Conjuring the Witch
The legacy of Matthew Hopkins’ bloody trail of terror could be felt at Salem and even today, says witchcraft historian Dr John Callow
is there a direct link between the depiction of royalists as demonic, and the witch hunt in east Anglia?
This is certainly what historians now think, largely as the result of ground-breaking work by Professor Mark Stoyle. The Civil Wars militarised and brutalised English society to an unprecedented extent and, at the outbreak of the conflict, Prince Rupert [of the Rhine] seemed to embody all that was to be most feared: the ethos of the ruthless, swaggering, foreign professional soldier, hardened to looting and the massacres of the Thirty Years’ War. As a consequence, the stories that gathered around Rupert from 1642-44, concerning his employment of familiar spirits – namely his great white dog ‘Boy’ – witchcraft and shape-shifting, were easily projected onto village women, once the prince’s military reputation was shattered at the Battle of Marston Moor.
What role did the fear of catholicism play in the shaping of this image?
The idea of the ‘other’ – the fearful, corrosive outsider – is a common theme in most witch persecutions. Minorities are always at risk. In Counter-reformation Germany, the Protestant was often identified as the would-be witch; in the Spain of the Inquisition, it was the Jew; in 15th-century France, it was Joan of Arc as the liberated woman who adopted men’s clothing. In the same way, deadly folktales about Cardinal Wolsey – once a local boy made good, turned after his fall from power into a ‘witch master’ – began to transfer themselves onto Prince Rupert. The irony, here, is that Rupert was a dedicated Calvinist; a temperate drinker and very far from being a rake. It was his uncanny good fortune in battle – just like Wolsey’s sudden rise to power – that appeared suspect and unnatural.
Was Matthew hopkins’ Satanic panic an anomaly during the civil Wars?
After a period of marked decline from the 1620s, the Civil Wars re-ignited an interest in witches and a burgeoning, popular literature about their fearful magic. After the deadly hatred surrounding the last of the Lancashire witch trials had died down, the figure of the witch had often been viewed by dramatists as a comic or pitiable one. The trouble was that these jokes and the sometimes entirely fictionalised accounts of their careers could – and often were – taken in deadly seriousness at times of crisis and societal breakdown. The hurried reprinting of earlier witchcraft tracts and trial accounts during the 1640s-50s created conditions in which persecution could flourish. Beyond any doubt, the East Anglian outbreak of 1645-47 was the most dramatic and deadly cycle of witch hunting ever undertaken in England.
But Hopkins and his companion, John Stearne, were the symptoms of this canker rather than the cause. The collapse of traditional authority, a vacuum at the heart of the legal system, and an upsurge in popular fears about the efficacy of witchcraft created the climate in which Hopkins and Stearne might flourish. Certainly they were not the only witch hunters operating during the period; the trials did not stop with Hopkins’ death in 1647, but radiated out to Kent in the 1650s. As late as the 1680s, the services of witchfinders were being sought and contracted by concerned citizens in the Devon boomtown of Bideford, where accusations of witchcraft, once again, surfaced. It was not until the 18th century, with the acceptance of Cartesianism, a transcendent notion of God, and the rise of the philosophes that the Devil was pushed to the margins and the witch was consigned to the pages of the story book.
how did hopkins’ actions inform future witch panics?
Despite a gap of almost half a century, Puritanism, a society under considerable stress and a desire for religious conformity, provided common links between the largest witch hunt in English history (in East Anglia in 1645-7) and in North America (at Salem in 1692). Furthermore, Massachusetts had been a magnet for settlers from the same Eastern counties in England that had been at the centre of the earlier trials. Ideas as well as commerce flowed freely between old and New England, and figures like John Hathorne (1641-1717), who presided over the Salem trials, spanned both lands and were rooted in a sense of an imminent, judgmental God and a prescient, corporeal evil that continually sought to undermine His world and work, through the devil and witches.
how much of today’s pop culture view of the witch can be traced back to this era?
There is no doubt that the modern image of the witch – crooked, old and poor, complete with a pointed hat, broom and black cat – stems from the mid-17th century. You only have to look at the title page of Hopkins’ ‘Discovery of Witches’ to see the stereotype, seated around the hearth and surrounded by her quarrelsome familiar spirits. [This] witch could live next door; sour the milk, sicken the livestock and kill the babe in the cradle. That is what made her so dangerous, fearsome and compelling.
Embracing the Darkness: A Cultural History of Witchcraft by John Callow is available now for £20 from I.b.tauris