A superb history of the witchcraze in early modern Europe – but then comes the twist
In 1619, the sisters Margaret and Philippa Flower were executed for witchcraft in Lincoln, accused of being responsible for the death of the eldest son of the Earl of Rutland. Margaret and Philippa did not deny their guilt: rather, in open court, they complained only that the devil had not come to rescue them. Their mother Joan had also been charged, but had swallowed some bread and butter after saying "she wished it might never go through her if she were guilty", and had promptly died.
Witchcraft trials were not uncommon in early-17th-century England. James I had come to the throne a firm believer in the pervasive threat of demonic forces: he believed witches had summoned up storms in an attempt to drown his bride-to-be as she tried to sail from Scotland to England. But the case of Anne Gunter in 1611 had served as a salutary warning to James and the establishment in general. The young Anne had claimed to be possessed by demons, and had accused neighbours of bewitching her, but had later confessed to being a fraud, schooled in deception by her father. The confessions of the Flower sisters, who claimed to be motivated by resentment because the earl had sacked Margaret for stealing, however, appeared to leave no room for doubt. They had put a spell on the young boy, and he had died. Two things make this case exceptional: the confessions, and the involvement of an aristocratic family.
Tracy Borman has written a superb history of the witchcraze in early modern Europe focusing around this one case. Her book is enthralling and accurate. She does not make things up: when obliged to speculate, she carefully adds the necessary "probably"s and "perhaps"s. I noticed only one slip, when she says that judges and juries knew that the sabbats, when witches were supposed to gather and have sex with the devil, were imaginary. Most people – educated and uneducated – actually believed they were real, just as they believed that one could identify a witch by "swimming" her. Trussed up and thrown in the water, an innocent person would sink, and a guilty one float. In many respects this is a triumph of popular historical writing.
I have my doubts about one central claim: that the Flower sisters confessed because they were tortured. They were produced in open court and did not complain of mistreatment. No contemporary writes of torture. Torture was used in England in matters of state; but its use in a case such as this would have been illegal and it would have been difficult to keep it secret when the women were questioned in front of a panel of local dignitaries (including the earl himself, who came uncomfortably close to being both victim and prosecutor). During the civil war, the self-appointed witchfinder general Matthew Hopkins tortured suspects by sleep deprivation and other techniques designed to bring about mental collapse; but these methods required teamwork, and as a consequence were never secret. Confession to making a pact with the devil, living with a devil incarnate (their familiar, a cat called Rutterkin) and murder by spell-making is certainly difficult to understand, particularly as the evidence without it was far from strong. But a not-guilty verdict, which implied returning to live in acute poverty among hostile neighbours may have had few attractions, and confession at least allowed the accused to own the power and hatred attributed to them by others. Confession should perhaps be understood as a form of early modern suicide by cop. And in some cases, even perhaps this one, there may have been something to confess: spells spoken, curses uttered, a cat not just caressed but worshipped.
Borman may be wrong about torture, but she is right to want to find out what really happened. For a long time, the literature on early modern witchcraft was written under the shadow of anthropological work on African witchcraft. Among the Azande in north central Africa, anthropologists claimed, everyone believed in witchcraft, but there were no witches – equally, though, no Azande ever confessed to witchcraft. Presuming there were no witches in 17th-century England, historians wrote about witchcraft as a (false) belief system, and not as a resource to which the poor, the angry, the impotent may have been tempted to turn.
The first 200 pages of this book are thought-provoking; a fine account of evil beliefs and (at least on the part of the authorities) evil actions. But then we get the twist. For Borman wants to expose James I's favourite the Duke of Buckingham as the real murderer of the earl's eldest son and of his only brother, who was mortally ill even when the witches were on trial. Buckingham was determined to marry Rutland's daughter, whom, after a fashion, he seduced – he persuaded her to stay the night under the same roof as him, thus tainting her honour. By killing off the potential heirs (using poison) and forcing through the marriage, he made himself heir to Rutland's vast fortune.
