Download PDF | Francis Young - Magic as a Political Crime in Medieval and Early Modern England_ A History of Sorcery and Treason (International Library of Historical Studies)-I.B. Tauris (2017).
276 Pages
Francis Young is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and gained a PhD in history from the University of Cambridge. He is the author and editor of seven previous books. These include English Catholics and the Supernatural, 1553-1829 (2013), The Gages of Hengrave and Suffolk Catholicism, 1640-1767 (2015), The Abbey of Bury St Edmunds: History, Legacy and Discovery (2016) and A History of Exorcism in Catholic Christianity (2016). He broadcasts regularly for the BBC on historical topics and is centrally involved in efforts to locate the coffin of St Edmund, Martyred Monarch of the East Angles. His new book, Edmund: In Search of England’s Lost King, will be published by I.B.Tauris in 2018.
The study of magic in medieval and early modern England has been dominated by its having been located within the study of witchcraft, to the detriment of its study outside the history of witchcraft accusations. Legal histories of treason have similarly marginalised the role of magic. This has led to the virtual ignoring of the relationship between elite magic’s significant role in political crime and in accusations of treason against its practitioners. The first book devoted to the study of magic and political crime, Francis Young’s new volume substantially redresses this situation. Taking us on a fascinating journey through the terrain of treasonous magic, it illuminates how, from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, treasonous activities against both the monarch and the government were often driven by magical practices - whether by means of astrological calculations, the stabbing or melting of effigies or occult knowledge of poisons. It makes an original and significant addition both to modern studies of the European magical tradition and to the political history of medieval and early modern England, while serving too as a salutary reminder that that history cannot be fully understood without recognition of the intimate relation between the magical and the monarchical.’
— Philip C. Almond, Emeritus Professor of Religion,
University of Queensland
‘While most histories of medieval and early modern magic have focused either on the theories and practices of magic, or on its troubled relationship with religious authority, Francis Young’s impressively argued and richly documented study offers a new area of investigation: the close links between moments of political instability, fears of sedition and treason and accusations of harmful magic. Young’s book will be warmly welcomed by all those who work on the social and
cultural history of European magic and the history of ideas.’ — Stephen Clucas, Reader in Early Modern Intellectual History, Birkbeck, University of London
‘Francis Young’s new book is an accessible and wide-ranging narrative history of a fascinating subject: magical treason, its methods, practitioners and — supposedly — its “victims”. Atmospheric and
engaging, it is notably well written.’ — Marion Gibson, Professor of Renaissance and Magical Literatures, University of Exeter
‘This volume makes an important contribution to the field and is a welcome counterbalance to the literature on witchcraft, which tends to view the history of magic simply as a road leading to the witch trials. It brings together the scattered literature on treasonous magic and convincingly demonstrates that magical threats interwoven with courtly politics and political intrigue were key elements in the
shifting approaches to magic in early modern England.’ — Frank Klaassen, Associate Professor of History, University of Saskatchewan, author of The Transformations of Magic: Illicit Learned Magic in the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance
Preface
Between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries treasonous plots and other forms of subversion directed against the monarch and government often contained a magical element - whether in the form of illicit astrological calculation, the stabbing or melting of effigies, or occult knowledge of poisoning. A number of such cases played a pivotal role in well-known political events: the 1441 trial of Eleanor Cobham, duchess of Gloucester, discredited her husband and led ultimately to the Wars of the Roses; George, duke of Clarence’s attempt to defend a servant accused of magical treason led to his drowning in a butt of wine in 1478; and Richard III’s accusations of magic against Edward IV’s queen, Elizabeth Woodville, were key to his rise to power. However, other less well-known magical plots were of equal concern to medieval, Tudor and Stuart governments at the time, such as the panic that surrounded a supposed plot to kill Queen Elizabeth and her advisors using wax effigies uncovered in 1578, which lasted over two years. Even James I was widely rumoured to have been murdered by magical poisoning in 1625. Although magic as a form of political crime never gained the prominence in England that it enjoyed in early modern Scotland or France, it remained a significant source of concern to governments that has largely been overlooked by historians.
The idea for this book emerged from the process of writing my earlier monograph English Catholics and the Supernatural, 1553-1829 (2013), which examined the attitudes of post-Reformation English Catholics towards ghosts, witchcraft, magic and exorcism of demons. There I addressed early modern Catholic attitudes towards magic, but restrictions of time and space did not permit me to explore thoroughly the accusations of magic levelled against Catholics, who from 1534 onwards (apart from the interlude of Mary I’s reign in 1553-8) often found themselves politically at odds with English governments. Accusations of treasonous magic were by no means exclusively aimed against Catholics, but the anti-Catholic trope of Catholic obsession with superstitious ritual, combined with the real existence of Catholic plots involving Mary, Queen of Scots and Yorkist pretenders in the reign of Elizabeth, meant that Catholics were often the focus of post-Reformation accusations of treasonous magic. Having previously undertaken the first study of the relationship between English Catholics and supernatural belief, it seemed appropriate for me to attempt this first study of an overlooked aspect of treason accusations as well.
A history of magic as a political crime in England must transgress the customary periodisation of medieval and early modern history, since most of the evidence suggests that the practices used (or alleged to have been used) by magical traitors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were essentially survivals or revivals of medieval techniques. Furthermore, memory of famous medieval treasons involving magic was kept alive in the sixteenth century in popular chronicles as well as in dramas such as Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part Two, which reinterpreted Eleanor Cobham’s conjurations for an early modern theatre audience. Early modern plots frequently echoed their medieval antecedents, and although the political and religious motivations behind accusations may have changed over time, early modern magical treasons cannot be truly understood apart from their medieval origins.
