Witch Hunt: A Century of Murder (2015–…): Season 1, Episode 2 - Episode #1.2 - full transcript
This is the British Isles 400 years ago.
You will be hanged by the neck
until you are dead.
Mass trials and executions erupted
across the country.
And the reason for the chaos
and violence...
Witches.
Devil's whore.
People were convinced they sank ships,
brought famine and disease,
murdered and maimed.
Because witches worked for Satan.
Hundreds of innocent people
were persecuted...
Are thou a witch?
...tortured and put to death
in a hysterical effort
to stamp out the scourge of witchcraft.
Imagine living in that world.
You could be accused,
tortured and executed
on the basis of nothing more than gossip
and superstition.
How could such a deadly and violent idea
have got so out of control in Britain?
What drove the persecutors
to such awful lengths?
And what was it like for the victims
who were tortured and executed
for crimes they couldn't possibly
have committed?
For over 100 years,
shocking witch trials
swept across the British Isles...
...and the most infamous figure
in that whole terrifying century
was Matthew Hopkins,
Witchfinder General.
Tell me the truth. I am your confessor.
[screaming and sobbing]
This is the sleepy village of
Manningtree on the river Stour in Essex.
In 1645, something apparently trivial
happened here
that grew to engulf this corner
of England in a frenzy of paranoia
that would leave more
than a hundred innocent people dead.
It all started with a sick woman.
She was the wife
of local tailor John Rivet.
On March 21st, 1645,
Rivet petitioned two magistrates
who were visiting Manningtree.
He believed they could save her.
My wife has been struck down
by an all-consuming fever
that threatens her life.
At first,
she complained of dizziness and nausea
but now she is confined to her bed,
her body flushed hot and cold,
her senses dulled.
This is something more
than merely natural.
My wife is bewitched.
[murmuring]
To people of the time, this was
a completely rational explanation.
Witches were as real to them
as the ground beneath their feet
and the sun above their heads.
They believed the devil made a pact
with witches, sealed by sex.
And that the devil gave witches
supernatural powers to maim and to kill.
People were terrified of them.
In the 17th century,
life was often nasty, brutish and short.
Everyone was looking for someone
to blame when things went wrong.
So it makes sense that a person
like John Rivet grasped at witchcraft
as an explanation for his wife's
otherwise inexplicable illness.
My wife is bewitched
by Elizabeth Clarke.
[gasps]
Elizabeth Clarke was well-known
around Manningtree.
She was around 80 years old,
she was a widow,
she was poor and she had only one leg.
She was also famously cantankerous,
much given to cursing
and with a quick temper.
She wasn't well liked.
Rivet wanted Elizabeth convicted
and executed to save his wife.
But even in the 17th century,
accusations alone
were not grounds for arrest.
And so it might have ended there,
if it hadn't been for one man.
Local landowner John Stearne.
I have evidence...
to support John Rivet's claim.
Stearne carried eyewitness statements
that would transform this from a minor
local incident into a catastrophe.
In the statements,
locals said Elizabeth Clarke
had not only refused
to deny being a witch.
She'd also claimed to know
plenty of other witches,
so they'd better watch their tongues.
Stearne's eyewitness accounts
changed everything.
The magistrates gave Stearne
a warrant to investigate the claims.
It backed him
with the full weight of the law.
He could use anything, short of torture,
to question Elizabeth Clarke
and any other suspected witches
living in Essex.
Essentially, they'd given Stearne,
a man with no legal status at all,
a freelance license
to hunt down witches.
It was this warrant started the most
brutal witch hunt in English history.
But it wasn't Stearne
who would drive it.
It was a young man standing quietly
at the back of the room.
His name was Matthew Hopkins.
Matthew Hopkins was born in the 1620s,
though we don't know exactly what year.
What we do know is that his father
was a strict Puritan preacher.
From an early age, Matthew would have
been immersed in his father's faith.
[murmured prayer]
He was brought up to believe it wasn't
enough to just to believe in Christ,
he also needed to demonstrate his faith
through public acts.
And in that Manningtree meeting room,
Hopkins saw an opportunity
to do just that.
Hopkins offered to help Stearne
investigate Elizabeth Clarke.
But proving her guilty
would not be easy.
King Charles I
had suppressed witch-hunting
by requiring extremely
demanding standards of evidence.
In the last 20 years,
very few witches had been convicted.
But Charles was now losing control
and civil war had broken out.
This violent chaos came as no surprise
to the Puritans
who dominated East Anglia.
They were expecting it.
They believed it signaled
the end days before the apocalypse,
when the devil would walk the earth.
So finding witches living amongst them
was exactly what they had anticipated.
This collision between the terrifying
chaos of war and rigid Puritan beliefs
created the perfect conditions
for witch-hunting.
So, Hopkins' opportunistic approach
to Stearne was perfectly timed.
Stearne accepted his help.
Matthew Hopkins was on his way
to launching the most brutal witch hunts
in English history.
[shouting]
On Friday the 21st of March, 1645,
a group of women chosen by Hopkins
and Stearne went to Elizabeth's cottage.
Get her!
Help! What are you doing!
The women stripped and searched her,
looking for the devil's mark.
People believed that the pact
between the devil and the witch
was consummated with sex.
He would then mark her body.
The devil often concealed these marks
beneath the witch's body hair.
[screaming]
The searchers would do whatever it took
to find it.
A devil's marks could be any skin
blemish, a mole, even an age spot.
So the chance of finding something
on an elderly woman was pretty high.
Finally, they found the mark,
hidden on Elizabeth's genitals.
This was an appalling level
of casual brutality.
Imagine the shame and humiliation
for Elizabeth Clarke.
Remember, we're talking
about an old and disabled woman.
As a widow, she didn't even have
the protection of a husband.
But the mark alone wasn't enough.
To be certain of a conviction,
they needed Elizabeth to confess.
Hopkins' and Stearne's warrant
restricted them
to operating within the law,
which excluded torture.
So to get what they needed,
they would have to be creative.
Elizabeth Clarke was tied to a chair
and deprived of sleep.
Wake up, old woman.
