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’s snares, tempting the sinner to forget the larger glory of the heavenly kingdom. As William Perkins had it, ‘the power of this Prince of Darkness manifests itself herein by works of wonder, transcendent in regard of ordinary capacity… to purchase himself the admiration, fear, and faith of the credulous world’. Parliamentarian propaganda made a general association between the popish plot and the Devil’s wiles, and Charles himself was touched by these charges of diabolism. Cavalierism in general became a species of demonic activity. Royalists, on the other hand, charged that witchcraft was closely tied to the sin of rebellion.77 The East Anglian witch-hunt was quickly invested with these meanings too. John Hammond, who printed Signes and wonders, saw it as a judgement on the whole people – he published a number of wonder pamphlets in these months with the message that everyone should look to their own sins in order to avoid similar judgements in the future. That it took place in parliamentary territory was, of course, fuel for the royalists, but The parliaments post turned this into a gender issue: ‘There is an infection in wickedness; and the spirit of the Cavaliers because it could not prevail with our men, hath met with some of our women, and it hath turned them into witches’.78

The fight against witches was a godly work, and one described in martial language, requiring personal valour and other masculine values. As one writer had it in 1648:

The late lamentable wars began, yet God was good to us in discovering many secret treacheries… And many superstitious relics were abolished, which neither we nor our godly fathers (as ye have heard) were able to bear. Since which time, ye knew, many witches have been discovered by their own confessions, and executed; many glorious victories obtained (beyond any man’s expectation) and places of strength yielded.

Once again, it seems, there might be a connection between the work of Dowsing and Hopkins. Dowsing, for example, thought that a victory for Fairfax at Nantwich owed something to his own successful destruction of images at Orford, Snape and Saxmundham on the same day. Hopkins and Stearne’s evidence, and their account of themselves, can plausibly be seen as a means of dealing with social and spiritual chaos through an assertion of masculine control. That control rested in part in a physical violence which recalls accounts of male violence against women during the wars: a way of maintaining masculine identity in the face of violent and chaotic uncertainties.79 Although the physical safety of women was usually respected, and stories of rape are rare, there were atrocities involving women near the fighting. At Naseby the massacre and mutilation of women camp followers was apparently an ethnic as well as a gender crime – this was an unusual story, but might be read as a masculine response to disorder, fear and female potency.80

Although not all the witches were women, the bulk of them were and a wider anxiety about the stability of patriarchal order is an important context for these trials, or at least for their representation in print.81 The parliaments post had made a standard observation about the greater vulnerability of women to spiritual error, linking it to witchcraft in a way which was common to contemporary thinking about witches. It was also a common theme in writing about the dangers of sectarianism, a form of diabolical temptation. There was a common association between the Devil and over-zealous godliness, with sectarian excess the obvious fruit of the Devil’s work.82 These associations between the Devil and unbridled zeal, and between them both and sectarianism, were clearly close to witchcraft fantasies. Conventicles and covens were imagined in similar ways, with women prominent in both.

In numerous ways the women who petitioned, published or prophesied tried to present themselves within the bounds of conventional gender roles, but the pamphlet literature of the 1640s is full of anxieties about uppity women. Looking at the witchcraft prosecutions in Tudor and