God’s FURY, England’s FIRE

by Braddick, Michael

  On the other hand, successive attempts at purgation had corroded the legitimacy of some of the institutions through which Christian community had previously been fostered, notably the parish as a unified religious body. Partisan religious contest robbed the church, or particular incumbents, of the claim legitimately to embody the local Christian community. Ministers were ejected at the petition of their parishioners; others intruded into their places might face ‘much opposition from disaffected persons’.57 This was at the heart of the controversy over Independency, of course, and differences about the essence, and expression, of Christian community had been expressed through ejections of scandalous ministers and iconoclasm. County committees were frequently divided over what should replace bishops and parishes – to what extent membership of a congregation should be voluntary or geographically determined.58 The counterpart to that, of course, was the extent to which the parish remained a spiritual community. Church courts, previously reasonably attractive institutions through which to police local spiritual life, had ceased to function in 1642.59

  This was not simply a theoretical question: at the same time that these established forms were disrupted, divisive attempts at reformation and purgation were taking place across England. The history of Suffolk was once written as an exemplification of the view that English counties were in general autonomous gentry-led political communities, and that national administrative initiatives were an unwelcome and intermittently effective intrusion. But Suffolk had seen many ejections of scandalous ministers under the authority of a parliamentary committee, and had shared in William Dowsing’s iconoclasm during 1643 and 1644. These attempts at purification of the Christian community were of much more than local significance: in each case the local was understood as the expression of transcendent issues in microcosm.60 Activists could be found everywhere, taking advantage of the times to press their own vision of godly Protestantism.

  One of the most dramatic forms of purgation for the Christian community was the prosecution of witches and in 1645 East Anglia saw the largest witch-hunt in English history. At the Essex assizes held on 17 July 1645, three days after Naseby, thirty-six witches were put on trial. Nineteen were executed, nine died in prison and a further six were still in gaol in 1648. Only one was acquitted. Not only was this an unusually large number of trials in such a short space of time; it was also a prelude to a much wider prosecution across East Anglia. In Norfolk forty trials probably led to twenty executions. There were trials in Huntingdonshire, Cambridgeshire, the Isle of Ely and some boroughs (Yarmouth, Kings Lynn, Stowmarket and Aldeburgh). One contemporary observer, who was close to events, thought that perhaps 200 had been executed; probably an exaggerated, but not completely incredible, estimate: it is likely that 250 people were tried and that at least 100 were executed. A significant proportion of all executions for witchcraft in English history came during this single summer.61

  Of course, many more people died in battle – even in Essex, where 800 died in the siege of Colchester in 164862 – but the real significance of witch trials lies in the social tensions that they reveal. The Essex prosecutions are particularly well-documented, and many of the patterns they reveal are familiar from the longer history of witchcraft prosecutions. Nearly 90 per cent of the accused were women, predominantly of lower social status. Their crimes were ones familiar from many other witchcraft trials – causing illness in adults, children and livestock, or blighting crops or other foodstuffs. An influential interpretation of such prosecutions is that they were a means of dealing with misfortune. An explanation for misfortune was found in the behaviour of individuals thought difficult by their neighbours – the stereotype is of an older woman, spinster or widow, of relatively low status, who was unwilling to accept her place in life with due humility. Rather than blame bad luck, or accept a providential judgement on their own lives, the argument goes, substantial villagers found it easier to blame the malice of the poor and marginal. But other tensions were also clearly present, about the proper role of women, something which women themselves were keen to police: women frequently appeared as accusers and witnesses, establishing their own authority as respectable women by denouncing others.63

  It is usually presumed that witches did not commit the crimes of which they were accused: although witchcraft can be effective on believers, it seems to modern observers unlikely that witches can successfully harm infants, animals or foodstuffs. Some witches did apparently think that they had done these things, and there is no real reason to doubt the sincerity of the accusations. It does, however, seem likely that these things tell us more about the anxieties of village life than about the actual behaviour of witches. The East Anglian witches seem to fit this pattern – witnessed against by their neighbours, for minor acts of malice achieved by terrifying means, they were denounced by neighbours with whom they had fallen out.64