Many people have provided inspiration, encouragement and guidance for this book. I am grateful to James Noyes for directing me to I.B.Tauris and to Alex Wright for being an immensely supportive editor and guiding this project smoothly towards publication. I am indebted to Richard Kieckhefer, Claire Fanger and Frank Klaassen for their early encouragement, to Christina Cameron for kindly proofreading the text, and to Inga Jones for pointing me in the direction of some important material on the English Civil War. I thank the staff of the British Library manuscripts and rare books rooms, and of the manuscripts and rare books rooms at Cambridge University Library, the National Archives at Kew and everywhere else that I have conducted research over the past three years. My wife Rachel has, as always, earned my greatest debt of gratitude by patiently supporting my scholarship and recondite preoccupations, and this book is dedicated to her.
All translations from Latin, French, Scots and Spanish are my own unless otherwise stated, and naturally I take responsibility for all errors in any translation or transcription. I am grateful to Esmeralda Salgado for reviewing my translations from the original Spanish. The transcription of magical texts presents particular difficulties, as it is sometimes a challenge to distinguish between magical nomina ignota (exotic-sounding names without obvious meaning, deliberately inserted into texts) and abbreviated Latin or English. In transcriptions I have expanded abbreviated words in square brackets [thus] and indicated later insertions by the original scribe \thus/. In quoted extracts from medieval and early modern texts I have modernised the spelling, but have made no attempt to modernise grammar or substitute contemporary equivalents for obsolete vocabulary.
All dates given in the text are Old Style (following the old Julian Calendar), although I have taken the year to begin on 1 January. All line numbers of quotations from Shakespeare’s plays are taken from William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. S. Wells, G. Taylor, J. Jowett, and W. Montgomery (1986).
Introduction
The desire to kill, injure or control another person remotely, by the power of projected thought, is probably as old as humanity itself. It is well attested in the gruesome language of lead curse tablets recovered from the sacred spring at Bath, deposited by visitors during the Roman occupation of Britain.! When it came to magical attack, a ruler, however well protected by material walls and guards, was as vulnerable as any other human being, and magic represented a unique class of threat to political stability for as long as people contemplated the possibility of its effectiveness. Magic was, in theory, the perfect method of treason. It could be performed remotely and secretly, and required the involvement of few (if any) other people, invoking instead the assistance of powerful non-human forces against the supreme earthly power of the monarch.
Most private magical operations that were performed against the monarch in medieval and early modern England, by their very nature, would never have been discovered. When they were discovered, this was often because they were one component of broader plots involving more conventional methods of rebellion. The failure of magical plots rarely seems to have deterred such attempts. When magic did not work, practitioners were far more likely to think that they had performed the procedure incorrectly than to conclude that magic was an ineffective instrument. The persistence of magical plots would suggest that, at the very least, the working of magic against the government provided some degree of psychological relief for the powerless and politically excluded.
The connection between harmful magic and treason is a deeply rooted one in Christian culture. According to the Geneva Bible of 1560 and the Authorised Version of 1611 ‘rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft’ (I Samuel 15:23), and this verse was much exploited in early modern England to blacken all critics of official policy. The verse had a double effect: on the one hand, it allowed an analogy to be drawn between treasonous activity and the supreme treason to God (idolatrous magic or witchcraft); and on the other hand, it served as a reminder of the tendency of traitors to commit magical crimes. The connection between magic and treason was reinforced at the linguistic level by the fact that the same Latin word — coniuratio — could mean both a conspiracy and the summoning of demons. However, rhetorical accusations levelled against traitors that they were like witches did not amount to formal accusations of supernatural crime, and it is important not to confuse the two separate discourses that flowed out from I Samuel 15:23.
This book is not concerned, except tangentially, with the rich political metaphor of treason as the sin of witchcraft — which is certainly worthy of a study in its own right. Instead, it focusses on real or suspected magical plots. On one level, every illicit magical act after 1563 (when ‘conjuration’ and ‘witchcraft’ became felonies) was in some way a threat to good order and therefore to the government. However, the definition of ‘political crime’ adopted in this book, whilst a broad one, is not so broad as to treat all magic as political. The primary focus of this study is magical acts that were perceived by the authorities as a direct and specific threat to the life, health or judgement of the monarch and regime rather than a generalised threat to society. Many magical plots came within the ambit of the law of treason because they aimed to harm or kill the monarch, and many that were not technically treasonous could be classed as other crimes of political dissent, such as sedition and Jése majesté. Christina Larner, in a study of witchcraft in Scotland, found the connection between magic and treason so close that she coined the term ‘treasoncum-sorcery’ to describe many charges of treason.” Larner’s model of treason-cum-sorcery does not hold up quite as well in England as it does in Scotland, but the tendency to pile supernatural accusations on suspected traitors operated on both sides of the border.