In the 17th century, sleep deprivation,
by the thinnest of margins, was legal.
Are you a witch?
No, not I!
[Elizabeth screams]
Hopkins' henchmen
worked on Elizabeth in shifts,
keeping her awake...
for three days and nights.
[scream]
Wake up.
But Elizabeth Clarke
must have been tough as old boots,
because she still would not confess.
On the third day,
Hopkins and Stearne paid her a visit.
It was the first time Hopkins
had come face to face with Elizabeth.
Do you know who I am, old woman?
I'm your confessor.
When did you sign a pact with the devil?
What sins have you committed
in his name?
Continue.
Hopkins was never going to give up.
It was all too much for Elizabeth.
Stop.
Please stop.
Talk then, old woman,
in what form did the devil come to you?
He was a tall, proper,
black-haired gentleman,
a properer man than you yourself.
He come to me three or four times
in a week in my bedchamber
and go to bed with me.
I never deny him.
Imagine the depths of degradation
to which Elizabeth had been exposed.
She'd been brutalized, starved
and denied water and sleep.
And although she was clearly made
of strong stuff,
the elderly widow finally broke.
That gave her the dubious privilege
of becoming Hopkins' first victim.
And what Elizabeth did next doomed
many more victims to follow her.
She said that she was part of a coven.
There were more witches out there
for Hopkins to hunt down.
After torturing Elizabeth Clarke,
Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne
used her confession
to forge new careers for themselves,
careers that had never
previously existed in England.
They became freelance witch hunters.
Hopkins and Stearne used
the Manningtree warrant
to begin hunting down the people
Elizabeth Clarke had named.
Elizabeth was arrested in March.
Six more arrests followed in April.
By June,
as Hopkins and Stearne hit their stride,
the number had swollen to at least 30.
The suspects were brought here
to Colchester Castle.
And conditions in this jail
were appalling.
The prisoners were shackled
day and night
and routinely beaten by the guards.
There was no light, no space,
no sanitation.
[door slams]
By June, four prisoners had already
died, most probably from typhus.
On the 17th of July, 1645,
the survivors were herded onto carts
bound for the courts at Chelmsford.
For many of them,
it wasn't the first time
they'd been arrested for witchcraft.
But previous cases had been dismissed
for lack of evidence.
Perhaps they expected
the same result this time.
If so, they reckoned
without Matthew Hopkins' zeal.
He was determined
to rid the world of Satan's agents.
Elizabeth Clarke was tried
with the first group of suspects.
Hopkins recorded the details
of the case himself.
How do you plead?
I am innocent.
The court was in uproar.
Silence!
At the back, spectators heckled
and hissed from the gallery
and the judge intervened
whenever he saw fit.
I will have silence!
Then, into the chaos of the courtroom,
stepped Matthew Hopkins.
Clarke was apprehended, and searched
and found upon her three teats.
So upon command from the justice, they
kept her from sleep two or three nights.
Immediately after this, this witch
confesses several other witches.
- [gasps]
- [man] Blasphemy!
Hopkins had something
that recent trials had lacked,
the confession that he'd extracted
from Elizabeth.
The confession of a witch in
my judgment is enough to hang a witch.
[shouting]
And Hopkins had a secret weapon
to convict the rest of the coven.
Her name was Rebecca West.
He had singled her out in jail
and offered her freedom if she gave
evidence against the others.
The alternative
was conviction and death.
So, unsurprisingly, she accepted.
We came to the house
where there were five witches.
They commanded their spirits,
some to kill a man's horse,
some to lame a cow, lame a child.
Devil's whore!
Rebecca's testimony sealed
the fate of the accused women.
Culpabilis o non culpabilis?
[jury] Culpabilis!
15 of the accused,
including Elizabeth Clarke,
were found guilty
and sentenced to death.
Hopkins was victorious.
It was the largest number of convictions
in a single witch trial
in English history.
On Friday the 18th of July,
Elizabeth Clarke,
together with 14 other condemned women,
was brought here
to where the gallows stood
in Chelmsford Market Square.
No, I didn't do anything.
I didn't do it! I didn't do it!
Elizabeth Clarke had to be helped up
to have the noose put round her neck.
Because, of course,
she only had one leg.
No, no, stop!
I didn't do it!
Elizabeth Clarke's only crime
was to be poor, bad-tempered
and in the wrong place at the wrong time
when Hopkins was launching his career.
[yelling]
[yelling]
[cheering]
Execution was by the short drop.
The victims died slowly
of strangulation.
These deaths made Hopkins' reputation.
He used this to transform himself
into something new and terrifying.
Hopkins gave himself a grand new title.
Witchfinder General.
He became unrecognizable from the man
who had stood quietly at the back
of the meeting room in Manningtree.
This is a contemporary portrait
of Hopkins.
Notice what he's wearing.
He's got a high-crowned hat, boots,
spurs and he's carrying a staff.
He's the very image
of a respected country magistrate.
When someone dressed like this
walks into a room,
people are going to sit up
and pay attention.
And I think it's obvious that Hopkins
has dressed himself like this
to have the appearance of authority.
What does a man
in his twenties need with a staff
except to have the symbol of a rank
that he doesn't actually possess?
In just four short months,
Hopkins had become one of the most
feared men in eastern England.
His career was on a meteoric path.
In the previous 20 years,
just two women had been executed
for witchcraft in East Anglia.
- Culpabilis o non culpabilis?
- Culpabilis.
[screaming]
Hopkins had now sent 15 to the gallows
in a single day.
This wasn't just good for God,
it was good for business.
Because Hopkins received a fee
for every one.
News of his success
at the Chelmsford witch trials
began to spread beyond Essex.
This is All Saints Church
in Brandeston, Suffolk.
In 1645, the parishioners here
published a pamphlet
that accused a local man of witchcraft.
Hopkins offered to help
expose the witch.
But he had absolutely no legal right
to do so.
Hopkins' original permission
came from two magistrates in Essex.
Which meant he actually didn't have
legal authority
to operate in other counties,
such as Suffolk.
But Hopkins was
clearly feeling very confident.
And why not?