  Prior to the civil war the trend of prosecutions in Essex had been falling, and the great peak of 1645 can make it seem as if Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne, energetic ‘witchfinders’, were wholly responsible. But although these trials took place in an area of the country which saw relatively little military action, it is still tempting to see here the effects of the civil war: it may be the war, rather than these men, that was really to blame. Anxieties were increased, and the authorities more receptive to prosecutions, with the result that longstanding tensions were openly expressed. Most immediately, the war created the opportunity for Matthew Hopkins to exercise an authority that in less disrupted times would have been denied to him. He was the younger son of a provincial clergyman, probably in his twenties, and probably lacking legal training. In the winter of 1644–5 his concerns about the activities of a number of local witches were acute, and when they were arrested in March 1645 he gave detailed evidence against a number of them. In other times this would probably not have launched a career. Like William Dowsing, he was a man who before the war would have had little prospect of overseeing such important business. Moreover, there was an overlap between the areas in which Dowsing had been active and those in which Hopkins’s activities resonated.65 It is not fanciful to see these two efforts at purgation as somehow related.

  Hopkins clearly played a leading role in promoting the prosecutions, and earned money from them. Hopkins and Stearne resorted to methods which, while legal, were unusual in England. Suspects were stripped naked and searched for the witches” mark – the unusual teat from which their familiar spirits would feed. In Essex a number of women searchers clearly did this work on the basis of some expertise – their names recur in the trial records. The accused were then placed on a stool in the middle of a room, with their feet off the ground, and watched for up to three days without food or sleep. It was hoped that in this time their familiars might come to them. At the end of this ‘watching’ they might be asked leading questions by Hopkins or Stearne, and were also interrogated by other interested parties.66

  This process – torture, watching and leading questions – undoubtedly made the accused suggestible. Escalation followed, as networks of witches were ‘revealed’. Although this allowed Hopkins to inflect the prosecutions with his own views, he clearly also drew on the beliefs and participation of many others. At the initial trials, in fact, he was just one of ninety-two witnesses. This is not to deny the importance of the role of the witchfinders, but to suggest that local communities, galvanized by debate about Christian purity, and subject to providential stories of the moral message of fortune and misfortune in this world, were plainly primed for the purging of witches from their midst.67 There was a similar outbreak in Kent in the same years, perhaps significantly in the quarter sessions, a lower court without full-time judges, in the absence of assizes.68 The restraining hand of county administration was absent or limited. Arthur Wilson, star witness of the Stour Valley riots in 1642, was also a sceptical observer at the Essex assizes, and such scepticism seems to have restrained prosecutions in Lancashire in 1633.69 But in 1645 Hopkins and Stearne went out to lo
ok for witches and, apparently shocked by what they found, provided a service taken up with some enthusiasm by local authorities (the boroughs of the Suffolk coast paid £20 for witch prosecutions in these months) and the neighbours of suspects.70

  Accepting that the accused witches were not guilty as charged, the stories told about them (since they were not actually true) attract psychological analysis – what anxieties were being expressed in these fantasies? The stories about witches in the 1640s reflect anxieties common to other periods of witch-hunting, but also anxieties arising from the war. One pamphlet told how soldiers searching for food on the eve of the battle of Newbury came across an old woman who was able to make a boat move against the current in a way that clearly suggested supernatural power. They tried to kill her, placing a carbine against her chest, but the bullet just bounced off. Another soldier, enraged, tried to run her through, but the sword could not penetrate her body. Only once they had taken a traditional remedy against the power of the Devil – letting blood from the veins crossing her temples – did she become vulnerable. At that point her fate seems to have been connected with anxiety about the war: ‘is it come to pass that I must die indeed? Why then his excellency the earl of Essex shall be fortunate and win the field’. The Devil’s side would lose. But there was another less obvious anxiety here too, about male potency and combat. Enraged by the failure of their weapons the men were mocked by the woman, ‘though speechless, yet in a most contemptible way of scorn, still laughing at them [as they tried to kill her] which did the more exhaust their fury against her life’.71

