the Lord decreed a separation between the King and his Parliament before the wars began in England for the sins of the whole nation. That the Lord is angry with us every one; for our sin, doth appear in this … have not a crew of wicked Witches, together with the Devil’s assistance done many mischiefs in Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, and other parts of our Kingdom, whereof some were executed at Chelmsford in Essex last to the number of fourteen, and many more imprisoned to this day, and by the voice of the people there are some in Stepney Parish now in question about witchcraft.
Stepney was Anna Trapnel’s very godly parish, and it’s barely possible that the pamphlet refers to her and to some of her fellow-sectarians; certainly she was to be formally accused of witchcraft in 1654, in Cornwall. But these views were not inevitable. For others it was superstitious belief in witches, and consequent witch-prosecutions, which represented the intellectual and social disorder of the Civil War years.
This was especially true in reports of witch-prosecutions in Scotland, which were generally hostile to the routine Scottish use of torture and contrasted this with the less tyrannical rule of England. Thomas Ady located belief in witchcraft in an ungodly reliance on the kind of superstition and ritual that Parliament was seeking to reform away. The Moderate Intelligencer, also a Parliamentarian journal, questioned Hopkins’s activities in East Anglia, scornfully enquiring ‘whence is it that the Devils should choose to be conversant with silly women that know not their right hands from their left, is the great wonder … They will meddle with none but poor old women, as appears by what we received this day from Bury.’
Both sides also used the figure of the witch as a propaganda weapon, taking up a series of prominent persons and trying to build up an association between those figures and witchcraft. Two examples, one from each side, are Oliver Cromwell and Prince Rupert. The imagery surrounding Rupert was far more lurid than that surrounding Cromwell. For instance, Signs and Wonders From Heaven reports that the arrest of some Norfolk witches was likely to impede Royalist fortunes. The witches, it seems, had been working for Rupert: ‘It is likewise certified by many of good quality and worth that at the last Assizes in Norfolk there were 40 witches arraigned for their lives, and 20 executed: and that they have done very much harm in that country, and have prophesied of the downfall of the King and his army, and that Prince Robert [Rupert] shall be no longer shot-free: with many strange and unheard-of things that shall come to pass.’
James More of Halesworth, admitting making a covenant with the Devil, said he returned his imp to his sister Mary Everard, ‘to send with others to Prince Rupert’. There were a number of more-or-less satirical portrayals of Prince Rupert’s dog, Boy, eventually shot and killed at Marston Moor, as a familiar. ‘Certainly he is some Lapland Lady’, said one account which reported on but also parodied belief in Rupert’s occult powers, ‘who by nature was once a handsome white woman, and now by art is become a handsome white Dog, and hath vowed to follow the Prince to preserve him from mischief.’ Among his other gifts, Boy can find hidden treasure (the Oxford plate, which could not be found before). Like a demon, the dog is proof against attack: ‘once I gave him a very hearty stroke, with a confiding Dagger, but it slid off his skin as if it had been Armour of proof anointed over with Quicksilver’, and he also catches bullets aimed at Rupert in his mouth. ‘He prophesies as well as my lady Davis, or Mother Shipton’, concludes the pamphlet ambiguously; plainly, Lady Eleanor Davies was not expected to feel complimented by the remark. The pamphlet tries to say that only the ignorant peasant would believe such tales, but it also implies that there are plenty of ignorant peasants about.
Cromwell too was likened to a witch, often metaphorically rather than literally. When Denzil Holles described Cromwell as a witch working to overthrow the realm, he was using witchcraft as a metaphor for a secret plot: ‘your Sabbaths, when you have laid by your assumed shapes, with which you have cozened the world, and resumed your own; imparting to each other and both of you to your fellow-witches’. This notion of the witch as secret agent appeared in the Hopkins trials and elsewhere, taken entirely literally. Paranoia about double agents, secret agents, code and double meanings could easily shade into anxiety about witchcraft, as it had in the last decade or so of Elizabeth’s reign. Thomas Ady told of a Suffolk minister who affirmed that one of the ‘poor women that was hanged as a witch at Bury assizes in the year 1645 did send her imp into the Army to kill the Parliamentary soldiers and another sent her imps into the army to kill the king’s soldiers’. The imps could work secretly, explaining losses on both sides. There is an eighteenth-century historiographical tradition that Cromwell had made a pact with the Devil before the Battle of Worcester, to run for seven years.