Not only did he genuinely think
that he was doing God's work,
but also in the chaos of civil war,
who exactly was going to stop him?
This wasn't the only sign
of Hopkins' growing confidence.
Because the witch
he went after in Suffolk
wasn't some poor, unloved,
one-legged old crone.
It was an ordained clergyman.
Hello, is somebody there?
Reverend John Lowes had been the vicar
at Brandeston for over 40 years.
Hello?
But he was so disliked
that his parishioners
described him
as "naught but a foul witch."
How dare you!
I am a man of God!
Tackling such a conspicuous target
was risky for Hopkins.
Unhand me, I am a man of God!
No serving clergyman had ever been
convicted of witchcraft in England.
So, in this case, more than any other,
Hopkins simply had to get a result.
Your parishioners
think you're naught but a witch.
- They are wrong.
- We'll see!
As ever,
what Hopkins needed was a confession.
To extract a confession,
Hopkins reused a procedure that had worked
on Elizabeth Clarke, sleep deprivation.
But Hopkins had refined his technique.
Instead of tying John Lowes
to a chair...
...he made him run up and down the room
every few minutes.
Lowes was walked constantly for days.
When did you make
the pact with the devil?
Confess, tell me the truth,
I am your confessor.
[panting]
I am not guilty.
Hopkins had successfully used
sleep deprivation many times
to get a confession.
It was the most extreme technique
he could legally apply.
But this time, it had failed.
Hopkins' new career was under threat.
Hopkins had built an entire reputation
on getting results
when no one else could.
So, he took a momentous step.
In order to get the results he wanted,
he would break the law of the land.
After all, in his mind,
he was doing God's work.
To win, Hopkins would now do absolutely
anything, including breaking the law.
On a freezing day in the winter of 1645,
Hopkins' men dragged vicar John Lowes,
half-naked and terrified,
here to the moat at Framlingham Castle.
To try and break Lowes, Hopkins used
a technique known as swimming the witch.
It came highly recommended.
James I had written about it
in his book Daemonologie.
He said that by accepting the devil,
the witch rejected
the sacred waters of baptism.
And as a result,
the water would reject the witch's body
and he or she would float.
If the suspect floated,
he was a witch and should be executed.
But if the suspect hadn't rejected
the waters of baptism,
then he would sink as the waters
embraced him and he was proved innocent.
Of course, there was also a great chance
that we would drown.
So, by the time he arrived here, sink
or swim, John Lowes was a dead man.
Whatever James I
may have said about this test,
it was considered torture
and therefore highly illegal.
But Hopkins believed he could get away
with it, as long as it got results.
This decision would come back
to haunt him.
The 80-year-old vicar was bound with
ropes and thrown into the ice-cold moat.
Face down, partially drowning,
it must have been a terrifying ordeal.
[loud gasp]
There's no record of how many times
John Lowes was plunged into the water.
All we do know is the torture
finally broke him.
Art thou ready to confess?
My imps... killed cattle...
...and sank... ships.
Hopkins was victorious.
But there was one thing
Lowes would not admit.
I never... made contact...
with the devil...
...though my familiar...
...tried to persuade me to do so.
Unlike the other accused,
Lowes never confessed
to making a pact with the Devil.
He gave Hopkins
enough rope to hang him,
but he never truly broke
his covenant with God.
He was, after all, a man of the cloth.
You have to admire someone who clung
to what he believed was right
through the appalling sleep deprivation
and partial drownings
and still would not yield
that final inch.
But Hopkins' gamble
to use torture had paid off.
And by the time Reverend Lowes was
hauled into court a few months later,
Hopkins already had 90 other witches
on trial on that same day.
So the old minister's claims
that he'd been tortured
had no chance of a fair hearing.
He was found guilty of being a witch
and sentenced to death.
[jeering]
In the summer of 1645,
as Reverend John Lowes
stood at the gallows awaiting his death,
he read his own funeral service.
I am the resurrection and the life.
He who believeth in me, yea,
though he were dead, yet he shall live.
[jeering]
He had asked to do it himself.
He probably didn't trust
the ungodly people around him.
[yelling]
And who could blame him?
[cheering]
[cheering]
Hopkins had now had a sitting vicar
convicted and executed.
He was using interrogation techniques
that were expressly banned by law,
and he was operating in seven counties
across the southeast of England,
far beyond the legal limits
of his original warrant.
And no one stopped him.
And I suspect
there's a good reason for that.
What's really interesting
about his success,
is that although Hopkins called himself
a witchfinder,
he didn't actually have to find
a single witch.
Locals were doing all that for him.
Look at Elizabeth Clarke.
The local community
essentially offered her up on a plate.
She was bad-tempered and poor,
a charity case who was a drain
on village resources,
and all she offered in return
was cursing and swearing.
And John Lowe's parishioners
hated him so much,
they published a pamphlet
denouncing him as a witch.
How much easier life would be
if people like that simply disappeared?
[cheering]
It's hard to avoid the conclusion
that towns and villages were using
the witch hunts
as a form of social cleansing.
And Matthew Hopkins was simply
the well-paid instrument of their will.
By the summer of 1646, villages and
towns across the southeast of England
were clamoring for Hopkins' help.
In July, he was in Norwich
where 20 witches met their end.
In September, he was in Yarmouth
where 11 more were tried.
Hopkins scored more successes at
Yoxford, Westleton and Great Glenham.
At its widest,
his territory now spanned 300 miles.
Hopkins was now overseeing
hundreds of interrogations
and attending countless trials.
And he was receiving a fee
for every one.
But this success was storing up trouble
for the Witchfinder.
The first warning signs
can be found here
in the archives of
the East Suffolk Records Office.
These are accounting ledgers
from 1645 and 1646.
They detail payments made to Hopkins.
In King's Lynn, they pay £15
to Mr. Hopkins
for interrogating suspected witches,
and a few weeks later, they give him
another £3 for acting as a witness.
In Aldeburgh, we have him paid
on a regular basis,
so we have here on the 8th of September,
to Mr. Hopkins a gratuity for being
in town for finding out witches of £2.
He's paid the same amount
on the 20th of December,
and again on the 7th of January.
