In 1692, Judge William Stoughton frowned from the bench at the misfortunate Salem men and women accused of witchcraft. His long, white hair flowing beneath his black skullcap, he appeared the living embodiment of an Old Testament judge, and the justice he dispensed helped send Salem’s “witches” to the gallows. Unlike his colleague Judge Samuel Sewall, who later expressed his shame and regret for his role in the hysteria, Stoughton went to his Dorchester grave without ever making a public recantation—only, according to later sources, a tacit acknowledgement that he had done the best he could with the information available to him at the time of the witchcraft debacle. Historian Stacy Schiff’s The Witches revisits Stoughton’s pivotal role in the tragedy.

William Stoughton was born on September 30, 1631, the son of Israel Stoughton, who was one of Dorchester’s founders. Although it remains murky as to whether William was born in England or Dorchester, he went on to graduate from Harvard in 1650 and boarded a ship for England, where he would continue his education at the New College in Oxford, studying for the ministry.

He received his MA from Oxford in June 1653 and became curate of a Sussex church in 1659. Shortly afterward, with the Restoration stripping much of the Puritans’ power and placing Charles II on the throne, Stoughton lost his post.

Believing his prospects in England bleak, he returned to Dorchester in 1662 and preached at the town’s church for several years. He was paid for his services to the town’s worshipers but, when offered the pastorship, he declined. Politics and law were beckoning the ex-curate. He contended that his decision was compelled by “reasons within himself.”

By 1681, Stoughton was serving as a judge on several Massachusetts courts.

Stoughton’s Dorchester home, a spacious, well-built wood-frame home perched at the corner of Pleasant Street and Savin Hill Avenue and framed by two massive elms, and his real-estate holdings confirmed his rising status. He gave the staggering sum of £1,000 to Harvard for a new dormitory.

Stoughton was appointed lieutenant governor of the colony in 1692. When Governor Sir William Phips sailed for England in 1694, Stoughton became Massachusetts’s highest official and would govern, with the exception of May 1699 to July 1700, until his death..

As the furor over “Satan’s Shadow” in Salem swept across the colony in 1692, Stoughton stepped into the tragedy front and center as the chief justice of the Court of Oyer and Terminer that conducted the explosive Salem Witch Trials. Several of his fellow citizens and later generations of historians would condemn Stoughton as the arch-villain of the trials.

In his own day, the Dorchester judge’s reputation did not suffer anywhere near as severely as after his death. Judge Samuel Sewall, who had also played a pivotal role in the execution of the convicted “witches,” publicly recanted his decisions. It is unclear whether Stoughton ever did.

Stoughton died on July 1701 and was laid to rest in Dorchester’s Old Burying Ground. The Salem witch trials and his own difficult personality would tarnish him in the collective eyes of critics. Perhaps the most fitting epitaph, one that captured the Dorchester jurist and politician as the quintessential man of his times, rang in the words of Reverend Samuel Willard as he delivered Stoughton’s funeral sermon in July 1701. Justice William Stoughton, Willard said, died as “the last of the original Puritans.”