The result of all these pressures was numerous cases and reports of witchcraft as well as debates about its nature, existence and remedies. Many places experienced a peak of prosecutions in the 1640s and 1650s, and others saw a number of trials. In the summer of 1645, The Parliaments Post reported that ‘There is an infection in wickedness; and the spirit of the Cavaliers because it could not prevail with our men, hath met with some of our women, and it hath turned them into Witches’. This statement encapsulates the relations between Civil War witch-trials and the war itself.
An egregious case of violence and aggression by soldiers attacking a woman they thought was a witch comes from Warminster. Anne Warberton was attacked by a group of soldiers there, as she described:
upon the feast day of the annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary last past [25 March 1644] was two years sithence one George Long of Warminster came to the house of your petitioner and two soldiers in arms with him and the said Long and one of the soldiers required the petitioner to open her door who answered she would not unless he was an officer. Then the said Long said he was as good as any officer whatsoever and immediately by force broke down a window leaf which fell into the house upon a pail of water whereby both window leaf and pail of water fell upon your petitioner and her child which did so bruise the child that it fell sick and shortly after died. Yet not being contented they also broke up the door and entered the house by force and then the said Long fell to biting, pinching, and scratching of your petitioner saying and swearing in most execrable and ignominious manner she was a witch and therefore he would have her blood which he drawed from her in great abundance.
Doughty Anne survived the attack to complain about her assailants in court.
In Wiltshire the Civil War was especially grim: largely Parliamentarian during the war’s opening months, it was soon garrisoned by several Royalist groups, and the north-east came under the control of Royalist Oxfordshire. During 1643–4 most of the county fell to the king, and the Parliamentarians were isolated in scattered outposts to the north-west. Wiltshire was retaken by Parliament in 1645. This may have been the occasion for many minor acts of violence, as was the case elsewhere: the Civil War often allowed and enabled a range of behaviour ordinarily open to censure; like other wars, it both placed intolerable strain on male identity and allowed it full and destructive rein.
It was the areas on the fringes, or where the impact of conflict was less overwhelming, that outbursts of witch persecution occurred. That said, there was no special reason why a witchcraze of vast proportions should have started in Essex rather than in Wiltshire or Hertfordshire. What started it, enabled it, facilitated it at every turn, was the presence of a zealous witch-finder, a necessary though not a sufficient cause for the entire episode. The depositions collected from plaintiffs very closely resemble those from other trials, containing the usual popular preoccupations with food preparation, the household economy, family tensions, and the stresses and strains imposed by the experiences of pregnancy, childbirth and maternity. Once it did start, however, the Witch-finder’s own fantasies and the local depositions he collected were shaped and tinted by the particularities of the locale, the historical moment, the man himself.
Witches. The East was full of them. But one man planned to
change all that, to remove the Devil’s emissaries from God’s own lands. His name was Matthew Hopkins, and he was able to use the Civil War to bring about England’s worst-ever witchcraft persecution. It began in a small, local way. The first to be investigated was a one-legged, aged woman called Elizabeth Clarke, who lived in Matthew Hopkins’s own village of Manningtree. On 25 March 1645 she confessed to keeping familiars. Familiars were servant-demon-pets; Satan sent them to witches in exchange for their souls. They could kill, cause illness, destroy animals or food supplies. The witch suckled them at her witchmark. So all a witch-finder had to do was to keep the witch in an enclosed room, under guard. Sooner or later her familiars would arrive, and then her guilt would be proved. Of course, what actually happened was that the woman in question was deprived of sleep, which inclined her to confess.