  There was an established connection for contemporaries between witchcraft and rebellion (modern readers need think only of Macbeth, although contemporaries might have read it too in Lucan’s Pharsalia). Signes and wonders from Heaven interpreted the witch-hunt in East Anglia as another sign of God’s anger at the divisions in civil government: alongside reports of the witchcraft prosecutions it related the story of two monstrous births – one human and one feline. ‘It is said, that pestilence, the sword and famine are the searchers, wherewith the Lord draws blood of sinners’ and since there is no-one who has not ‘felt the smart of one, if not all of those forenamed scourges: no, no, there is none alive but hath smarted in one degree or another, even from the King to the beggar. Ergo, we are all sinners’. Wonders and marvels were further evidence of God’s anger, ‘strange comets, seen in the air, prodigies, sights on the seas, marvellous tempests and storms on the land… Have not nature altered her course so much, that women framed of pure flesh and blood, bring forth ugly and deformed monsters; and contrariwise beasts bring forth human shapes contrary to their kind’. It was in punishment for these sins that ‘the Lord suffered the devil to ramble about like a roaring lion see[k]ing to devour us’, not least in East Anglia, where ‘a crew of wicked witches, together with the devil’s assistance [have] done many mischiefs’.72

  In East Anglia, under torture, the accused produced stories that probably reflected an amalgam of educated and vernacular wisdom about witches. There was more mention of the Devil than in most previous English trials, and that may have been the result of the accused answering leading questions after torture and harsh treatment. It was a fundamental belief of the learned that witches enjoyed their power from the Devil. But the details of the confessions – the forms taken by the familiars, the names that they were given – do not seem to belong to the world of the learned demonologist.73 It is more than possible that the particular anxiety about the Devil, about meetings where books were read, and about a familiar called ‘Newes’, reflect the particular tensions of civil war England. The preaching of hotter Protestants, anxious about the work of the Devil in this world, was common in East Anglia. In national political debate the relationship between the visible and invisible church was of central importance, and the presses continually harped on the spread of the sects. Essex, like Suffolk, had seen campaigns to purge malignant clergy and enjoyed the attentions of William Dowsing. There had also been many examples of relatively spontaneous popular iconoclasm between 1640 and 1642.74

  Matthew Hopkins ‘watching’ two witches, whose familiars include one called ‘Newes’

  There were more direct connections with the war too. Signes and wonders claimed that the Norfolk witches ‘have prophesied of the downfall of the King and his army, and that Prince Robert shall be no longer shot-free: with many strange and unheard of things that shall come to pass’.75 Rupert, we should remember, was held by many to be the main obstacle to a negotiated peace at this point. There was an association between Rupert and witchcraft: his pet dog was represented as a familiar and he himself referred to both as an incubus and as a devil.76 It was not the first time that the power of an evil adviser of a monarch had been associated with witchcraft. Strafford, on the scaffold, had apparently answered a charge that he had been prey to the ‘witchcraft of authority’, an echo perhaps of a Puritan argument that worldly glory was one of the Devil’s snares, tempting the sinner to forget the larger glory of the heavenly kingdom. As William Perkins had it, ‘the power of this Prince of Darkness manifests itself herein by works of wonder, transcendent in regard of ordinary capacity… to purchase himself the admiration, fear, and faith of the credulous world’. Parliamentarian propaganda made a general association between the popish plot and the Devil’s wiles, and Charles himself was touched by these charges of diabolism. Cavalierism in general became a species of demonic activity. Royalists, on the other hand, charged that witchcraft was closely tied to the sin of rebellion.77 The East Anglian witch-hunt was quickly invested with these meanings too. John Hammond, who printed Signes and wonders, saw it as a judgement on the whole people – he published a number of wonder pamphlets in these months with the message that everyone should look to their own sins in order to avoid similar judgements in the future. That it took place in parliamentary territory was, of course, fuel for the royalists, but The parliaments post turned this into a gender issue: ‘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’.78

