The English Civil War: A People’s History (Text Only)

by Diane Purkiss

  The Discoverer [Hopkins] never travelled far for it, but in March 1644, he had some seven or eight of that horrible sect of witches living in the town where he lived, a town in Essex called Manningtree, with divers other adjacent witches of other towns, who every six weeks in the night (being always on the Friday night) had their meeting close by his house, and had their several solemn sacrifices there offered to the Devil, one of which this discoverer heard speaking to her Imps one night, and bid them go to another Witch, who was thereupon apprehended, and searched by women who had for many years known the Devil’s marks, and found to have three teats about her, which honest women have not: so upon command from the Justice, they were to keep her from sleep two or three nights, expecting in that time to see her familiars, which the fourth night she called in by their several names, and told them what shapes a quarter of an hour before they came in, there being ten of us in the roome.

  The people of East Anglian towns and villages called Hopkins in as a consultant, just as in less godly days or among less godly company they might have called in the local cunning man to finger the witch. Since for the godly a cunning person was culpable as a malicious witch, Hopkins opened himself to identification as supernaturally gifted when exposing such gifts in others. This interpretation may have occurred to no one but him, since there is no evidence for the tradition that he was himself swum as a witch and convicted (reported in Samuel Butler’s satirical poem Hudibras), but the first question in The Discovery of Witches is a refutation of the idea that he must himself be ‘the greatest Witch, Sorcerer and Wizard himself, else he could not do it’. Hopkins was of course aiming at a far more godly kind of identity, perhaps even at an imitatio Christi. Perhaps in a spirit of competitive envy, John Gaule wrote that ‘country People talk already and that more frequently, more affectedly, of the infallible and wonderful power of the witch-finders, then they do of God, or Christ, or the Gospel preached’. Hopkins had certainly transcended his family.

  Manningtree, where Hopkins lived and where his career began, was a curious place in the mid-seventeenth century because it was both a centre of activity and geographically marginal. It was a port and shipbuilding dockyard – Manningtree sent ships against the Armada. But it was peripheral because the Tendring Hundred is literally on the edge of Essex, and Manningtree and Mistley were themselves surrounded by the great and misty sea-marshes. The marshes and the Stour River were sites of a trade boom, but also of illegal activities: there was extensive smuggling up the Stour River, and over the marshes. The marshes and the river created opportunities for secret enterprises, for wealth creation neither sanctioned nor scrutinized by the authorities.

  But these lawless terrains were stained in imagination by dread. Folktales from the East Anglian area prior to the drainage of fens and marshes stress the division between arable land and marsh. Regarded as unhealthy because of the miasmas associated with them, the marshes are given over to the supernatural activities of boggarts and others, including hags and other witches. The marshes were outside the law of the Church as well as state, and in the legends of the locale they are lawless, silent, pervasively misty. It was against this backward, gloomy background that the towns and their inhabitants defined themselves, just as the godly defined themselves against backward, hazy superstition.

  This in turn was further exacerbated by fear of another kind of engulfment. Essex was one of the areas which quickly declared for Parliament, to the delight of its godly inhabitants. But throughout 1645–6, the Royalist army was still trying to break out into East Anglia and the whole territory was under threat of turning into a battlefield. Although Hopkins’s activities began before the real military crisis, godly folk in Essex had heard of events in other counties, and knew (or feared) what might occur. For John Stearne, the war against witches was another way of fighting the Civil War: ‘And so going ever wellarmed against these rulers of darkness, devils and evil spirits, furnished with the heavenly furniture and spirituall weapons, of which the Apostle speaketh, Eph. 6.14.18, and being thus qualified, and armed, to trust in God only, who will keep thee under the shadow of his wings, Psal. 91.’ What with one thing and another, the psychic pressures on a man like Hopkins, perhaps already warped by a hard Presbyterian father, reached unbearable levels in the mid-1640s, with the result that he produced a spate of fantasies to alleviate them.