Using this method, Hopkins had soon secured thirty-six witches; about half of them were executed at Chelmsford in July 1645. By then, the hunt had spread – to Suffolk, Norfolk, Huntingdonshire, Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire and Bedfordshire. The whole East burned with Hopkins’s terrible light as witch-hunts sprang up everywhere. We don’t know exactly how many died; estimates vary from one hundred to three times that number. Hopkins’s assistant John Stearne guessed two hundred. But regardless of numbers, everyone in the area was affected, or rather afflicted – by fear of witches, and by fear of being thought a witch. It began quickly, and gathered momentum. On 18 July 1645, fifteen women investigated by Hopkins were facing the gallows in Chelmsford. Elizabeth Clarke had to be helped up the scaffold because of her missing leg. Others from Manningtree were hanged a fortnight later, on 1 August. Many had already died in gaol, of disease and hunger – and this was not the end of it.
Numbers like this give us little sense of what it was like to be investigated by Hopkins or Stearne. What was distinctive about the Hopkins-Stearne cases was that both men asked more than the usual quota of questions about pacts with Satan. Interrogations often took the form of Hopkins asking some very leading questions, while the accused simply said ‘yes’. As a result, the Hopkins cases are apt to be dully similar. The Devil appears, usually in the likeness of an animal or a black man, and requires soul. Sometimes he offers her wealth in exchange. Sometimes he demands that she lie with him. Then the Devil sends imps or familiars to do her bidding, which she has to suckle; these took the form of small animals, beetles and mice and spiders.
More distinctive is the amount of evidence Hopkins was able to amass from local people who disliked or feared the accused. What Hopkins did was to turn the interrogation of witches from a merely reactive affair to something proactive. Normally, villagers or townspeople might approach a local Justice of the Peace with a complaint about a neighbour. The JP could then choose to investigate by questioning others in the area, or could tell the complainants to go home and stop bothering him with superstitions. The latter response was the more usual one in the 1630s. However, Hopkins actively sought out complainants by riding up and down East Anglia asking people if there were any witches in the locale and encouraging complainants to approach their own officials. He found fertile ground in the seething villages of the Association Counties. Fearful of the political and military menaces on all sides, and harbouring grudges against neighbours that went back years or even decades, many were willing and eager to testify. Religious divisions were a factor, where the godly were menaced both by Catholics and also by the new radical sects – Seekers, Anabapists and Familists – who were becoming a threat, too, in the eyes of the Commons in London. With Hopkins’s encouragement, witch-hunting could also be old-fashioned papist-hunting under a newer and more fashionable name. Branches of the Rivers family, who had been savagely attacked in 1642, were located in and around the witch-hunting centre of St Osyth, while in nearby Hintlesham four witches with connections with the pro-Catholic Timperley family found themselves under interrogation. Similarly, in the Suffolk village of Wickham Skeith a woman who was ‘a runner-after of the new sects’ was accused. A minister named John Lowes who had been hostile to local godly people was accused; he was, said his parishioners, a ‘reading parson’, a Laudian, and therefore a malignant. He was duly hanged on 27 August 1645. But many of those rounded up came from families with a reputation for witchcraft, sometimes going back several generations. And the trials, imprisonments and hangings were an entertainment in themselves; the gaol in Ipswich was swamped with sightseers eager to encounter the witches.
In this sense, Matthew Hopkins was by the standards of his own times not a monster, but a product of his society. We know little of Hopkins’s life before he dragged himself to prominence. He was a very minor gentleman, even more marginal to the gentry than Cromwell. He was born around 1619–22, and so was in his early to mid-twenties at the beginning of his witch-hunting activities. His mother, Marie Hopkins, was possibly a Huguenot refugee, and his father was the vicar of Great Wenham. Hopkins Senior uses godly language in his extant will: ‘I shall be received to Mercy only through the Righteousness & Merits of the Lord Jesus Christ my Saviour.’ His later associate John Stearne says of Hopkins that ‘he was the son of a godly minister’, and also names him as a Presbyterian ‘and therefore without doubt within the covenant’. We also know little of his career before the witch persecutions. A manuscript now lost allegedly said Hopkins was ‘a lawyer of but little note’. Since there is no record of him at the Inns of Court, or in other court records, he may have worked as a legal clerk, possibly for a ship-owner in Mistley. Suffolk Record Office contains a conveyance of a tenement in Bramford, only just outside Ipswich, dated 1641, bearing Hopkins’s signature as a witness, which may imply a role as a lawyer’s clerk.