And here in Stowmarket, we have that
he's paid £23 in the spring of 1646.
Matthew Hopkins may have started out
doing God's work.
But he had turned it
into a very lucrative business.
And the Witchfinder General's fee
wasn't the only cost.
These accounts from Aldeburgh
tell us how much it cost
to execute a witch.
So this reference here says,
"To William Daniel for the gallows
and setting them up, £1,
and for Henry Lawrence the roper
for seven halters
and for making the knots,
eight shillings."
We've got a cost here for the sundry men
for watching days and nights
over the witches,
13 shillings and ten pence.
In total,
it adds up to something like £40,
which would have been a seventh
of the town's yearly income.
And to pay it, the town had to raise
a massive additional tax,
and it seems that this was a pattern
that was repeated wherever Hopkins went.
In short,
Matthew Hopkins Witchfinder General
was starting to hit people
where it mattered: in their pockets.
Matthew Hopkins' reign of terror was
about to come crashing down around him.
People began to complain
about the executions.
It wasn't the killing they minded.
It was the cost.
At Brandeston in Sussex, for example,
parishioners refused to pay
for the execution of their own vicar,
John Lowes.
People with serious objections
to the Witchfinder's cruel methods
now joined the growing chorus
of opposition against him.
One man in particular would go
to any lengths to bring him down.
John Gaule was a Puritan preacher
here in the village of Great Staunton.
He hated everything
that Matthew Hopkins stood for.
And when he heard
that the Witchfinder General
was planning to come to his parish,
he began to preach openly against him.
The office of Witchfinder
is exceedingly doubtful.
A trade that was not taken up
in England till this time.
It was risky for a lowly priest to take
on the superstar status of Hopkins.
But Gaule was too angry to care.
He accused Hopkins
of incompetence and self-interest.
Hopkins' response to Gaule's sermons
was to go on the attack.
He wrote to one of Gaule's parishioners
warning of the consequences
of disagreeing with him
on the matter of witches.
He writes, "I have known a Minister
in Suffolke preach
as much against their discovery
in a Pulpit,
and forced to recant it
in the same place."
This letter was a thinly veiled threat.
He was reminding Reverend Gaule
that he'd already sent one vicar,
John Lowes, to the gallows.
He could easily do it again.
But Hopkins was being overconfident.
Gaule wasn't intimidated.
Instead, he went public.
This is a copy of the book
that John Gaule wrote.
It's called Select Cases of Conscience
Touching Witches And Witchcraft,
and in it, he says that Hopkins
is just choosing easy targets.
He says, "Every old woman
with a wrinkled face, a furrowed brow,
a hairy lip, a gobber tooth,
a squint eye,
a squeaking voice or a scolding tongue,
and a dog or cat by her side,
is not only suspected
but pronounced for a witch."
Gaule went on to say that Hopkins
had "lucratory skill,"
which is to say that the whole thing
was a money-making scheme,
that the Witchfinder had
no special skill or ability
and was a job
that Hopkins had simply invented.
It was a pretty damning attack.
When Gaule's book was published,
it caught the attention of a group
of influential Norfolk gentlemen.
When they read it, they were outraged.
In spring 1647, they went
into open court in Norwich
to present their objections
to visiting Westminster judges.
Hopkins' abusive techniques
and his cavalier attitude to the law
would be his undoing.
They must be tortured
to make them say anything,
which is a way to tame a wild colt.
Besides this unnatural watching,
they were extraordinarily walked
till their feet were blistered and so
through that cruelty forced to confess.
Hopkins' wisest course of action
would probably have been
to ignore the accusations.
But they had thrown down a gauntlet,
and Hopkins picked it up.
He printed the accusations in a pamphlet
alongside his defense.
It was a disastrous mistake.
This is an original copy
of Matthew Hopkins' pamphlet.
It's called The Discovery of Witches.
And in it, he prints the allegations
made by the Norfolk gentlemen
against him alongside his responses.
This one says,
"All that the Witchfinder doth is to
the fleece the country of their money."
...therefore he rides,
goes to towns to have employment,
and promises them fair promises,
but maybe doth nothing for it.
Hopkins denies everything.
I demand but 20 shillings a town.
And that is the great sum it takes me
to maintain a company with three horses.
We know from the surviving financial
records that Hopkins was lying.
He was routinely paid
far more than 20 shillings.
But the most astonishing thing
about this book
is that he reprints
accusations of illegal torture.
"There hath been an abominable,
inhumane and unmerciful trial
of these poor creatures
by tying them and heaving them
into the water,
a trial not allowable
by law or conscience
and I would fain know
the reasons for that."
Hopkins justified his use of torture by
quoting King James's book Daemonologie.
"King James in his Daemonologie saith,
it is a certain rule,
for saith he, witches deny their baptism
when they covenant with the devil."
So Hopkins' justification
was that James,
a king who had been dead for 22 years,
had once approved of swimming witches.
This was no kind of legal defense.
Hopkins failed to appreciate the danger
of publicizing the accusations of
illegal torture and fleecing the public.
Demand for his skills evaporated.
The Witchfinder General
had hunted his last witch.
[coughs]
We'll never know if Hopkins would have
ended up in court for breaking the law.
Because fate intervened first.
On Thursday the 12th of August, 1647...
[coughs]
...in the village
where his spectacularly bloody career
began barely two years earlier...
...Hopkins died...
...most probably of tuberculosis.
In his short career,
he'd been responsible for the death
of over a hundred innocent people.
[cheering]
Perhaps Hopkins truly believed
he was doing God's work.
But he was also a ruthless opportunist
who used the persecution, suffering
and death of innocent people
to make his name and fortune.
The hatred and hysterical fear
of witches
that he kindled
was not easily extinguished.
Over the next 100 years,
more than 500 innocent people
were arrested, tried and hanged
in the British Isles as witches.
Hopkins' malign influence
even crossed the Atlantic.
A trial 45 years after his death
advocated,
"The course that hath been taken
in England for the discovery of witches."
Hopkins had found new admirers in
a small East Coast town in the Americas.
It was called Salem.