Magical acts could also become political crimes when they were associated with activities proscribed by government policy at a particular time. In the 1530s any kind of prognostication or prophecy that hinted at comeuppance for Henry VIII’s religious changes was treated as a political crime. P. G. Maxwell-Stuart states well how easy it was for someone to become the target of a charge of treasonous magic:
Inquisitiveness might lead someone to ask when the ruler would die and who was likely to be his or her successor; or to find out whether such and such an uprising, rebellion, or war stood a chance of being successful; or to discover a person’s career prospects in royal or imperial service. Should the individual’s prospects look favourable or grim, they could always be assisted by magic. So, too, a rebellion or the succession to the throne. Consequently both divination and magic could be seen as fraught with danger to the authority and stability of the state.*
In most cases, we must accept that the original intentions of people accused of magical crimes are no longer recoverable. Some may have intended to perform magic, some may have been innocent victims, and some may have been magicians whose practices were mistaken for treason. Ultimately, as Maxwell-Stuart suggests, it was what ‘magic could be seen as’ by the authorities that mattered. Any attempt to assess the guilt or innocence of the accused parties is almost impossible, primarily because the historical sources are almost always the product of an official investigation or a report on it. However, basing this study solely on official sources would mean ignoring the question of whether government suspicions accurately reflected what magicians themselves thought they could do. It is crucial, therefore, for the historian to engage with the history of magic, since even if the truth of the magical practices of particular accused traitors is lost to us in official accounts, we can study comparable magical practices preserved in other texts. A significant gap often existed between official fears of what magicians might do and what magicians themselves tried to do.
HISTORIES OF MAGIC AS POLITICAL CRIME
Accusations of magic as a political crime have received surprisingly little attention from historians; the present book is the first dedicated to the subject. One reason for this neglect is that cases in which magic was entangled with treasonous acts do not fit comfortably within the historiography of ‘witchcraft studies’ as it has developed in the last forty years. Because he wrote so long ago, George Lyman Kittredge (1860-1941) made no distinction between witchcraft and magic in his Witchcraft in Old and New England (1928), a book that is still a good starting point for cases of magic as political crime. However, the cases cited by Kittredge received little subsequent attention because they were not clearly instances of ‘witchcraft’, and the dominance of ‘witchcraft studies’ historiographically marginalised ritual magic. Even the title of Kittredge’s book gives the impression that the history of magic is a footnote to the history of witchcraft.
Historians of early modern England have tended to treat ritual magic as a sideshow to the persecution of accused witches between 1563 and 1717. Criminal trials of people accused of witchcraft vastly outnumbered those of people accused of magic under the same statutes, and because ‘witchcraft studies’ often approaches witchcraft as a social phenomenon rather than one defined by the law, many historians have set aside trials for magic. No case of magic in English history has acquired the same level of notoriety as the great East Anglian witch-hunt of 1645-7, but there is no shortage of evidence that treasonous activities involving magic were of much more direct concern to governments than witchcraft ever was. There can be no doubt that witchcraft was a more socially significant phenomenon than magic at all levels of English society, but the elite nature of magic — and the elite status of those involved — added to, rather than detracted from, its political significance.
As early as 1933 Cecil L’Estrange Ewen (1877-1949) realised, on the basis of trial records and contemporary pamphlets, that English witches (in contrast to their Scottish counterparts) were never portrayed as being involved in treason; rather, they were almost always portrayed as being motivated by personal revenge or financial gain.* In only two English cases can it be argued that a conventional victim of a witchcraft charge was also executed for treason. The charge on which Margery Jourdemayne was burnt to death in 1443 may have been treason (although this remains unclear, as Chapter 1 will demonstrate), and another witch was condemned on a charge of high treason at York in the spring of 1584. Mary Lakeland was burnt to death for treason in 1645, but this was ‘petty treason’ (killing her husband).° Yet the tiny number of witches accused of treason has no direct bearing on the significance of magic to treason, because the vast majority of those accused of magical treason cannot be classed as witches. The historical categories adopted by Ewen created the appearance that cases of treasonous magic were rare and marginal. In reality, such cases were not uncommon, but cases of treasonous witchcraft were almost non-existent.
Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), perhaps the most influential book on the supernatural in English social history in the last fifty years, followed Ewen’s lead by treating magical treason as a marginal activity.° Geoffrey Elton’s Policy and Police (1972) did something to redress the balance, since Elton was the first to uncover the full extent of government concern about magic in Henry VIII’s state letters and papers. Elton’s work was followed by important articles on magic as treason by William Jones, Henry Ansgar Kelly and Jonathan Van Patten.’ The case of Eleanor Cobham also attracted some interest,® while John Leland has made a detailed study of Richard III’s claims of magical treason against him.’ Retha Warnicke has investigated suspicions and accusations of magic at the court of Henry VIII.'° Kelly argued that, whilst medieval English monarchs were worried about magical treason, early modern monarchs were not. Prophecy became more important than magic as a threat to the state, and the greater faith in providence that prevailed in England had the effect of controlling witch-hunting.'' The latter claim may or may not be true, but the evidence presented in this book tends to undermine Kelly’s view that early modern monarchs (or at least their councillors) stopped worrying about magic; if anything, they became more anxious than their medieval predecessors.
Historians specifically concerned with the law of treason have also neglected the subject of treasonous magic. Lacey Baldwin Smith’s Treason in Tudor England (1986) examined the unrealistic schemes of sixteenth-century traitors, but strangely omitted a discussion of magical treason. Nevertheless, Baldwin Smith’s argument that a ‘conspiracy theory of politics’ dominated Tudor thinking, in which there was always a more sinister and larger plot behind outward dissent,'* provides a useful framework for understanding why accusations of treasonous magic arose. Accusations of magic were one way of showing that a traitor was implicated in the most diabolical and unnatural activity of all. Baldwin Smith also noted the tendency of paranoid figures of authority to see their enemies as
almost infinitely evil,"
which made it much easier to imagine that traitors were also dabbling in necromancy.