There are so many things wrong with this story that it is hard to know where to begin. First, to assume that because the boys died someone must be responsible for their deaths is to make the same mistake as the witchfinders. Doctors (and in this case the very best were hired) were useless. Children took sick and died. No one was to blame. Second, Buckingham was after more than money when he married; he was after social status and a political alliance – after the marriage, he ensured Rutland was promoted to the privy council and even before it he was arranging for one of his own lucrative positions, chief justice in Eyre North of Trent, to be passed to Rutland. If Rutland prospered, so would Buckingham, and vice versa. Politics in this period was not a zero-sum game. Third, there was every reason to think the earl might have more sons: his wife was about 32 years old. Fourth, Buckingham had no need to kill in order to get rich. He had a monopoly of the king's goodwill. What he wanted was his – quite literally. He decided that he wanted Francis Bacon's house. Bacon protested, and was sharply reprimanded for not understanding his obligations. His house, since Buckingham had taken a fancy to it, was now Buckingham's, and that was that. The same was true of Rutland's daughter (like Bacon, Rutland was a little slow on the uptake, but he too learned his lesson in the end), and would have been true of his fine castle too, had it come to that.
Lastly, and most importantly, there is not a single hint by a contemporary (many of whom hated the duke and, after his assassination in 1628, made no bones about it) that Buckingham, or his mother, or any of his close associates were to blame. There is no account book recording the purchase of poison, no coded letter, no new evidence. For the first 200 pages, this book sticks close to the sources, then it parts company with them entirely. (I wouldn't claim Buckingham was incapable of such a murder; his predecessor as James's favourite, Robert Carr, was party to the murder of Thomas Overbury, poisoned while a prisoner in the Tower of London, and there is no reason to think Buckingham was in any way a nicer chap, although he was generally acknowledged to be even better looking.)
As I read this book I found myself growing more and more optimistic about historical writing that is both serious and popular. But then came the twist. Is it just a cynical device, intended to liven up the story by adding a dash of murder, intrigue and seduction? Or has Borman persuaded herself that, since Buckingham stood to gain, he must have murdered the little boys? It is hard to know. This book will teach you a lot about real history, but I fear that if it is successful it will encourage authors, agents and publishers in the surely mistaken view that without a conspiracy, a murder and a long-hidden secret no Renaissance history can sell. Better, then, to read Jim Sharpe's fine book The Bewitching of Anne Gunter: it's the real thing. This very nearly is; but it isn't.
• David Wootton's Galileo is published by Yale. Reported by guardian.co.uk 10 hours ago.
In 1619, the sisters Margaret and Philippa Flower were executed for witchcraft in Lincoln, accused of being responsible for the death of the eldest son of the Earl of Rutland. Margaret and Philippa did not deny their guilt: rather, in open court, they complained only that the devil had not come to rescue them. Their mother Joan had also been charged, but had swallowed some bread and butter after saying "she wished it might never go through her if she were guilty", and had promptly died.
Witchcraft trials were not uncommon in early-17th-century England. James I had come to the throne a firm believer in the pervasive threat of demonic forces: he believed witches had summoned up storms in an attempt to drown his bride-to-be as she tried to sail from Scotland to England. But the case of Anne Gunter in 1611 had served as a salutary warning to James and the establishment in general. The young Anne had claimed to be possessed by demons, and had accused neighbours of bewitching her, but had later confessed to being a fraud, schooled in deception by her father. The confessions of the Flower sisters, who claimed to be motivated by resentment because the earl had sacked Margaret for stealing, however, appeared to leave no room for doubt. They had put a spell on the young boy, and he had died. Two things make this case exceptional: the confessions, and the involvement of an aristocratic family.
Tracy Borman has written a superb history of the witchcraze in early modern Europe focusing around this one case. Her book is enthralling and accurate. She does not make things up: when obliged to speculate, she carefully adds the necessary "probably"s and "perhaps"s. I noticed only one slip, when she says that judges and juries knew that the sabbats, when witches were supposed to gather and have sex with the devil, were imaginary. Most people – educated and uneducated – actually believed they were real, just as they believed that one could identify a witch by "swimming" her. Trussed up and thrown in the water, an innocent person would sink, and a guilty one float. In many respects this is a triumph of popular historical writing.