The 20 witches executed there added to
Hopkins' legacy of suffering and death.
You will be hanged by the neck
until you are dead.
Mass trials and executions erupted
across the country.
And the reason for the chaos
and violence...
Witches.
Devil's whore.
People were convinced they sank ships,
brought famine and disease,
murdered and maimed.
Because witches worked for Satan.
Hundreds of innocent people
were persecuted...
Are thou a witch?
...tortured and put to death
in a hysterical effort
to stamp out the scourge of witchcraft.
Imagine living in that world.
You could be accused,
tortured and executed
on the basis of nothing more than gossip
and superstition.
How could such a deadly and violent idea
have got so out of control in Britain?
What drove the persecutors
to such awful lengths?
And what was it like for the victims
who were tortured and executed
for crimes they couldn't possibly
have committed?
For over 100 years,
shocking witch trials
swept across the British Isles...
...and the most infamous figure
in that whole terrifying century
was Matthew Hopkins,
Witchfinder General.
Tell me the truth. I am your confessor.
[screaming and sobbing]
This is the sleepy village of
Manningtree on the river Stour in Essex.
In 1645, something apparently trivial
happened here
that grew to engulf this corner
of England in a frenzy of paranoia
that would leave more
than a hundred innocent people dead.
It all started with a sick woman.
She was the wife
of local tailor John Rivet.
On March 21st, 1645,
Rivet petitioned two magistrates
who were visiting Manningtree.
He believed they could save her.
My wife has been struck down
by an all-consuming fever
that threatens her life.
At first,
she complained of dizziness and nausea
but now she is confined to her bed,
her body flushed hot and cold,
her senses dulled.
This is something more
than merely natural.
My wife is bewitched.
[murmuring]
To people of the time, this was
a completely rational explanation.
Witches were as real to them
as the ground beneath their feet
and the sun above their heads.
They believed the devil made a pact
with witches, sealed by sex.
And that the devil gave witches
supernatural powers to maim and to kill.
People were terrified of them.
In the 17th century,
life was often nasty, brutish and short.
Everyone was looking for someone
to blame when things went wrong.
So it makes sense that a person
like John Rivet grasped at witchcraft
as an explanation for his wife's
otherwise inexplicable illness.
My wife is bewitched
by Elizabeth Clarke.
[gasps]
Elizabeth Clarke was well-known
around Manningtree.
She was around 80 years old,
she was a widow,
she was poor and she had only one leg.
She was also famously cantankerous,
much given to cursing
and with a quick temper.
She wasn't well liked.
Rivet wanted Elizabeth convicted
and executed to save his wife.
But even in the 17th century,
accusations alone
were not grounds for arrest.
And so it might have ended there,
if it hadn't been for one man.
Local landowner John Stearne.
I have evidence...
to support John Rivet's claim.
Stearne carried eyewitness statements
that would transform this from a minor
local incident into a catastrophe.
In the statements,
locals said Elizabeth Clarke
had not only refused
to deny being a witch.
She'd also claimed to know
plenty of other witches,
so they'd better watch their tongues.
Stearne's eyewitness accounts
changed everything.
The magistrates gave Stearne
a warrant to investigate the claims.
It backed him
with the full weight of the law.
He could use anything, short of torture,
to question Elizabeth Clarke
and any other suspected witches
living in Essex.
Essentially, they'd given Stearne,
a man with no legal status at all,
a freelance license
to hunt down witches.
It was this warrant started the most
brutal witch hunt in English history.
But it wasn't Stearne
who would drive it.
It was a young man standing quietly
at the back of the room.
His name was Matthew Hopkins.
Matthew Hopkins was born in the 1620s,
though we don't know exactly what year.
What we do know is that his father
was a strict Puritan preacher.
From an early age, Matthew would have
been immersed in his father's faith.
[murmured prayer]
He was brought up to believe it wasn't
enough to just to believe in Christ,
he also needed to demonstrate his faith
through public acts.
And in that Manningtree meeting room,
Hopkins saw an opportunity
to do just that.
Hopkins offered to help Stearne
investigate Elizabeth Clarke.
But proving her guilty
would not be easy.
King Charles I
had suppressed witch-hunting
by requiring extremely
demanding standards of evidence.
In the last 20 years,
very few witches had been convicted.
But Charles was now losing control
and civil war had broken out.
This violent chaos came as no surprise
to the Puritans
who dominated East Anglia.
They were expecting it.
They believed it signaled
the end days before the apocalypse,
when the devil would walk the earth.
So finding witches living amongst them
was exactly what they had anticipated.
This collision between the terrifying
chaos of war and rigid Puritan beliefs
created the perfect conditions
for witch-hunting.
So, Hopkins' opportunistic approach
to Stearne was perfectly timed.
Stearne accepted his help.
Matthew Hopkins was on his way
to launching the most brutal witch hunts
in English history.
[shouting]
On Friday the 21st of March, 1645,
a group of women chosen by Hopkins
and Stearne went to Elizabeth's cottage.
Get her!
Help! What are you doing!
The women stripped and searched her,
looking for the devil's mark.
People believed that the pact
between the devil and the witch
was consummated with sex.
He would then mark her body.
The devil often concealed these marks
beneath the witch's body hair.
[screaming]
The searchers would do whatever it took
to find it.
A devil's marks could be any skin
blemish, a mole, even an age spot.
So the chance of finding something
on an elderly woman was pretty high.
Finally, they found the mark,
hidden on Elizabeth's genitals.
This was an appalling level
of casual brutality.
Imagine the shame and humiliation
for Elizabeth Clarke.
Remember, we're talking
about an old and disabled woman.
As a widow, she didn't even have
the protection of a husband.
But the mark alone wasn't enough.
To be certain of a conviction,
they needed Elizabeth to confess.
Hopkins' and Stearne's warrant
restricted them
to operating within the law,
which excluded torture.
So to get what they needed,
they would have to be creative.
Elizabeth Clarke was tied to a chair
and deprived of sleep.
Wake up, old woman.
In the 17th century, sleep deprivation,
by the thinnest of margins, was legal.
Are you a witch?