  Modern readers sometimes think Hopkins was motivated by simple lust. But his choice of victims suggests otherwise. He chose old women, not beautiful girls. He did strip his victims, but not erotically. For him, horror seems to have swallowed eroticism. It was to avoid the erotic and its entanglement, its power to implicate, that he took pleasure from seeing the elderly witch naked and hearing her disclose her sexual relations with the Devil. Far from seeking otherwise forbidden pleasures, Hopkins seems to have sought to distance himself from the eroticized female body by conjuring it up in a repulsively aged form. Nor did they desire him, as Stearne mischievously reports: ‘Then said Mr Hopkin, in what manner and likeness came he to you? she said, like a tall, proper, blackhaired gentleman, a properer man then you self, and being asked which she had rather lie withal, she said the Devil.’ In this case, the witch used her sharp tongue to get her own back, but such levity was probably fatal to her.

  Hopkins also thought of himself as a kind of scientist, trying to prove the existence of witches and find forensic tests to check on whether they were real. He stripped women to search for the witchmark, supposedly the place where their familiars suckled them. But he also thought he was a kind of clergyman, helping to save these women’s souls. Godly confession and testimony, wrung from sinners by violent speaking and questioning, were part of ordinary Protestant life. Stearne explains that watching is ‘not to use violence, or extremity to force them to confess, but only the keeping is, first, to see whether any of their spirits, or familiars come to or near them’, and ‘that Godly Divines and others might discourse with them, and idle persons be kept from them, for if any of their society come to them … they will never confess’. He tells the story of a group of witches who all kept together in a barn and made a pact not to confess, except one who made the pact known. ‘But if honest godly people discourse with them, laying the heinousness of their sins to them, and in what condition they are in without Repentance, and telling them the subtleties of the Devil, and the mercies of god, these ways will bring them to Confession without extremity, it will make them break into Confession hoping for mercy.’

  Heroism is also uppermost in Hopkins’s understanding of his role as interrogator. Godly preachers and congregations did not see interrogation and confession in quite the secular light in which they appear to us. Rather than forcing an unwilling admission from a suspect in violation of their personal integrity and civil liberties, he was actually heroically venturing into hell itself to help her, despite the menaces that surrounded him: ‘29 were condemned at once, 4 brought 25 miles to be hanged, where this Discoverer lives, for sending the Devil like a Bear to kill him in his garden, so by seeing diverse of the mens [sic] Papps, and trying ways with hundreds of them, he gained this experience, and for aught he knows any man else may find them as well as he and his company, if they had the same skill and experience.’

  Finally, Hopkins may have been motivated by money. He made as much as £23 from Stowmarket and £15 from King’s Lynn, with promises for more after the next sessions. His inn bill was also paid in Stowmarket. But he got only £6 in Aldeburgh – £2 from each visit, three visits – suggesting that the rate was decidedly variable. Hopkins himself denies that he made much money. What seems most likely is that both Hopkins and his victims were caught in the swirling emotions of the time. Hopkins was by no means alone in seeing witches everywhere. In fact, his ‘discoveries’ impressed many as a sign of the times.

  There is a comforting historiographical tradition that Hopkins was hanged as a witch, but in fact – like Pym – he fell ill early, and died of consumption: ‘he died peaceably at Manningtree, after
a long sickness of a Consumption, as many of his generation had done before him, without any trouble of conscience for what he had done, as was falsely reported of him’. He was buried on 12 August 1647 at Mistley.

  Hopkins and his reign of terror were products of the war. Sometimes, most heartrendingly, ‘the Devil’ spoke to witches in the voice of a dead husband or, worse, in the voice of a dead child. Such voices might be identified as a Devil’s only later, under interrogation. In this way, what women had already lost was turned against them. Their dead family members, their poverty, their vanished youth and prettiness – these losses might have made them seem like walking reminders of the ache of war, like the embodiments of its pain. Perhaps those already half-mad with Calvinism, anti-popery and violence could not bear to look upon their own griefs, and believed that exterminating the symbol would relieve the feeling. As with iconoclasm, the idea spread, and the painful process of cleansing went on, into Kent, into the north, so that many areas had their own witchcrazes, a series of brutal wars on a different front.