David Cressy’s Dangerous Talk (2010) considered the early modern development of the law of treason to cover treason by speech from the reign of Henry VIII onwards, but stopped short of treating treasonous magic (in spite of the fact that it is explicitly mentioned in the 1580 act against seditious words).'* An important 1998 article by Norman Jones dealt with the subject of magical conspiracies against Elizabeth I, recently complemented by an equally valuable study by Michael Devine.!* Glyn Parry, in his biography of John Dee The ArchConjurer of England (2011), has probably done more than any other historian to unearth the lost history of magical plots against Elizabeth I. Accusations of magical treason from the reigns of James I and Charles I are touched upon in the work of David Underdown and Nathan Johnstone,'® and the conspiracy theories surrounding the death of King James I are considered in Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell’s The Murder of King James I (2015).'’ The theme of magic as political crime after the English Civil Wars has never been studied.
Perhaps the most significant historical work on magical treason to date has been accomplished by P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, first in his book on Scottish witchcraft, Satan’s Conspiracy (2001), and latterly in The British Witch (2014), which departs from previous studies by stressing the treasonous component in accusations of witchcraft in the late Middle Ages and early sixteenth century. The growing literature on magic as treason means that it can no longer be marginalised in English history and regarded as a Scottish phenomenon that barely existed south of the border. The governmental energy expended on investigating a single suspected magical conspiracy to kill Elizabeth I between 1578 and 1581 is astonishing. Parry has shown that official concern about magic was not just a feature of the early Reformation in the 1530s, as Elton and Van Patten supposed; rather, it extended well into Elizabeth’s reign. Prophecy, which was very significant in the 1530s, receded in importance after the 1560s while magical treason retained its vitality. This book will demonstrate that the utility of accusations of magical acts directed against the government as a political instrument lasted well into the seventeenth century.
STUDYING MAGIC AS POLITICAL CRIME
The study of magic as a political crime poses the same historiographical challenges as the study of any kind of magic, owing to the difficulty of defining what ‘magic’ is and the proscribed and secretive nature of magical activities in past societies. The material and literary evidence of magic, such as books and ritual paraphernalia, was customarily destroyed as part of judicial proceedings, and this was especially true if suspicions of treason were involved. By definition, such items do not survive as evidence, although some surviving texts by other magical practitioners may contain comparable rites. It is the aim of this book, as far as possible, to set individual accusations of magic in the context of known varieties of magical practice in order to enable some basic assessment of the plausibility of accusations. All too often, historians dealing with magic make little effort to recover the content of the rites and practices that were used and fail to engage with textual traditions of magic. Brian Copenhaver has argued that this shortcoming derives from prevalent academic assumptions rooted in the anthropology of Sir James Frazer. By arguing that magic precedes religion as a more ‘primitive’ category of human behaviour, Frazer created an enduring idea that magic is intrinsically ‘primitive’, a visceral and universal category of human experience almost beyond rational analysis. Although Frazer’s methodology has been comprehensively challenged, his view of magic remains influential, and the idea of magic as an intellectual tradition (or at the very least a textual tradition) is marginalised in comparison with anthropological approaches. However, Copenhaver argues that attempting to understand western magic by analogy with sub-Saharan practices ignores the literary tradition of western magic rooted in the Classical world.'®
Just as historians before the publication of Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars (1992) may have written off the devotional practices of the pre-Reformation church as ‘superstition’, so some historians continue to be dismissive of magic. Some historians functionalise magic since they are interested only in the non-magical motivations of those who used magic, and are content with the knowledge that magic was a forbidden act without enquiring into its content. Alternatively, historians may take accusations against magicians seriously while little or no attempt is made to understand the probable practices of those magicians. Richard Kieckhefer, Owen Davies, Frank Klaassen, Claire Fanger and others have made important contributions to the study of the textual tradition of magic,’® but attention to the inner workings of magic remains rare amongst historians who are not specialists in the field.
Accused witches rarely speak for themselves, and we hear their voices only through court records. Magicians, by contrast, were a literate group who produced their own literature, however meagre its surviving instances. The study of magic is therefore both richer in source material and can potentially achieve a greater balance between the voices of the accused and their accusers than the study of witchcraft. Accounts of magical practice were also preserved by those keen to attack or discredit practitioners. The care taken by Duffy to reconstruct the details of pre-Reformation and Reformation-era liturgies is now seen as essential to early modern religious history, and the same attention to the details of rite and ceremony should also be seen as essential to the history of magic.
DEFINING MAGIC
Many attempts have been made to define magic by anthropologists, archaeologists and historians, most of which are unsatisfactory in one way or another. The archaeologist Ralph Merrifield defined magic as ‘the use of supernatural power vested in the operator or in the ritual he employs, without the intervention of a supernatural being’.?° Although this definition might cover some forms of magic, it does not apply to necromancy or ritual magic, which is based almost entirely on the intervention of invoked supernatural beings. Merrifield’s definition sprang from a desire to distinguish ‘religion’ and ‘magic’ as categories, a task that is probably impossible and, arguably, misconceived in the first place. As Klaassen has shown in his study of the fourteenth-century Benedictine monk John of Morigny, ritual magic was regarded by many in the Middle Ages as one spiritual path among many, and as an expression of religion and piety rather than something opposed to it.*! Just because magic was regarded as illicit by inquisitors and church officials, we cannot assume that its practitioners acted as if they considered it illicit and forbidden.