No, not I!
[Elizabeth screams]
Hopkins' henchmen
worked on Elizabeth in shifts,
keeping her awake...
for three days and nights.
[scream]
Wake up.
But Elizabeth Clarke
must have been tough as old boots,
because she still would not confess.
On the third day,
Hopkins and Stearne paid her a visit.
It was the first time Hopkins
had come face to face with Elizabeth.
Do you know who I am, old woman?
I'm your confessor.
When did you sign a pact with the devil?
What sins have you committed
in his name?
Continue.
Hopkins was never going to give up.
It was all too much for Elizabeth.
Stop.
Please stop.
Talk then, old woman,
in what form did the devil come to you?
He was a tall, proper,
black-haired gentleman,
a properer man than you yourself.
He come to me three or four times
in a week in my bedchamber
and go to bed with me.
I never deny him.
Imagine the depths of degradation
to which Elizabeth had been exposed.
She'd been brutalized, starved
and denied water and sleep.
And although she was clearly made
of strong stuff,
the elderly widow finally broke.
That gave her the dubious privilege
of becoming Hopkins' first victim.
And what Elizabeth did next doomed
many more victims to follow her.
She said that she was part of a coven.
There were more witches out there
for Hopkins to hunt down.
After torturing Elizabeth Clarke,
Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne
used her confession
to forge new careers for themselves,
careers that had never
previously existed in England.
They became freelance witch hunters.
Hopkins and Stearne used
the Manningtree warrant
to begin hunting down the people
Elizabeth Clarke had named.
Elizabeth was arrested in March.
Six more arrests followed in April.
By June,
as Hopkins and Stearne hit their stride,
the number had swollen to at least 30.
The suspects were brought here
to Colchester Castle.
And conditions in this jail
were appalling.
The prisoners were shackled
day and night
and routinely beaten by the guards.
There was no light, no space,
no sanitation.
[door slams]
By June, four prisoners had already
died, most probably from typhus.
On the 17th of July, 1645,
the survivors were herded onto carts
bound for the courts at Chelmsford.
For many of them,
it wasn't the first time
they'd been arrested for witchcraft.
But previous cases had been dismissed
for lack of evidence.
Perhaps they expected
the same result this time.
If so, they reckoned
without Matthew Hopkins' zeal.
He was determined
to rid the world of Satan's agents.
Elizabeth Clarke was tried
with the first group of suspects.
Hopkins recorded the details
of the case himself.
How do you plead?
I am innocent.
The court was in uproar.
Silence!
At the back, spectators heckled
and hissed from the gallery
and the judge intervened
whenever he saw fit.
I will have silence!
Then, into the chaos of the courtroom,
stepped Matthew Hopkins.
Clarke was apprehended, and searched
and found upon her three teats.
So upon command from the justice, they
kept her from sleep two or three nights.
Immediately after this, this witch
confesses several other witches.
- [gasps]
- [man] Blasphemy!
Hopkins had something
that recent trials had lacked,
the confession that he'd extracted
from Elizabeth.
The confession of a witch in
my judgment is enough to hang a witch.
[shouting]
And Hopkins had a secret weapon
to convict the rest of the coven.
Her name was Rebecca West.
He had singled her out in jail
and offered her freedom if she gave
evidence against the others.
The alternative
was conviction and death.
So, unsurprisingly, she accepted.
We came to the house
where there were five witches.
They commanded their spirits,
some to kill a man's horse,
some to lame a cow, lame a child.
Devil's whore!
Rebecca's testimony sealed
the fate of the accused women.
Culpabilis o non culpabilis?
[jury] Culpabilis!
15 of the accused,
including Elizabeth Clarke,
were found guilty
and sentenced to death.
Hopkins was victorious.
It was the largest number of convictions
in a single witch trial
in English history.
On Friday the 18th of July,
Elizabeth Clarke,
together with 14 other condemned women,
was brought here
to where the gallows stood
in Chelmsford Market Square.
No, I didn't do anything.
I didn't do it! I didn't do it!
Elizabeth Clarke had to be helped up
to have the noose put round her neck.
Because, of course,
she only had one leg.
No, no, stop!
I didn't do it!
Elizabeth Clarke's only crime
was to be poor, bad-tempered
and in the wrong place at the wrong time
when Hopkins was launching his career.
[yelling]
[yelling]
[cheering]
Execution was by the short drop.
The victims died slowly
of strangulation.
These deaths made Hopkins' reputation.
He used this to transform himself
into something new and terrifying.
Hopkins gave himself a grand new title.
Witchfinder General.
He became unrecognizable from the man
who had stood quietly at the back
of the meeting room in Manningtree.
This is a contemporary portrait
of Hopkins.
Notice what he's wearing.
He's got a high-crowned hat, boots,
spurs and he's carrying a staff.
He's the very image
of a respected country magistrate.
When someone dressed like this
walks into a room,
people are going to sit up
and pay attention.
And I think it's obvious that Hopkins
has dressed himself like this
to have the appearance of authority.
What does a man
in his twenties need with a staff
except to have the symbol of a rank
that he doesn't actually possess?
In just four short months,
Hopkins had become one of the most
feared men in eastern England.
His career was on a meteoric path.
In the previous 20 years,
just two women had been executed
for witchcraft in East Anglia.
- Culpabilis o non culpabilis?
- Culpabilis.
[screaming]
Hopkins had now sent 15 to the gallows
in a single day.
This wasn't just good for God,
it was good for business.
Because Hopkins received a fee
for every one.
News of his success
at the Chelmsford witch trials
began to spread beyond Essex.
This is All Saints Church
in Brandeston, Suffolk.
In 1645, the parishioners here
published a pamphlet
that accused a local man of witchcraft.
Hopkins offered to help
expose the witch.
But he had absolutely no legal right
to do so.
Hopkins' original permission
came from two magistrates in Essex.
Which meant he actually didn't have
legal authority
to operate in other counties,
such as Suffolk.
But Hopkins was
clearly feeling very confident.
And why not?
Not only did he genuinely think
that he was doing God's work,
but also in the chaos of civil war,
who exactly was going to stop him?