  The fight against witches was a godly work, and one described in martial language, requiring personal valour and other masculine values. As one writer had it in 1648:

  The late lamentable wars began, yet God was good to us in discovering many secret treacheries… And many superstitious relics were abolished, which neither we nor our godly fathers (as ye have heard) were able to bear. Since which time, ye knew, many witches have been discovered by their own confessions, and executed; many glorious victories obtained (beyond any man’s expectation) and places of strength yielded.

  Once again, it seems, there might be a connection between the work of Dowsing and Hopkins. Dowsing, for example, thought that a victory for Fairfax at Nantwich owed something to his own successful destruction of images at Orford, Snape and Saxmundham on the same day. Hopkins and Stearne’s evidence, and their account of themselves, can plausibly be seen as a means of dealing with social and spiritual chaos through an assertion of masculine control. That control rested in part in a physical violence which recalls accounts of male violence against women during the wars: a way of maintaining masculine identity in the face of violent and chaotic uncertainties.79 Although the physical safety of women was usually respected, and stories of rape are rare, there were atrocities involving women near the fighting. At Naseby the massacre and mutilation of women camp followers was apparently an ethnic as well as a gender crime – this was an unusual story, but might be read as a masculine response to disorder, fear and female potency.80

  Although not all the witches were women, the bulk of them were and a wider anxiety about the stability of patriarchal order is an important context for these trials, or at least for their representation in print.81 The parliaments post had made a standard observation about the greater vulnerability of women to spiritual error, linking it to witchcraft in a way which was common to contemporary thin
king about witches. It was also a common theme in writing about the dangers of sectarianism, a form of diabolical temptation. There was a common association between the Devil and over-zealous godliness, with sectarian excess the obvious fruit of the Devil’s work.82 These associations between the Devil and unbridled zeal, and between them both and sectarianism, were clearly close to witchcraft fantasies. Conventicles and covens were imagined in similar ways, with women prominent in both.

  In numerous ways the women who petitioned, published or prophesied tried to present themselves within the bounds of conventional gender roles, but the pamphlet literature of the 1640s is full of anxieties about uppity women. Looking at the witchcraft prosecutions in Tudor and Stuart England as a whole, it seems clear that men and women saw in witches a threat to orderly gender relations.83 We cannot put Hopkins on the couch to prove that the prosecutions were a response to these anxieties: this may not have motivated him or any of the other participants in the witch-hunt. Even so, we can be fairly sure that the hunt acquired larger meanings in the world of print, and that these anxieties about masculinity and patriarchy were among them.

  Before the war the local community had not been understood only in terms of neighbourliness and mutual support but also in terms of good government. Local notables held offices in the church and state, and used their authority and discretion to bring order and harmony to their parish. Constables, churchwardens, overseers of the poor were effectively arbiters of local decency. Parish communities formed around strongly held notions of order, hierarchy and authority, and membership of the community was policed. Local officeholders and village worthies might exercise a close and oppressive control over local sociability and sexual life. The village greybeards exacted deference in return for a fatherly care – it was by no means a bucolic paradise, but a very stable reconciliation of social status and political authority. Parish community was also marked ritually – the agricultural cycle, the devotional calendar and the life-cycle of the individual were marked out by public ceremonies. In towns the civic year was also marked, and strong corporate structures integrated individuals into a social body. These practices resolved conflict – communities were not marked by the absence of conflict so much as by collectively acceptable means to reconcile and live with it.84 By the end of the war many of the established routines of village and county government were still in place, or had been reestablished. Crimes were punished and social policies implemented. In some cases these activities were hampered or complicated by military authorities, or the administrative structures erected to fight the wars, but much had survived.85