However, whilst magic had religious significance for some practitioners, this does not justify subsuming magic entirely within the realm of religion, given that people in the past often made their own distinctions between religion and magic and perceived a difference between unacceptable religious opinions (heresy) and magic. As David J. Collins notes, ‘the premise that magic had (and has) coherent, rational significance in relation to discourses of religion has so far proven itself more elucidative of the historical phenomena than has the alternative premise that magic and religion cannot be distinguished at all’.** In other words, there may be no solid theoretical justification for considering ‘magic’ a meaningful historical category, but it remains extremely useful to the historian to separate ‘magic’ from ‘religion’. The anthropologist E. E. EvansPritchard (1902-73) used the terms ‘magic’ and ‘witchcraft’ but declined to define them, describing them as ‘only labels which help us sort out the facts’. Such labels could be discarded if they proved unhelpful, and ‘The facts will be the same without their labels’.”* Copenhaver defends Evans-Pritchard’s nominalist approach, noting that ‘since no essences are available, no definitions will be possible’.”* The ‘terminological slipperiness across cultures and through time’ associated with magic must be acknowledged,”° yet at the same time the adoption of some working conceptual distinctions is crucial to understanding people’s beliefs.
The classic approach to magic and religion within the historiography of medieval and early modern Europe, advocated by Bronislaw Malinowski in his essay ‘Magic, Science and Religion’ (1948),2° has involved distinguishing magic from religion as an individualistic attempt to compel supernatural powers for short-term ends; religion, by contrast, involves ritual performed for more abstract and less immediate ends, often with community participation.”’ It is not difficult to find examples of ‘religion’ that fit this definition of magic and examples of ‘magic’ that fit this definition of religion, and Stuart Clark observed that ‘only something entirely contingent legitimacy’ separates magic from religion.** In other words, one person’s (or one faction’s) religion is another’s magic, which is vividly shown in Reformation writers’ redefinition of Catholic practices as superstitious magic.?? The fact that almost any ritual practice might be seen or defined as magic by others enabled the coercive use of accusations of magic by governments and made magic the perfect material for a case of constructive treason.
Distinctions between different kinds of magic within the history of magic are perhaps less controversial than the definition of magic itself, and the categories of ritual magic (conjuration, demonic magic or necromancy), natural magic and astral (or astrological) magic are broadly accepted. In addition, Kieckhefer identified a ‘common tradition’ of unlearned magic,*? which Catherine Rider defines by purpose rather than form. Common magic ‘responded to widespread and fundamental concerns, such as curing illness, seeking prosperity or love and explaining or averting misfortune’.*' Although the rise of printed translations of works such as Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s Of Occult Philosophy led to a convergence between common magic and learned magic in the seventeenth century, learned magic was defined by its faithfulness to Classical sources, philosophical interests and what Collins describes as ‘The struggle to carve out an intellectually and morally legitimate field of magic’.*”
Practices considered magical today were not always classed as magical in medieval and early modern England, while practices no longer considered magical were regarded as magic. Alchemy and astrological prognostication were learned pursuits rarely condemned by religious authorities. Knowledge of poisons (veneficium), on the other hand, was considered a branch of magic from antiquity because it gave the power to kill remotely, without warning, and without physical strength. The Latin word venefica was often used to render the English word ‘witch’, meaning that veneficium could also function as a synonym for ‘witchcraft’ (or at least heavily imply it). Veneficium was an important category of magic that could be used to kill,*? and it was not until the seventeenth century that learned commentators in England began to accept that poisons were entirely natural substances. Elsewhere in Europe the conceptual separation of poisoning and witchcraft took much longer, and Owen Davies has shown that the last woman in Europe to be executed on the basis of accusations of witchcraft, Anna G6ldi of Glarus, Switzerland, was beheaded in 1782 on a formal charge of poisoning.** Any study of medieval and early modern magic must strike a balance in the scope of what it considers ‘magic’ between what seems ‘magical’ to the modern reader and what was considered ‘magical’ in those eras. Activities usually considered non-magical also sometimes led to accusations of magic at times of particular stress, such as denunciations of astrologers. Yet to label anyone who practised alchemy or astrology as a ‘magician’ would be thoroughly misleading and historically inaccurate, even if those who engaged in these practices thereby made themselves more vulnerable to accusations of magic. Until the second half of the twentieth century, a moralising and rationalist approach to magic prevailed, and historians tended to disparage it as a false and discarded belief-system. The use of valueladen terminology such as ‘superstition’ and ‘credulity’ as catch-all terms for puzzling beliefs does nothing to explain why anyone believed anything, and a focus on what people believed is a decidedly modern preoccupation. It was more often what people did that mattered to the authorities in the Middle Ages.** Defining the extent of definite and conscious beliefin magic, either in the early modern or contemporary world, is well-nigh impossible. Furthermore, before we can ask why the people of the past believed something, we must try to understand exactly what it was they believed, as far as possible in their own terms. Passing moral or rational judgements on the private beliefs or practices of long-dead people is a futile exercise that makes for bad history. Magic has its own flexible internal logic, and magical thinking remains one possible response to modernity,*° lingering in a society long after conscious belief in its power has disappeared.
Behaviour may be a better guide to someone’s attitude to magic than the beliefs he or she explicitly articulates. Because the operation of magic is inherently mysterious, believing that it is just possible that magic might work amounts to much the same thing as believing that magic does work. The responses of government officials to magical threats may not always have been underpinned by committed belief in magic on the part of those officials, but throughout history magic has flourished in the grey area between definite belief and instinctive, inarticulate suspicion.