This wasn't the only sign
of Hopkins' growing confidence.
Because the witch
he went after in Suffolk
wasn't some poor, unloved,
one-legged old crone.
It was an ordained clergyman.
Hello, is somebody there?
Reverend John Lowes had been the vicar
at Brandeston for over 40 years.
Hello?
But he was so disliked
that his parishioners
described him
as "naught but a foul witch."
How dare you!
I am a man of God!
Tackling such a conspicuous target
was risky for Hopkins.
Unhand me, I am a man of God!
No serving clergyman had ever been
convicted of witchcraft in England.
So, in this case, more than any other,
Hopkins simply had to get a result.
Your parishioners
think you're naught but a witch.
- They are wrong.
- We'll see!
As ever,
what Hopkins needed was a confession.
To extract a confession,
Hopkins reused a procedure that had worked
on Elizabeth Clarke, sleep deprivation.
But Hopkins had refined his technique.
Instead of tying John Lowes
to a chair...
...he made him run up and down the room
every few minutes.
Lowes was walked constantly for days.
When did you make
the pact with the devil?
Confess, tell me the truth,
I am your confessor.
[panting]
I am not guilty.
Hopkins had successfully used
sleep deprivation many times
to get a confession.
It was the most extreme technique
he could legally apply.
But this time, it had failed.
Hopkins' new career was under threat.
Hopkins had built an entire reputation
on getting results
when no one else could.
So, he took a momentous step.
In order to get the results he wanted,
he would break the law of the land.
After all, in his mind,
he was doing God's work.
To win, Hopkins would now do absolutely
anything, including breaking the law.
On a freezing day in the winter of 1645,
Hopkins' men dragged vicar John Lowes,
half-naked and terrified,
here to the moat at Framlingham Castle.
To try and break Lowes, Hopkins used
a technique known as swimming the witch.
It came highly recommended.
James I had written about it
in his book Daemonologie.
He said that by accepting the devil,
the witch rejected
the sacred waters of baptism.
And as a result,
the water would reject the witch's body
and he or she would float.
If the suspect floated,
he was a witch and should be executed.
But if the suspect hadn't rejected
the waters of baptism,
then he would sink as the waters
embraced him and he was proved innocent.
Of course, there was also a great chance
that we would drown.
So, by the time he arrived here, sink
or swim, John Lowes was a dead man.
Whatever James I
may have said about this test,
it was considered torture
and therefore highly illegal.
But Hopkins believed he could get away
with it, as long as it got results.
This decision would come back
to haunt him.
The 80-year-old vicar was bound with
ropes and thrown into the ice-cold moat.
Face down, partially drowning,
it must have been a terrifying ordeal.
[loud gasp]
There's no record of how many times
John Lowes was plunged into the water.
All we do know is the torture
finally broke him.
Art thou ready to confess?
My imps... killed cattle...
...and sank... ships.
Hopkins was victorious.
But there was one thing
Lowes would not admit.
I never... made contact...
with the devil...
...though my familiar...
...tried to persuade me to do so.
Unlike the other accused,
Lowes never confessed
to making a pact with the Devil.
He gave Hopkins
enough rope to hang him,
but he never truly broke
his covenant with God.
He was, after all, a man of the cloth.
You have to admire someone who clung
to what he believed was right
through the appalling sleep deprivation
and partial drownings
and still would not yield
that final inch.
But Hopkins' gamble
to use torture had paid off.
And by the time Reverend Lowes was
hauled into court a few months later,
Hopkins already had 90 other witches
on trial on that same day.
So the old minister's claims
that he'd been tortured
had no chance of a fair hearing.
He was found guilty of being a witch
and sentenced to death.
[jeering]
In the summer of 1645,
as Reverend John Lowes
stood at the gallows awaiting his death,
he read his own funeral service.
I am the resurrection and the life.
He who believeth in me, yea,
though he were dead, yet he shall live.
[jeering]
He had asked to do it himself.
He probably didn't trust
the ungodly people around him.
[yelling]
And who could blame him?
[cheering]
[cheering]
Hopkins had now had a sitting vicar
convicted and executed.
He was using interrogation techniques
that were expressly banned by law,
and he was operating in seven counties
across the southeast of England,
far beyond the legal limits
of his original warrant.
And no one stopped him.
And I suspect
there's a good reason for that.
What's really interesting
about his success,
is that although Hopkins called himself
a witchfinder,
he didn't actually have to find
a single witch.
Locals were doing all that for him.
Look at Elizabeth Clarke.
The local community
essentially offered her up on a plate.
She was bad-tempered and poor,
a charity case who was a drain
on village resources,
and all she offered in return
was cursing and swearing.
And John Lowe's parishioners
hated him so much,
they published a pamphlet
denouncing him as a witch.
How much easier life would be
if people like that simply disappeared?
[cheering]
It's hard to avoid the conclusion
that towns and villages were using
the witch hunts
as a form of social cleansing.
And Matthew Hopkins was simply
the well-paid instrument of their will.
By the summer of 1646, villages and
towns across the southeast of England
were clamoring for Hopkins' help.
In July, he was in Norwich
where 20 witches met their end.
In September, he was in Yarmouth
where 11 more were tried.
Hopkins scored more successes at
Yoxford, Westleton and Great Glenham.
At its widest,
his territory now spanned 300 miles.
Hopkins was now overseeing
hundreds of interrogations
and attending countless trials.
And he was receiving a fee
for every one.
But this success was storing up trouble
for the Witchfinder.
The first warning signs
can be found here
in the archives of
the East Suffolk Records Office.
These are accounting ledgers
from 1645 and 1646.
They detail payments made to Hopkins.
In King's Lynn, they pay £15
to Mr. Hopkins
for interrogating suspected witches,
and a few weeks later, they give him
another £3 for acting as a witness.
In Aldeburgh, we have him paid
on a regular basis,
so we have here on the 8th of September,
to Mr. Hopkins a gratuity for being
in town for finding out witches of £2.
He's paid the same amount
on the 20th of December,
and again on the 7th of January.
And here in Stowmarket, we have that
he's paid £23 in the spring of 1646.
