What did Thomas Plume think about witchcraft?
199
books will not serve independently as a reliable biographical
source’,
37
with the collection overall demonstrating ‘a curious
impartiality in the choice of subjects, amounting to an
apparently deliberate pairing of alternative viewpoints…It is
as if the collector had sought to make his collection uniformly
impersonal’.
38
By re-examining the Library contents in
conjunction with Plume’s biography and anecdotes, I think
rather that Plume had specific ideas about witchcraft which
shaped his choices about what to include in (and exclude
from) the Library on this subject in a manner that was more
deliberate than impersonal.
Why might Plume have denied shelf-space to the East
Anglian Witch Hunt? Instances of religious violence that
occurred in Chelmsford between 1641 and Plume’s departure
for Cambridge in early 1646 may help answer this question.
Religious extremists, who were dissatisfied with the authorities’
slow response to a parliamentary ordinance requiring the
removal of ‘scandalous’ pictures from churches, took the law
into their own hands in November 1641 and smashed what
was left of the coloured glass in the aisle and east windows
of the parish church of St Mary. The rector, John Michaelson,
preached against the incident and what he called ‘an usurped
power in the People’.
39
For his pains Michaelson, who also
continued to use the Book of Common Prayer during these
volatile years, became the target of verbal and physical
violence at the hands of the Chelmsford extremists and
Parliamentarian soldiers who were billeted in the town in
increasing numbers after the outbreak of the Civil War. On one
infamous occasion in 1642 soldiers tried to bury Michaelson
alive after they came across him conducting a burial service
according to the Prayer Book they had forbidden him to use.
40
He was finally forced to flee Chelmsford for Oxford in January
1643
for his own safety after soldiers threatened to throw him
onto the bonfires they had lit to celebrate the abolition of the
episcopate.
41
Plume’s biographer Tony Doe argues plausibly that this
early exposure to instances of mob violence directed against
the fabric and rites of the Church of England in Chelmsford
explains why Plume chose not to adopt the religious and
political affiliations of his father and instead became a royalist
and staunch supporter of the Church of England from an
early age.
42
I would suggest that the Chelmsford events of
1641–3
may also have shaped Plume’s antipathy towards
the East Anglian Witch Hunt. For Plume, popular religious
extremism seemed to threaten the Church of England, social
order and the proper exercise of authority, and when Hopkins
and Stearne emerged into public view in Manningtree in 1645,
they may have appeared to Plume to do exactly the same.
They were Puritans who, lacking formal legal or theological
training or office, took upon themselves the role and authority
of witch-finders to devastating effect.
43
They also encouraged
popular participation in quasi-legal processes, by means of
their use of members of local communities as the searchers
and watchers of suspected witches in the pre-trial period, when
evidence against suspects was gathered and confessions forced
out of them.
44
In the biography he wrote of his mentor, John
Hacket, Plume wrote scathingly about what he regarded as the
improper (indeed, dangerous) involvement of the lower orders
in activities for which they were intellectually and emotionally
unfitted, describing them as the ‘tumultuous Concourses of
raging people, seeking to manage all Affairs by the whirlwind
of their own ignorant clamours, and to remedy grievances
without consulting Religion or Justice’.
45
Perhaps Plume
regarded the witch-finding activities of Hopkins, Stearne
and their helpers in the same negative light. Even worse
was the fact that the witch-finders, like the Parliamentarian
soldiers in Chelmsford, attacked men of the cloth. On 27
August 1645 John Lowes, the octogenarian Anglican minister
of Brandeston in Suffolk, was hanged for witchcraft (along
with seventeen other people) in Bury St Edmunds, the result
of trials instigated by Hopkins and Stearne in Suffolk; Lowes
had been watched, walked, interrogated and also swum in the
ditch of Framlingham Castle by Hopkins to force him into a
confession.
46
Lowes’s execution was the final dismal chapter
in a long story of bad relations with his parishioners, many
of whom willingly testified against him in 1645. The idea that
an Anglican cleric could be sent to the gallows by members
of his own flock to be hanged like a common criminal must
have epitomized the world-turned-upside down for Plume, an
example of the ‘accurst Anarchy’ which he condemned in the
royalist poem he copied into his account-book in 1646.
47
Plume seems to have associated not only popular
Puritanism and Presbyterianism but also the Catholic Church
with the excesses of persecution, however. One of the twenty
identifiable books discussed by Plume in MS. 7, a notebook he
kept after leaving Cambridge between 1650 and 1656, was the
Catholic Paul Servita’s
History of the Inquisition
;
48
in his notes
Plume criticized the Catholic Church for executing thousands
of people it deemed to be heretics,
49
emphasized instead the
need for toleration and a Christianity that was merciful and
humane, and believed that there should be no compulsion
in religion.
50
As we have already seen, Plume seems to have
practiced what he preached after becoming the Archdeacon
of Rochester in 1679, adopting a light touch over the parishes
answerable to his archdeaconry court and believing that
education rather than persecution was the best way to combat
immorality and unorthodoxy.
51
Doe argues convincingly that
Plume’s approach in Kent should be seen as a deliberate
and positive aspect of his churchmanship.
52
I would push the
point further and speculate that if Plume’s late seventeenth-
century churchmanship was indeed rooted in an aversion to
extremism that began in Chelmsford in the 1640s, then the
horrors of the East Anglian Witch Hunt might also have helped
convince him that discretion was the better part of valour in
cases of conscience.
If Plume says nothing about the East Anglian Witch Hunt,
what then does he say about witchcraft and magic in MS. 30?
There are three anecdotes of significant length and detail,
which I will label the Booker anecdote, the James I anecdote,
and the Dr Child anecdote.
53
They share the following features:
they are amusing, and even bawdy in some places; they
ridicule certain aspects of seventeenth-century beliefs in
magic; and, in terms of the drama of their narratives, they
emphasize moments when abilities or types of behaviour that
are initially believed to be supernatural are exposed, either
as frauds or as having natural explanations. The cleric and
eminent Plume scholar Andrew Clark found Plume’s interest
in the supernatural embarrassing and pointedly abstained
from discussing any of these anecdotes in his analysis of
the Plume notebooks, noting that, ‘the frequency of notes
about apparitions, witchcraft, omens, demoniacal possession,
fortune-telling, show that Plume was deeply tinged with