God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [259]
There was an established connection for contemporaries between witchcraft and rebellion (modern readers need think only of Macbeth, although contemporaries might have read it too in Lucan’s Pharsalia). Signes and wonders from Heaven interpreted the witch-hunt in East Anglia as another sign of God’s anger at the divisions in civil government: alongside reports of the witchcraft prosecutions it related the story of two monstrous births – one human and one feline. ‘It is said, that pestilence, the sword and famine are the searchers, wherewith the Lord draws blood of sinners’ and since there is no-one who has not ‘felt the smart of one, if not all of those forenamed scourges: no, no, there is none alive but hath smarted in one degree or another, even from the King to the beggar. Ergo, we are all sinners’. Wonders and marvels were further evidence of God’s anger, ‘strange comets, seen in the air, prodigies, sights on the seas, marvellous tempests and storms on the land… Have not nature altered her course so much, that women framed of pure flesh and blood, bring forth ugly and deformed monsters; and contrariwise beasts bring forth human shapes contrary to their kind’. It was in punishment for these sins that ‘the Lord suffered the devil to ramble about like a roaring lion see[k]ing to devour us’, not least in East Anglia, where ‘a crew of wicked witches, together with the devil’s assistance [have] done many mischiefs’.72
In East Anglia, under torture, the accused produced stories that probably reflected an amalgam of educated and vernacular wisdom about witches. There was more mention of the Devil than in most previous English trials, and that may have been the result of the accused answering leading questions after torture and harsh treatment. It was a fundamental belief of the learned that witches enjoyed their power from the Devil. But the details of the confessions – the forms taken by the familiars, the names that they were given – do not seem to belong to the world of the learned demonologist.73 It is more than possible that the particular anxiety about the Devil, about meetings where books were read, and about a familiar called ‘Newes’, reflect the particular tensions of civil war England. The preaching of hotter Protestants, anxious about the work of the Devil in this world, was common in East Anglia. In national political debate the relationship between the visible and invisible church was of central importance, and the presses continually harped on the spread of the sects. Essex, like Suffolk, had seen campaigns to purge malignant clergy and enjoyed the attentions of William Dowsing. There had also been many examples of relatively spontaneous popular iconoclasm between 1640 and 1642.74
Matthew Hopkins ‘watching’ two witches, whose familiars include one called ‘Newes’
There were more direct connections with the war too. Signes and wonders claimed that the Norfolk witches ‘have prophesied of the downfall of the King and his army, and that Prince Robert shall be no longer shot-free: with many strange and unheard of things that shall come to pass’.75 Rupert, we should remember, was held by many to be the main obstacle to a negotiated peace at this point. There was an association between Rupert and witchcraft: his pet dog was represented as a familiar and he himself referred to both as an incubus and as a devil.76 It was not the first time that the power of an evil adviser of a monarch had been associated with witchcraft. Strafford, on the scaffold, had apparently answered a charge that he had been prey to the ‘witchcraft of authority’, an echo perhaps of a Puritan argument that worldly glory was one of the Devil