Matthew Hopkins may have started out
doing God's work.
But he had turned it
into a very lucrative business.
And the Witchfinder General's fee
wasn't the only cost.
These accounts from Aldeburgh
tell us how much it cost
to execute a witch.
So this reference here says,
"To William Daniel for the gallows
and setting them up, £1,
and for Henry Lawrence the roper
for seven halters
and for making the knots,
eight shillings."
We've got a cost here for the sundry men
for watching days and nights
over the witches,
13 shillings and ten pence.
In total,
it adds up to something like £40,
which would have been a seventh
of the town's yearly income.
And to pay it, the town had to raise
a massive additional tax,
and it seems that this was a pattern
that was repeated wherever Hopkins went.
In short,
Matthew Hopkins Witchfinder General
was starting to hit people
where it mattered: in their pockets.
Matthew Hopkins' reign of terror was
about to come crashing down around him.
People began to complain
about the executions.
It wasn't the killing they minded.
It was the cost.
At Brandeston in Sussex, for example,
parishioners refused to pay
for the execution of their own vicar,
John Lowes.
People with serious objections
to the Witchfinder's cruel methods
now joined the growing chorus
of opposition against him.
One man in particular would go
to any lengths to bring him down.
John Gaule was a Puritan preacher
here in the village of Great Staunton.
He hated everything
that Matthew Hopkins stood for.
And when he heard
that the Witchfinder General
was planning to come to his parish,
he began to preach openly against him.
The office of Witchfinder
is exceedingly doubtful.
A trade that was not taken up
in England till this time.
It was risky for a lowly priest to take
on the superstar status of Hopkins.
But Gaule was too angry to care.
He accused Hopkins
of incompetence and self-interest.
Hopkins' response to Gaule's sermons
was to go on the attack.
He wrote to one of Gaule's parishioners
warning of the consequences
of disagreeing with him
on the matter of witches.
He writes, "I have known a Minister
in Suffolke preach
as much against their discovery
in a Pulpit,
and forced to recant it
in the same place."
This letter was a thinly veiled threat.
He was reminding Reverend Gaule
that he'd already sent one vicar,
John Lowes, to the gallows.
He could easily do it again.
But Hopkins was being overconfident.
Gaule wasn't intimidated.
Instead, he went public.
This is a copy of the book
that John Gaule wrote.
It's called Select Cases of Conscience
Touching Witches And Witchcraft,
and in it, he says that Hopkins
is just choosing easy targets.
He says, "Every old woman
with a wrinkled face, a furrowed brow,
a hairy lip, a gobber tooth,
a squint eye,
a squeaking voice or a scolding tongue,
and a dog or cat by her side,
is not only suspected
but pronounced for a witch."
Gaule went on to say that Hopkins
had "lucratory skill,"
which is to say that the whole thing
was a money-making scheme,
that the Witchfinder had
no special skill or ability
and was a job
that Hopkins had simply invented.
It was a pretty damning attack.
When Gaule's book was published,
it caught the attention of a group
of influential Norfolk gentlemen.
When they read it, they were outraged.
In spring 1647, they went
into open court in Norwich
to present their objections
to visiting Westminster judges.
Hopkins' abusive techniques
and his cavalier attitude to the law
would be his undoing.
They must be tortured
to make them say anything,
which is a way to tame a wild colt.
Besides this unnatural watching,
they were extraordinarily walked
till their feet were blistered and so
through that cruelty forced to confess.
Hopkins' wisest course of action
would probably have been
to ignore the accusations.
But they had thrown down a gauntlet,
and Hopkins picked it up.
He printed the accusations in a pamphlet
alongside his defense.
It was a disastrous mistake.
This is an original copy
of Matthew Hopkins' pamphlet.
It's called The Discovery of Witches.
And in it, he prints the allegations
made by the Norfolk gentlemen
against him alongside his responses.
This one says,
"All that the Witchfinder doth is to
the fleece the country of their money."
...therefore he rides,
goes to towns to have employment,
and promises them fair promises,
but maybe doth nothing for it.
Hopkins denies everything.
I demand but 20 shillings a town.
And that is the great sum it takes me
to maintain a company with three horses.
We know from the surviving financial
records that Hopkins was lying.
He was routinely paid
far more than 20 shillings.
But the most astonishing thing
about this book
is that he reprints
accusations of illegal torture.
"There hath been an abominable,
inhumane and unmerciful trial
of these poor creatures
by tying them and heaving them
into the water,
a trial not allowable
by law or conscience
and I would fain know
the reasons for that."
Hopkins justified his use of torture by
quoting King James's book Daemonologie.
"King James in his Daemonologie saith,
it is a certain rule,
for saith he, witches deny their baptism
when they covenant with the devil."
So Hopkins' justification
was that James,
a king who had been dead for 22 years,
had once approved of swimming witches.
This was no kind of legal defense.
Hopkins failed to appreciate the danger
of publicizing the accusations of
illegal torture and fleecing the public.
Demand for his skills evaporated.
The Witchfinder General
had hunted his last witch.
[coughs]
We'll never know if Hopkins would have
ended up in court for breaking the law.
Because fate intervened first.
On Thursday the 12th of August, 1647...
[coughs]
...in the village
where his spectacularly bloody career
began barely two years earlier...
...Hopkins died...
...most probably of tuberculosis.
In his short career,
he'd been responsible for the death
of over a hundred innocent people.
[cheering]
Perhaps Hopkins truly believed
he was doing God's work.
But he was also a ruthless opportunist
who used the persecution, suffering
and death of innocent people
to make his name and fortune.
The hatred and hysterical fear
of witches
that he kindled
was not easily extinguished.
Over the next 100 years,
more than 500 innocent people
were arrested, tried and hanged
in the British Isles as witches.
Hopkins' malign influence
even crossed the Atlantic.
A trial 45 years after his death
advocated,
"The course that hath been taken
in England for the discovery of witches."
Hopkins had found new admirers in
a small East Coast town in the Americas.
It was called Salem.
The 20 witches executed there added to
Hopkins' legacy of suffering and death.