  XXI Th’ Easy Earth That Covers Her: The Children’s Tales

  In 1643 the Royalists were besieging Wardour Castle in Wiltshire. The defending Parliamentarians were surprised when a twelve-year-old boy arrived at the gate. Like Sir Gareth in Arthurian legend, the youth begged for the lowliest employment, turning the spit. Edward Ludlow, who had probably read the same romances, agreed. But almost at once mysterious ill-luck began to dog the garrison. A gun exploded as it was being fired, and the boy had been seen near it. The guards on duty became suspicious, and the boy was interrogated; the soldiers, angry and frightened, threatened to hang him. He remained silent, so they tied a piece of match around his neck and began to hoist him on a halberd. He confessed at once that he had been ordered to assess the strength of the garrison, and then to poison the water supply (and, worse, the beer), blow up any gunpowder, and destroy any ordnance. He had been offered the lavish wages of half a crown for all this diligent sabotage. They let him go.

  The war bore hard on children. They lost their fathers and brothers. Some lost both parents to disease. Thousands more lost their homes and were forced onto the teeming roads, while still others were forced into temporary exile, like the young Ann Harrison (later Fanshawe), and the royal children. But there were opportunities for fun, too; they were not always victims. Schools were closed, as their schoolmasters joined the opposing armies. In Southampton, and in Plymouth, the boys formed themselves into rival gangs, the Roundheads and the Cavaliers, and staged mock battles; one such gang inadvertently broke up a church service by shouting ‘Arms!’ The men, nervous, rushed outside, to find that the alarm was just part of a game. Boys will be boys, and it was sport in Exeter, as in Oxford, to see the prisoners brought in, and to vent some rage and fear by throwing dirt at them and shouting abuse. In both cities, boys and girls worked alongside parents on the town defences. It was the same in London, as Samuel Pepys recalled: ‘I was a great roundhead when I was a boy’, he boasted.

  If Pepys’s father had been in Essex’s army, Pepys himself might have followed it in the baggage-train, as many boys did. They were there to be with fathers, or occasionally brothers, but they were useful too: they could be ‘horseboys’, or act as servants. With very little encouragement, they could join in the fighting. During the siege of Plymouth, a Parliamentarian remarked that many of the defenders were ‘poor little boys’, boys from London.

  To console ourselves against the thought that people who lost a quarter of their children felt about it much as we would if it happened to us, historians have sometimes argued that the high death rate somehow led people to mind the deaths of their children less than modern parents do. Ann Fanshawe’s daughter died of smallpox at the age of nine. Ann wrote that she and her husband ‘both wished to have gone into the grave with her’. Ann’s journeys meant that she buried children in Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, and in Oxford, Yorkshire, Hertfordshire and Kent.

  Mary Verney was forced to leave her husband, Ralph, in France, and to travel alone to London to try to persuade the Parliamentary committee for compounding to let the family keep something from its once-great estates, now sequestered. She was pregnant, and she may have hoped that this would help to persuade them. But it meant that she was without Ralph and her other children during the long, stressful business of lying-in, and she wrote that ‘to lie without thee is a greater affliction than I fear I shall be able to bear’.