I have my doubts about one central claim: that the Flower sisters confessed because they were tortured. They were produced in open court and did not complain of mistreatment. No contemporary writes of torture. Torture was used in England in matters of state; but its use in a case such as this would have been illegal and it would have been difficult to keep it secret when the women were questioned in front of a panel of local dignitaries (including the earl himself, who came uncomfortably close to being both victim and prosecutor). During the civil war, the self-appointed witchfinder general Matthew Hopkins tortured suspects by sleep deprivation and other techniques designed to bring about mental collapse; but these methods required teamwork, and as a consequence were never secret. Confession to making a pact with the devil, living with a devil incarnate (their familiar, a cat called Rutterkin) and murder by spell-making is certainly difficult to understand, particularly as the evidence without it was far from strong. But a not-guilty verdict, which implied returning to live in acute poverty among hostile neighbours may have had few attractions, and confession at least allowed the accused to own the power and hatred attributed to them by others. Confession should perhaps be understood as a form of early modern suicide by cop. And in some cases, even perhaps this one, there may have been something to confess: spells spoken, curses uttered, a cat not just caressed but worshipped.
Borman may be wrong about torture, but she is right to want to find out what really happened. For a long time, the literature on early modern witchcraft was written under the shadow of anthropological work on African witchcraft. Among the Azande in north central Africa, anthropologists claimed, everyone believed in witchcraft, but there were no witches – equally, though, no Azande ever confessed to witchcraft. Presuming there were no witches in 17th-century England, historians wrote about witchcraft as a (false) belief system, and not as a resource to which the poor, the angry, the impotent may have been tempted to turn.
The first 200 pages of this book are thought-provoking; a fine account of evil beliefs and (at least on the part of the authorities) evil actions. But then we get the twist. For Borman wants to expose James I's favourite the Duke of Buckingham as the real murderer of the earl's eldest son and of his only brother, who was mortally ill even when the witches were on trial. Buckingham was determined to marry Rutland's daughter, whom, after a fashion, he seduced – he persuaded her to stay the night under the same roof as him, thus tainting her honour. By killing off the potential heirs (using poison) and forcing through the marriage, he made himself heir to Rutland's vast fortune.
There are so many things wrong with this story that it is hard to know where to begin. First, to assume that because the boys died someone must be responsible for their deaths is to make the same mistake as the witchfinders. Doctors (and in this case the very best were hired) were useless. Children took sick and died. No one was to blame. Second, Buckingham was after more than money when he married; he was after social status and a political alliance – after the marriage, he ensured Rutland was promoted to the privy council and even before it he was arranging for one of his own lucrative positions, chief justice in Eyre North of Trent, to be passed to Rutland. If Rutland prospered, so would Buckingham, and vice versa. Politics in this period was not a zero-sum game. Third, there was every reason to think the earl might have more sons: his wife was about 32 years old. Fourth, Buckingham had no need to kill in order to get rich. He had a monopoly of the king's goodwill. What he wanted was his – quite literally. He decided that he wanted Francis Bacon's house. Bacon protested, and was sharply reprimanded for not understanding his obligations. His house, since Buckingham had taken a fancy to it, was now Buckingham's, and that was that. The same was true of Rutland's daughter (like Bacon, Rutland was a little slow on the uptake, but he too learned his lesson in the end), and would have been true of his fine castle too, had it come to that.
Lastly, and most importantly, there is not a single hint by a contemporary (many of whom hated the duke and, after his assassination in 1628, made no bones about it) that Buckingham, or his mother, or any of his close associates were to blame. There is no account book recording the purchase of poison, no coded letter, no new evidence. For the first 200 pages, this book sticks close to the sources, then it parts company with them entirely. (I wouldn't claim Buckingham was incapable of such a murder; his predecessor as James's favourite, Robert Carr, was party to the murder of Thomas Overbury, poisoned while a prisoner in the Tower of London, and there is no reason to think Buckingham was in any way a nicer chap, although he was generally acknowledged to be even better looking.)
As I read this book I found myself growing more and more optimistic about historical writing that is both serious and popular. But then came the twist. Is it just a cynical device, intended to liven up the story by adding a dash of murder, intrigue and seduction? Or has Borman persuaded herself that, since Buckingham stood to gain, he must have murdered the little boys? It is hard to know. This book will teach you a lot about real history, but I fear that if it is successful it will encourage authors, agents and publishers in the surely mistaken view that without a conspiracy, a murder and a long-hidden secret no Renaissance history can sell. Better, then, to read Jim Sharpe's fine book The Bewitching of Anne Gunter: it's the real thing. This very nearly is; but it isn't.
• David Wootton's Galileo is published by Yale. Reported by guardian.co.uk 10 hours ago.