by Julie Hearn
It was then that the ministers daughters began to take shape, in my imagination. Grace and Patience Madden. Two very different girls, but both expected, by their Puritannical father, to suppress natural feelings of jealousy, insecurity, and desire.
The height of the witch craze in England occurred in the 1640s. The English Civil War, between Parliament and the monarchy, was at its height then, dividing the loyalties of the people and throwing everyday life into turmoil. Matthew Hopkins, an unsuccessful lawyer, was quick to take advantage of this situation. He convinced the population of Essex that Satan was out to get them. Known before long as the “Witch-finder General,” Hopkins made a great deal of money from getting vulnerable individuals to confess to witchcraft—and seeing them hanged.
I took the liberty of “borrowing” Matthew Hopkins and sending him a long way from home.
The young Charles II really was sent to the west country of England in 1645 as a figurehead for the Royalist cause. He hid out at Pendennis Castle in Cornwall before sailing into exile in the spring of 1646. His involvement with the cunning woman’s granddaughter is pure make-believe—although it startled me to discover, while plotting the gallows scene, that King Charles I wrote repeatedly to his son between August and November of 1645, urging him to flee the country and “not to delay one hour.”
I never did find out why young Charles—fifteen at the time and no lover of hardship—ignored his father’s instructions and dithered around the west of England during the filthiest of winters, in constant danger of falling into the rebels’ hands. It didn’t matter, for I already had an answer. Of course I did. He had to save my Nell!
Charles I was executed in 1649. Young Charles, however, did not ascend the throne until the monarchy was restored in 1660. Remembered historically as “the Merry Monarch,” Charles II allegedly devoted as much time to sensual pleasure as diplomatic activity before converting to Catholicism and dying in his own bed in 1685. Nell Gwyn, who is mentioned fleetingly in this book, was one of his many mistresses.
My own Nell and her grandmother typify the countless numbers of single, outspoken, unconventional women and girls, who have been accused of witchcraft in numerous times and places around the world. Their knowledge of herbal remedies and leanings toward pagan ritual were bound to go against them since both could be twisted into “proof” of Satanic practices.
I borrowed heavily from the Culpeper’s (1616-1654) Complete Herbal to conjure the remedies brewed in the cunning woman’s cottage and plundered the folklore and superstitions of Devon and Cornwall to create the piskies in the ditches and the fairies in the hill. The spells are based on traditional Wiccan magic with a fanciful twist or two.
The word “Merrybegot” has slipped out of use. But it was spoken long ago—in the west country, anyway—and meant exactly what it means in this story.
Julie Hearn
April 2005
www.julie-hearn.com
www.authordalehertige.org
www.as.wvu.edu/-srsh/history.html
For Further Reading
Many of these books are written for readers on the college or graduate-school level, but they offer great insight to those interested in reading further about the setting and lingering myths of this period.
Aronson, Marc. Witch-Hunt: Mysteries of the Salem Witch Trials. (New York, NY: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2003).
Bunn, Ivan, and Gilbert Geis. A Trial of Witches: A Seventeenth-Century Witchcraft Prosecution. (London, England: Routledge, 1997).
Culpeper, Nicholas. Culpeper’s Complete Herbal. (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2003).
Gibson, Marion. Reading Witchcraft: Stories of Early English Witches. (London, England: Routledge, 1999).
Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. (New York: Knopf, 2002).
Royle, Trevor. The British Civil War: The War of the Three Kingdoms, 1638-1660. (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
Scot, Reginald. The Discoverie of Witchcraft. (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1989, 1930).