Magic implicated in political crime could take many forms, although the most common accusations concerned conjuration of demons associated with astrological calculations of a ruler’s death and the construction of an effigy in order to harm a ruler by sympathetic magic. Sometimes people were accused of doing both of these things. Spirit conjuration and astrology were elite activities, and those accused of using them for treasonous purposes were usually either educated individuals or elite individuals who hired an educated astrologer or necromancer to perform magic on their behalf. Effigy magic did not, in and of itself, require education or skill and was associated with witchcraft. However, it could also take sophisticated forms and featured in books of necromancy, enhanced by complex astrological and demonic rites. Many practices were not ritual magic under the strict definition of conjuration of spirits, but nevertheless involved ritual elements.*” In the majority of cases in which people were accused of effigy magic against the monarch and other officials it seems that the construction of the effigy was accompanied by the celebration of masses, observance of astrological times and magical figures drawn on the effigies. However, the taint of base witchcraft that accompanied the making of effigies added to the stigma associated with the activity.
MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT
Distinguishing magic from witchcraft is a particularly difficult problem for the historian of supernatural beliefs in England, but one that cannot be avoided. Outside England, the key difference between accusations against witches and accusations against magicians was that witches were supposed to be ‘members of great cults of sorcerers’ who met at orgiastic Sabbaths, while magicians
were not.°8
Witches were members of devil worshipping cults while magicians committed the sin of honouring demons without being full-blown diabolists. However, Ronald Hutton has argued that witches in England (apart from Cornwall) were almost always thought of as solitary individuals, and no idea of witches’ Sabbaths exists in English tradition.2? Nevertheless, early modern English people did not consider witchcraft and magic to be the same thing, and to lump the two terms together is to disregard the mental landscape of people in the past.
The anthropologist Garrick Bailey distinguished between ‘sorcery’ as ‘the performance of rites and spells intended to cause supernatural forces to harm others’, and ‘witchcraft’ as ‘the use of psychic power alone to cause harm to others’.*° This definition is problematic as applied to medieval and early modern England, where the word ‘witch’ was used more broadly than just to refer to people who were thought to harm by projected thought (ill-wishing or ‘malefice’). Someone might be accused of being a witch for creating an effigy as well as mere ill-wishing, and virtually the same ritual methods used to cause harm (such as constructing a wax effigy) might also be used to attempt healing (indeed, medieval books of magic advise that a person harmed by means of effigy magic can also be healed by it). Furthermore, counter-magic directed against harmful magic often simply reversed the procedure originally used to harm, yet was not considered witchcraft.
From the sixteenth century onwards, the English words ‘witch’ and ‘witchcraft’ had purely negative connotations. Magic, by contrast, could be performed for both good and evil purposes. However, magic performed for evil might also be called witchcraft. A distinction between witchcraft and magic in purely functional terms is therefore problematic. Another approach is to accept that the words used to describe a supernatural accusation against someone in early modern England said more about who that person was than the practices of which he or she was accused. Thus an uneducated person, especially a woman, might be accused of witchcraft, while an educated man was more likely to be accused of magic. There are notable exceptions to this general observation, such as the 1645 witchcraft trial of the clergyman John Lowes,*! but it provides a basic framework within which the historian can work. Accusations of witchcraft rarely included any mention of the ritual practices characteristic of magic, while accusations of magic did not include the idea of the explicit Satanic pact that often underpinned witchcraft accusations. To classify witchcraft as a kind of magic or magic as a kind of witchcraft is to turn one or other word into a ‘greedy concept’ that is at risk of devouring the distinctions (albeit fluid and inexact) that early modern people themselves drew between magic and witchcraft.
The contrast between witchcraft and magic was reflected in the way people accused of the offences were treated. England never experienced a national panic over magicians on the scale of France’s ‘affair of the poisons’ (1676-82), and even the events of 1578-81 did not lead to a large number of trials for magic or witchcraft. Indeed, Davies has shown that it was rare for professional magicians (cunning-folk) to be prosecuted as witches.*” One possible interpretation of this difference in judicial treatment between magicians and witches, in spite of the fact that both conjuration and witchcraft were punishable under the same statute, is that witches were thought to make a pact with the devil. The pact was not mentioned in the ‘Witchcraft Acts’ of 1563 and 1604, and scholars are divided on exactly when pact witchcraft first made an appearance in England. On the Continent the idea of a pact can be traced to a series of bulls issued by Pope John XXII in the 1320s,** but a pamphlet of 1589 represents one of the earliest mentions of the idea in England.** Even then, accusations of pact witchcraft only came to the fore in England in the 1640s, and instances of witchcraft without an explicitly diabolic element continued to be part of the English tradition.*°
Nevertheless, by the middle of the seventeenth century English lawyers understood a clear distinction between witchcraft and conjuration (i.e. necromancy), based on the nature of the Satanic pact, as a legal manual of 1645 explained:
The conjurers believe that by certain terrible words they can raise the Devil and make him to tremble ... and having raised the Devil, they seem, by prayers and invocation of God’s powerful names, to compel the Devil to do and say what the conjurer commandeth him. The witch dealeth rather by a friendly and voluntary conference or agreement between him or her and the Devil or familiar to have his or her turn served, and in lieu thereof the witch giveth or offereth his or her soul, blood, or other gift unto the Devil.*°
Furthermore, conjurers and witches differed in their intentions, since ‘the conjurer compacteth for curiosity’ but ‘the witch of mere malice’.*’” In 1716, just a year before the last English witch trial, William Hawkins distinguished three types of supernatural offenders:
(1) Conjurers, who by force of certain magic words endeavour to raise the devil, and compel him to execute their commands.