  Mary worried about all her children, especially Jack, now seven, whom we have already met; his rickety legs were a health concern, and Mary blamed his wartime carers for his condition. But she also defended him lovingly and stoutly against any who might criticize him. ‘Jack is a very gallant boy … but truly if he stay there a little longer he will be utterly spoiled … he hath no fault in him beside his legs, for though ’tis mine own I must needs say he is an extremely witty child.’ They agreed that Jack should go to France with her in 1647. Meanwhile, Ralph, her baby son, born in June 1647, was on his way to Claydon, and his mother worried about him too. ‘I wish myself heartily there too’, she wrote. ‘I pray speak to Mrs Allcock to let the nurse have a Cradle; one of the worst will serve her turn, and a hard pillow.’ This was probably to make sure the nurse didn’t go to sleep and lie on Ralph, something every mother dreaded. Ralph was not very healthy, but he did recover at Claydon, and Mary searched desperately for a new wetnurse. All she could find was ‘Raph Rodes Wife, and I fear they are but poor and she looks like a slattern, but she sayeth if she takes the child she will have a mighty care of it, and truly she has two as fine children of her own as ever I saw’. The nurse was paid four shillings a week, and two loads of vital, scarce wood. Nurses, Mary noted, were getting more expensive. ‘He thrives well,’ she wrote, ‘and is a lovely baby.’ At three months she wrote, ‘I mean to coat him this week.’ The nurse insisted on it. So Mary felt happy about leaving Jack and Ralph at Claydon and going back to London: ‘I am so weary that ’tis a pain to me to hold the pen, but yet I cannot conclude, until I have chid thee that thou dost never give me an account how thyself and boy and girl have your healths, and yet I have entreated it of ye before now; ’tis a duty I weekly perform to thee.’ She went on worrying about the other children in France: ‘I cannot now express to thee how sad a heart I have to think how long ’twill be before I come to thee.’ She sent them clothes, but in the wrong sizes; children grow so fast. Edmund, called Mun, was eleven years old. ‘Mun’s grey stockings’, Ralph complained, ‘are about a handful too short and almost an inch too little, so I have laid them up for Jack.’ She sent Ralph reams of advice, orders even: no more dancing lessons, for instance, since ‘2 or 3 months in the year is enough to learn that’. ‘Mun’, she added, ‘must learn to play the guitar and sing.’ She would like Peg to learn the lute, too, but the main thing was to correct her deportment: ‘I am sorry to hear that she holds her head so, but I hope it will not be very long before I am with thee, and then I hope to break her of it.’

  But before long, small eight-year-old Peg was ill with dysentery and fever. Ralph could not bear to tell Mary she was ill. As Mary asked him for news, her little girl was already dead. ‘I am so full of affliction,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘that I can say no more but pray for us … My poor Peg is happy but I am your most afflicted and unfortunate servant. Tell me how and when this shall be made known to her mother.’

  By the time Dr Denton had decided to break the news of Peg’s death to Mary, she had been overtaken by a different grief; her little son Ralph had died of sudden convulsions. She was in bed at Claydon when Denton told her, as gently as he could, that she had lost Peg too. She was beside herself. ‘She spake idly for two nights, and sometimes did not know her friends.’ But she recovered and went to London. It was Ralph whose reason seemed more comprehensively overthrown. He longed for Mary, whose company ‘I desire above all earthly things, but if that cannot be and that for the good of your self, and those few Babes that are left us, we must still be kept asunder, I t
ell you true, I have not a heart to stay here without you … It hath pleased God to provide for my poor sweet girl and I hope he will so direct me in the disposing of my boy that this shall not be for his disadvantage.’

  He planned to run away. To Italy, and then to Turkey. He would change his name. Then his family would be able to enjoy his sequestered estates. But of course Mary was horrified. Ralph gave way and they struggled on with their burden of grief.

  They were not alone. There are no complete records, but the war caused the deaths of many children, and not only in sieges and battles. The war spread disease, especially water-borne infections. When troops moved into new areas, they brought with them enteric disorders to which locals may not have built up immunity. The overstretched and never-reliable sewage and water systems, strained further by the exigencies of quartering and besieging, often became poisonous, especially to young children, then as now vulnerable to dysentery. The same risks arose when fleeing families themselves moved to new areas – such as Paris, in the Verneys’ case. The war also brought the dangers of chronic malnutrition as armies plundered local food reserves, leaving families more exposed to infection and less able to fight it. It also disrupted care arrangements, with children more vulnerable to accidents. ‘Many parents,’ wrote Thomas Fuller, ‘which otherwise would have been loving pelicans, are by these unnatural wars forced to be ostriches to their own children, leaving them to the narrow mercy of the wide world.’ He was thinking of plunder and sequestration, bad enough, but many children were orphaned by the war, deprived of care and nurture as well as sustenance. Children were often cared for by relatives after fathers and sometimes mothers too had been killed, executed or driven into exile.