The 1633-34 prosecution was the sequel to a larger trial of the Pendle witches in 1612, the major affair of its kind in English history, which resulted in nine people from the Pendle Hill area of Lancashire being hanged at Lancaster Moor. The second episode was unresolved when the two playwrights wrote their play; the dramatists were working so close to events that they had no firm conclusion - the play's Epilogue assumes the guilt of the four women who were the prime suspects but admits that the ripeness yet of time / Has not reveal'd the final outcome. (In fact, Edmund Robinson, the ten-year-old boy who was the prosecutors' chief witness, later admitted subornation of perjury; King Charles I pardoned all seventeen people convicted.) The Lord Chamberlain of that time, Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke, may have prompted the creation of the play for political reasons.