(2) Witches, who by way of friendly conference are said to bargain with an evil spirit to do what they desire of him.
(3) Sorcerers or charmers, who by the use of certain superstitious forms of words, or by means of images, or other odd representations of persons or things, etc., are said to produce strange effects above the ordinary course of nature.*®
Hawkins’s interpretation was hardly justified by the contents of the 1604 statute on which he was commenting, which made no mention of witches making a pact with the devil. Yet Hawkins’s definition of conjuration as a practice based on specific words does reveal a significant difference between the way in which magic and witchcraft were imagined in early modern England, because it was perfectly possible for a bewitchment to happen without words. Witchcraft in English tradition was first and foremost ‘ill-wishing’; only later were embellishments such as the Satanic pact, the witch’s mark and the imp/familiar added to the story. The power of witches was mysterious and supernatural in nature, but - unlike the sorcerer or conjurer — the witch did not need to possess any special skill or knowledge. A witch was a kind of person, whereas a magician was a person who practised a particular kind of activity. Although there were certainly instances of witches engaging in magical activity, witchcraft in England was not traditionally ‘book magic’, the kind of magic that literate people might attempt.*” The meaning of the words ‘witch’ and ‘witchcraft’ also changed over time. As the suffix ‘-craft’ suggests, in medieval England ‘witchcraft’ was a word that might be applied to popular magical remedies.°° This meaning survived into the early modern era; in 1566 Elizabeth Mortlock of Pampisford, Cambridgeshire, was ‘noted to the office of a witch’ because she offered women magical girdles to protect them in childbirth.°' However, by around 1600 the word had come to be associated almost exclusively with evil and ill-wishing.
MAGIC AND TREASON
There was no sense in which magic in medieval and early modern England was regarded as treasonous by definition, and it is important not to sensationalise magic in pre-industrial England. In both rural and urban communities, magic was more often than not a thoroughly ordinary, mundane business. It was used to find lost goods, locate thieves, protect cattle from disease and cure bewitched people or animals. However, magic had uses for the individual as well as the community. It was in these kind of activities that magic had the potential to come into conflict with the ever-encroaching claims of central government. People who dug treasure out of the ground, guided by spirits, were taking ‘treasure-trove’ that belonged to the crown; people who pulled down landmarks in the belief that treasure was hidden under them hindered the progress of travellers on the king’s highway; and people who used fragments of medieval liturgy in charms and spells were defying centrally enforced religious policies.
If someone could use magic to kill a neighbour over a boundary dispute, there was no reason (in theory) why magic might not be used to kill a social superior, or even the king himself — who was, after all, just a human being. In a world before effective autopsies, where there was little or no understanding of the causes of illness, sudden and premature death was a common occurrence. A few instances of a magical ritual, followed by the intended victim’s death, were enough to convince many people of magic’s ability to kill. Furthermore, serious illnesses were so prevalent that the chances of a magical attempt on the monarch’s life coinciding with a royal health scare were high; this happened in 1578 when a discovery of suspicious wax images coincided with an illness that Queen Elizabeth was suffering as a result of an abscess in her teeth.
The expansion of literacy triggered by the English Reformation also had significant consequences for magic.°? Magic remained something that required specialist knowledge and it retained much of its mystique, but by the end of the sixteenth century it was no longer confined to the clergy, or even those with knowledge of ancient languages. Magic offered an opportunity to those who felt powerless against the seemingly limitless reach of early modern governments. Whereas in the Middle Ages magic had been treated as an irritating infraction against religious discipline, in the sixteenth century it had the potential to become a socially destabilising force. In an era when even unthinking speeches uttered in drink could bring a charge of lése majesté or treason, it is hardly surprising that early modern governments were concerned about the seditious potential of magic. Until the late seventeenth century (and indeed beyond) it seems likely that most English people entertained the possibility that magic might work; many were absolutely convinced that it worked. In the light of this prevailing climate of credulity, it would have been the height of folly for a government charged with protecting the realm to fail to act against magical attempts to subvert the social and political order. Even if ministers themselves were sceptical of magic, they could not afford to be seen as weak by a population that largely accepted its reality. Indeed, so strict were the laws in Tudor England that even seeking information that could be used to make a magical attempt on the monarch’s life, by casting his or her horoscope, was forbidden.
In early modern England, as today, a variety of views on the reality and effectiveness of magic existed, even if figures like Reginald Scot, the Kentish magistrate who argued in 1584 that all magic was fraudulent, were at the outer fringes of opinion. Most people believed that magic was possible, even if most practising magicians they encountered were frauds — after all, until the mid-seventeenth century there was no established and credible natural philosophy that could offer an alternative to belief in magic. King James VI and I believed passionately in the reality of magic, but thought it impossible for magicians to kill a divinely ordained king. Likewise, many jurists held that witches and magicians were powerless against the authorities who apprehended and tried them. Still others, like Scot, thought that magicians were fraudulent but that they should nevertheless be punished for their presumption.
Scepticism about magic in early modern England existed primarily for religious rather than philosophical reasons. For Scot, a major reason to reject magic was its association with Catholicism; stamping out belief in magic was the logical progression of a Protestant Reformation that had stamped out belief in false religion. King James’s belief that magic could not touch him personally was bound up with his theopolitical conception of the divine right of kings. The power of God, who had chosen him as king, would always be greater than that of magicians and witches. Ironically, it seems that some early modern people with the most intense religious beliefs were less likely to be afraid of magic, on account of their enhanced sense of the power and majesty of God. Accordingly, some condemned excessive belief in the power of magic as an instance of faithlessness. It was the puritan minister John Gaule, concerned that witchfinders were polluting the word of God, rather than sympathetic defenders of accused witches, who eventually turned public opinion against ‘Witchfinder General’ Matthew Hopkins in the 1640s.°? Many Protestants believed that magic had power only over the sinful, who were already in the devil’s power.
