Post by Graveyardbride on Sept 30, 2014 13:07:47 GMT -5
Witches: James I and the English Witch Hunts by Tracy Borman
Witchcraft in the 16th and 17th centuries has been one of the most popular topics with historians and the reading public for almost half a century. And why not? There is much to grip the modern reader, insulated from the madness of the time by centuries of rational scepticism, but still alive to the frissons to be had from stories of popular delusion and all the delicious paraphernalia that come with them: the crones, their familiars (in this instance, a cat called Rutterkin), the dubious motives of the accusers, and, perhaps most interestingly, the surprisingly wide consensus among the accused that, yes, they were in fact witches. "It's a fair cop," as Connie Booth says when she is discovered to be a witch in Monty Python and the Holy Grail – although the scene is, in an otherwise impeccably historically accurate film, anachronistic: the mania for persecuting witches didn't really get going until the middle of the 15th century.
So Dr. Tracy Borman has entered a crowded field with her book Witches: James I and the English Witch Hunts. The peg on which she hangs her retelling of the popular attitude to sorcery is the family of Francis Manners, 6th Earl of Rutland, whose sons and wife died in mysterious circumstances at Belvoir Castle in 1613. The accused were Margaret and Phillipa Flower, along with their mother Joan (who died, also unusually, choking on a piece of consecrated bread, by way of admission of her guilt, as it were). Margaret had been a servant sacked by the earl for stealing, and the curse she was accused of putting on the family was her revenge. In open court, she confessed.
This is all intriguing stuff – not many witchcraft trials involved the nobility – and the narrow focus allows Borman to concentrate on an aspect of the witch-hunt craze that is under-represented in all the historiographical, psychological and sociological theories that have abounded over the years: the exploitation of credulity for political purposes. As well as the craziness of popular belief, we have a good deal of intrigue among courtiers, and an account of the shifting opinions of the monarch, James I, whose belief in witchcraft cooled considerably over the years, as did that of the population generally. Although, as Borman notes in an epilogue, it flared up again horribly in the 1640s, largely due to the efforts of the Witchfinder General, a nasty piece of work who, exploiting the harsh and unforgiving mindset of Puritanism, was responsible for the execution of about 100 people between 1645 and 1647.
Borman's thesis is that the Flowers were patsies and that the real villain was the Duke of Buckingham, who had his greedy eye on the wealth of Rutland. He had already compromised the honor of Manners's daughter by having her stay at his house unaccompanied, his plan being to marry her and get the male heirs out of the way.
In his Guardian review of the hardback, David Wootton took strong issue with this claim, and, as he is something of an authority on the subject, I am inclined to take him at his word – with the caveat that Buckingham was by many accounts not the most scrupulous of men (I for one will never forgive him for kicking Francis Bacon out of his own home simply because he liked the look of it). Buckingham would have stopped at nothing to get what he wanted, although, as Wootton pointed out, to get what he wanted all he usually had to do was ask for it; he was, after all, the king's favorite.
But this is all a bit of a MacGuffin. The interest here lies in the accurate and plausible portrait of a whole society, from top to bottom. Borman has read extensively (although not, curiously, Keith Thomas's classic Religion and the Decline of Magic). The details are fascinating, and, as people are being executed for sorcery in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere as I write, they could bear some scrutiny.
Source: Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian, September 30, 2014.