Hopkins allegedly told Lady Jane Whorwood that he had ‘studied maritime law in Amsterdam’. It is generally agreed that he did spend some time in the Netherlands, possibly with his Huguenot connections, but some suggest that this may mean the Essex village of Little Holland. We also know that Hopkins knew that other great self-fashioner of the Civil War years, William Lilly. There was iconoclasm in the areas of Essex where Hopkins began his career: at St Mary’s Church, Lawford, near Manningtree, the carved heads of the saints were hacked off during the 1640s. This may have provided a kind of mental model for Hopkins. Evil could be removed by determined destruction. It may not be a coincidence that Hopkins lived in the Stour Valley, scene of the violent demonstrations against ‘papists’ that marked the beginning of the war, or that his best-known victim was John Lowes, the vicar of Brandeston, thought by his parishioners to have papist leanings.
John Stearne was Hopkins’s principal associate. He was proper gentry; Stearne was still paying hearth tax in Manningtree in 1666, despite apparently moving to Lawshall in 1648, which means he had two houses. In his writings, Stearne was heavily influenced by William Perkins’s godly and influential Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft, 1608, but he also borrowed at length from Richard Bernard, A Guide to Grand Jurymen, 1627; these may have been among Hopkins’s intellectual antecedents too, but there is little trace of their influence in his writings. Hopkins drew more lavishly on the kind of thinking that had animated the Scottish witch-hunters since the sixteenth century: that witches were a sign of the Devil’s activities in the world, and must be stamped out firmly. The English tradition of jurisprudence had always tended to see witches as sad and deluded, but in Scotland they were a genuine menace. The same channels that brought Scottish Presbyterianism into contact with the godly English might have carried Scottish witch-beliefs south as well, particularly since the Manningtree area was in constant contact with the north via its port. And in England too, attitudes to witchcraft hardened during periods of national crisis. The peak period for hangings for witchcraft had been the decade immediately following the Armada terror. If young John Pym fastened his fears to papists, others spied different kinds of diabolism at work in the kingdom. Now that another and far worse national crisis had ensued, those fears too were to be revived.
Hopkins lived in a vi
vid, narrow, frightened nightmare of a world where witches walked by night. It was said that Hopkins ‘as a child’, ‘took affright at an apparition of the Devil, which he saw in the night’. As the child of a godly vicar, whose will insists firmly on salvation through faith alone, Hopkins was part of a godly discourse that could terrify through its vehement insistence on the gap between election and damnation. Although all his biographers have seen Hopkins as marked by this lineage, Hopkins himself invented alternative ancestries for himself, possibly grounded in family legend, but betokening a wish to make something of himself. He told William Lilly that he came from a line of schoolmasters in Suffolk, ‘who had composed for the psalms of King David’. There was a John Hopkins, an English hymn-writer, a different godly father, perhaps, from his own. One less terrifying, more obviously a maker himself. By contrast, Hopkins told Lady Jane Whorwood that he was really named Hopequins and was the grandson of an English Catholic diplomat, Richard Hopequins. Lady Jane was a Royalist, so this may have been designed to create an identity acceptable to her, as well as to Hopkins. Being a witch-finder, with its money-making possibilities, was another way for Hopkins to reinvent himself.
Hopkins’s fantasies of witches were part of his ruthless self-fashioning, a process which enabled him to flee from his family, to prove himself by making a place among the better sort, and also by piling up at least some personal wealth. This element of Hopkins’s self-creation as Witch-Finder General is evident in his own account of his first encounter with witches in his self-defence. This account explains how he became involved in the process of discovery:
The English Civil War: A People’s History (Text Only) Page 46
