MATTHEW Hopkins, Witchfinder
General, has gone down in history as one of
Britain’s most evil men.
The zealot behind England’s only witch-hunt
worthy of the name, legend has painted him as a bloodthirsty pervert
exploiting the fears of a population made vulnerable by
civil war, a
malevolent figure epitomised by Vincent Price in the 1968 movie Witchfinder
General.
In this new study Malcolm Gaskill, a Fellow of Churchill College,
Cambridge, strips away the myths leaving a straightforward, factual account
of the witch craze that held southern England in its grip from 1645-7 – and it
is no less readable as a result.
Fifteen generations ago, England was a
superstitious place where pagan folklore mixed with increasingly radical
versions of Protestantism in the public imagination. Then came civil war
cursing the nation with poverty, disease and terror and suddenly the forces of
evil were detected in every shire.
When two obscure gentlemen, Matthew
Hopkins and John Stearne, began to examine women suspected of
witchcraft in a remote corner of Essex, the local population were only too willing to pay
them for every minion of Satan they unearthed. Driven by godly zeal, the pair
extended their campaign into Suffolk and East Anglia leading to hundreds of
executions. Yet, they were emphatic that they only went where they were
invited and never actually
accused anyone of anything, only determined the
guilt of suspects already fingered by a suspicious populace.
Witchcraft
had been a statutory offence in England punishable by execution since 1563.
Yet many cases hitherto brought to
court had resulted in acquittal through
lack of evidence. Ironically it was the need for greater proof that led to the
infamously cruel methods of extracting confessions practised by Hopkins and
his assistants such as swimming – where the accused was tied thumb to toes
and flung into a river the floaters being guilty and the sinkers drowning
anyway, or watching – when the accused was tied to a chair and watched
continuously until they confessed to suckling imps.
Unsurprisingly,
many terrified and sleep deprived suspects admitted to all sorts of patently
ludicrous couplings with demons and familiars. News of Hopkins’s and
Stearne’s successes spread like wildfire around the country and even made a
splash across the Atlantic with a court in Massachusetts adopting their
methods of ‘discovering’ witches in 1648.
The book follows the pair’s
progress from community to blighted community and explodes a few myths
along the way. Contrary to popular belief, witches were not burned at the
stake – that was a punishment generally reserved for heretics – they were
hanged. Hopkins himself was never hanged as a wizard, he died in his bed,
perhaps having made himself ill through conducting so many interrogations
in foetid, fever-ridden gaols.
By the time of his death on 12 August
1647 he had already witnessed the tide turn against his work and when the
social turbulence of the Civil War subsided with the Restoration of the
monarchy
Witch hunting faded in popularity altogether.
The Witchcraft
Act was repealed in 1736 although incidences of persecution continued until
as late as 1945.
However, as Gaskill observes in his epilogue, witch
hunting continues in the developing world today suggesting that should the
peace, prosperity and liberal democracy we currently enjoy in the West be
shattered, we could swiftly find ourselves back in the kind of tormented world
that threw up the Witchfinder General.
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