To some extent, magical treason was the creation of the governments that tried to stamp it out. It is likely that many of those arrested and tried were not remotely trying to kill the monarch by magic, but simply found themselves on the wrong side of policy at the wrong time. However, it would be a mistake to suppose that magical treason was nothing more than a paranoid fantasy of civil servants, albeit a deadly one. There can be little doubt that people really did set out to attack monarchs by magic, which raises the question of what motivated plotters to resort to such methods rather than straightforward assassination or rebellion. Ronald Hutton has observed that magic was the method of treason favoured by the ‘weak’ — women, priests and old men** - since it offered the possibility of a remote assassination with minimal danger to the magician, or the individual who hired him or her. Those accused of magical treason were not always ‘weak’, however, and magic sometimes accompanied more conventional methods. In these cases it would seem that magical operations were added to a diversified portfolio of treason as an additional guarantee of success.
The vast majority of medieval magicians were monks, friars and ordained clergy. One reason for this was simple; a magician had to be able to read and write (Latin as well as English), and the church was the major source of education. Another reason was that magicians needed to harness the intrinsic power of the church’s ceremonies, and therefore it helped if a magician could perform those ceremonies himself. The most powerful ceremony of all was the mass, in which the words spoken by the priest at the consecration of bread and wine transformed them into the body and blood of Christ. Many preReformation books of magic required the magician to say a mass (or several), thereby requiring him to be a priest, and both priests and deacons had the power to bless and exorcise. Some magical formulae even involved the use of consecrated hosts.*° All of this was strenuously condemned by the church, but the differences between the ‘official magic’ of the church and the unofficial magic of conjurers were slight.°° Many ordinary people, and some of the clergy themselves, either did not understand or had little regard for the distinctions made by learned theologians between licit and illicit practices.
The early modern popular image of the magician as a morally abandoned, overreaching character like Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus did not necessarily reflect the reality. Magicians were just as likely to be motivated by simple curiosity, petty lust and pecuniary greed as by a desire for cosmic power. Magic offered the clergy an opportunity to make a little money on the side, trading on their literacy and spiritual prestige. The sheer mundaneness of the spells in many books of magic suggests a degree of complacency on the part of some magicians about the spiritual forces they might be awakening. In other words, there is no reason to think that magicians were more inclined than anyone else to treason and plotting. They were simply individuals in possession of a unique and specific skill set. As Sophie Page has shown in her recent study of magical books in the library of St Augustine’s Abbey in Canterbury, natural magic of all kinds (even the creation of unnatural ‘monsters’) seems to have been practised without restriction by medieval monks.*’ The more acceptable forms of natural magic included astral magic, which sought to bring down the influences of stars and planets to achieve marvellous effects on earth, as well as herbalism and lithomancy, which drew on the inherent virtues of plants and minerals placed in them by God. However, the monks of St Augustine’s did not include books of ritual magic or necromancy in their library catalogue, since this was a form of magic more readily perceived as illicit.
Whereas much natural magic could be traced back to the works of Pliny the Elder and other ancient sources, along with Arabic manuscripts, medieval necromancy was ultimately of Jewish origin. Translation and repeated copying had produced a distinctively Christian form of necromancy, but many formulas were still attributed to King Solomon or Moses, while angels and demons retained Hebraic names.°* The few surviving books of necromancy rarely contain magical operations designed specifically to kill,°? since magic of this kind was usually used with the intention of influencing a person’s behaviour. Therefore, although necromancy might be used to coerce a monarch’s judgement or procure favour, it was generally unsuitable for magical assassinations.
Ironically, methods for killing by magic could be found in the practices of the less controversial natural magic. Sympathetic magic, the idea that something done to an image of a person or an object associated with that person would result in actual effects on that person, could be employed with sinister intent. Books of magic sometimes contained rituals for making more effective the manufacture of a wax effigy which could then be used to harm or even kill someone, and many accusations of magical treason focussed on such procedures. However, this was by no means the only method that could be used to harm or kill a monarch, and other cases involved magically formulated poisons and demons summoned to announce or hasten the monarch’s death.
STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK
The structure of the book is chronological, with Chapter 1 beginning with the earliest verifiable instances of magic with a treasonous element in the fourteenth century, and covering the remainder of the Middle Ages up to the death of the first Tudor king, Henry VII, in 1509. Chapter 2 covers the early Reformation period, beginning with Henry VIII’s earliest religious and political changes in the 1530s and taking the story up to the death of Queen Mary I in 1558. Chapter 3 covers the first phase of the reign of Elizabeth I, between 1558 and 1577, while Chapter 4 begins with the great magical treason panic of Elizabethan England, the affair of the Islington effigies, and traces its aftermath up to the queen’s death in 1603. The chapter also addresses the possible influence of reported treasonous magical conspiracies on the early works of Shakespeare. Chapter 5 addresses the theme of magic as a political crime in early Stuart England, between the accession of King James VI and I to the English throne in 1603 and the outbreak of civil war in England in 1642, while Chapter 6 concludes the story by considering the marked decline of political accusations of magic in the post-Civil War and post-Restoration eras. The chapter addresses English involvement in the French ‘affair of the poisons’ as well as the lingering legacy of magical treason into later eras.
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