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the uncritical beliefs of the day’.
54
I disagree with Clark’s
conclusion and suggest rather that analysis of the three
anecdotes listed above shows instead that Plume positioned
himself as a debunker of certain mistaken ideas about magic,
rather than as a credulous believer in everything.
The Booker anecdote relates conversations that supposedly
took place between John Booker, an astrologer and publisher
of almanacs who lived between 1602 and 1667, and an old
shepherd he met on Salisbury plain. Booker asked the shepherd
how much further he had to go to reach Salisbury; the shepherd
told him ‘3 miles & he w[ou]ld be almost wett to ye skin
bef[ore] he got thither’. Booker rode on and sure enough, it
started to rain before he reached the town. Being (as Plume put
it) a ‘prognosticator’ himself, Booker rode back to the shepherd,
keen to know ‘by w[ha]t art he knew this alteration of ye
weather’; the shepherd said he would reveal his art in return for
£5, to which bargain Booker agreed. The shepherd then showed
Booker ‘a low runt cow’ behind a hedge, saying that ‘whenever
she pricks up her tail & falls a running, I am sure of a shower’.
Booker was honour-bound to give him the money as promised,
as the shepherd had fulfilled his side of the bargain.
55
Plume is clearly amused by the fact that the mysterious
weather-predicting art that Booker was so keen to learn
was simply the natural behaviour of a cow, unsettled by an
approaching shower, and that Booker was tricked out of his
money by an old, but canny, shepherd. Directly after the Booker
anecdote is another which also suggests that the apparently
magical was often trickery. Plume writes that a man who had
lost a cow went to a cunning man to find her. The cunning
man ‘gave ye man a purg[e] & bid him goe home, on the
way going it fell a working w[hi]ch made ye man goe behind
a hedge & there he spied his cow’.
56
As well as appealing to
Plume’s scatological youthful humour, this anecdote also
suggests that he saw cunning men as tricksters who played on
their clients’ fears and hopes rather than being able to work
real magic. The anecdote is also critical of the credulity of the
cunning man’s customer, who (like Booker) is tricked out of
his money and also suffers an unnecessary purging, when he
should have looked for his cow properly in the first place. These
views echo the criticisms of cunning folk and popular credulity
in relation to white magic which took centre-stage in much
early modern Protestant demonology,
57
although the only clear
examples of this genre in the Plume Library are the section on
the magician in
A Treatise of the Foure Degenerate Sonnes
,
by the Scottish cleric John Weemes,
58
and the two works by the
much better-known Cambridge theologian William Perkins
(1558–1602):
A Discovrse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft
59
,
and
A Resolvtion to The Countrey-Man, proving it vtterly
vnlawful to bvy or vse our yearely Prognostications
.
60
Plume probably shared the distaste Perkins expressed in this
latter text for prognosticators’ impious misuse of the stars in
the making of their predictions, and may have founded his
Professorship of Astronomy at Cambridge at least in part in
order to encourage godly and scientific readings of the heavens
by properly educated men. His bequest (and his amusement
at the expense of Booker) certainly seem to fit into the post-
Restoration repudiation of the art of astrology, which had
become associated with ‘plebeian radicalism, republicanism
and reckless political prophecy’ during the Civil War.
61
The central themes of the other two MS. 30 anecdotes are
also trickery and fraud exposed by learned men, with whom
Plume perhaps identifies. King James I is the hero of the first,
which runs as follows:
K[ing] James long thought there were no witches, his Court
brought him in a young wench [that] confest she had made a
contract with ye devil & c[ou]ld doe strang things – fell downe
in a trance – saies K[ing] James to Buckingham standing by
–
Of my soule man take her by ye Quunt (w[hi]ch act some
parallel[e]d to [that] of Solomon) ye maid anon rising up
blush[e]d – saies K[ing] James – Of my Soul no witch ye devil
nere blush[e]d & so found out ye Imposture – but afterw[ar]ds
was told by a witch all ye discourse his Queen & he had one night
in private a bed, w[hi]ch made ye King alter his opinion, & write
[
that] Treatise against witchcraft.
62
Plume knows that James changed his opinions about witchcraft
during his life but has the order of events wrong. James took a
marked interest in witch-hunting during his reign in Scotland,
intervening personally in 1590–1 in the trials of alleged
witches who had supposedly plotted his murder. These trials
were reported to the English public in
Newes from Scotland
,
a pamphlet published in London in 1591 which emphasized
the turning-point to which Plume refers, at which an initially
sceptical James became suddenly convinced of the reality of
the magical plot against him. This happened when one of the
accused witches, Agnes Sampson, supposedly told the King the
exact words he and his wife had exchanged on their wedding
night in Oslo.
63
The ‘Treatise against witchcraft’ Plume refers to is
Daemonologie
,
published by James in 1597, in which James
affirmed his belief in the reality and threat of witchcraft and
emphasized the religious aspect of the crime (the witch’s pact
with the devil).
64
As King of England from 1603, however,
James adopted a more sceptical public position regarding the
supernatural, a move prompted at least in part by a series
of infamous ‘possession’ cases involving youngsters who
had strange fits.
65
James again intervened personally in such
cases, either on his travels throughout England or by ordering
the afflicted youngsters to be brought to London for closer
examination; they were invariably exposed as frauds and their
allegations of witchcraft proven false.
66
The case of imposture
noted by Plume is probably that of Anne Gunter, a twenty-year-
old from Oxfordshire who began having fits in 1604.
67
She
was brought before James on four occasions in 1605 and he
became convinced that she was simulating bewitchment.
68
She
finally confessed as much to the King, who wrote in a letter to
Robert Cecil ‘that she was never possessed with any devil nor
bewitched’.
69
Scepticism about possession is also the key theme of
Plume’s Dr Child anecdote, which follows directly after the
James I anecdote. Plume writes that:
Dr Child an Engl[ish]man (who thinks there are no witches nor
possesed men ect) being in Italy upon a S[ain]ts day, when they
usually eject ye devill, seing ye priest at his work w[i]th ye people
about him, ask[e]d ye matter – Oh ye people cried out spiritatum
spiritatum – he went in & challenged ye possessed party to speak
any language w[i]th him (as he had boasted before he c[ou]ld
to ye people) & told him [that] if twere ye devill w[i]thin him
he c[ou]ld speak all languages, & speak Greek, Latin, German,
French, but ye p[ar]ty c[ou]ld not answer him, so ye people were
amazed & ye impostor found out.
70