An Execution and a Witch: Malcolm Gaskill (1649)
In January 1649 King Charles I was executed outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall. This violent event came at the end of a tumultuous decade of civil war and religious strife. It preceded a year that was notable in other ways. In today’s episode Malcolm Gaskill takes us on a tour of 1649 to see the death of a king, the birth of a movement and an accusation of witchcraft.
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The crowd that gathered in Whitehall to watch King Charles I’s execution in January 1649 was tense and excitable. They watched as the deposed king emerged from a window and knelt down at the block. The story was later told that as the axe struck, a collective groan was emitted. This, as today’s guest Malcolm Gaskill reflects, was both spontaneous and revealing. The axe had not just cut through Charles’s neck. It had also sliced right through the ‘great chain of being.’
A curious mood had coloured 1649 from the start. News that the king was to be executed generated a mood of shock and excitement. This was not an outcome that anyone had expected. For the king’s enemies, though, Charles’s intransigence made such a step inevitable. To share the burden of such a gloomy responsibility, many individuals were asked to co-sign Charles’s death warrant. In a world of retribution - both divine and temporal - no one quite knew what the consequences of this would be.
The months that followed brought other testing events. The first was a seemingly benign movement led by ex-cloth merchant called Gerrard Winstanley. Having moved to the parish of Walton in Surrey, Winstanley and a few dozen of his followers set about planting little gardens of vegetables: parsnips, carrots and beans.
The Diggers (Public domain)
At a glance this was no different to what was happening in parishes right across England. But what set Winstanley and his followers (who soon collectively became known as ‘The Diggers’) apart, was the radical philosophy that underpinned their actions. Winstanley rejected the idea of ownership, believing that it was not justified by the Bible. Instead he memorably proclaimed that the land was the ‘common treasury of all.’
As the Diggers perplexed members of the gentry in Surrey, far away across the Atlantic Ocean a different kind of parochial drama was playing out. One hundred miles to the west of the port of Boston, on the frontier of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was the little settlement of Springfield.
Springfield was less than twenty-years-old and it was home to a strange mix of about 100 English and Welsh migrants. Many of them had travelled to the New World in search of a promised land, but the reality they found was quite different. Life was hard in Springfield. Rivalries were common. And then, in late 1648, one lady called Mary Parsons started to gossip about witches.
By the spring of 1649 this gossip had evolved into something more. There was talk of strange lights shining in the meadows; of animals dying in mysterious circumstances and the devil himself being present. Gaskill takes us back into this ‘enchanted world’ in May 1649 as the accusations of witchcraft burst out, at last, into the open.
Malcolm Gaskill is the author of the enchanting new micro history, The Ruin of all Witches.
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Click here to order Malcolm’s book from John Sandoe’s who, we are delighted to say, are supplying books for the podcast.
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Show notes
Scene One: Tuesday 30 January: Whitehall, London. The execution of King Charles I.
Scene Two: Sunday 1 April: St George’s Hill, Walton, Surrey. The Start of the Diggers
Scene Three: Wednesday 30 May: Springfield, Massachusetts. The Slander Trial of Mary Parsons
Memento: The top of King Charles I’s silver cane
People/Social
Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Malcolm Gaskill
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Unseen Histories
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About Malcolm Gaskill
Malcolm Gaskill is Emeritus Professor of Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia. One of Britain's leading experts in the history of witchcraft, his works include the highly acclaimed Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy and Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans.
Background image source: Library of Congress
Whitehall, 29 January 1649
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Click here to order The Ruin of all Witches by Malcolm Gaskill from our friends at John Sandoe’s Books.
MG’s absorbing new micro-history focuses on a Crucible-esque event in Springfield, Mass. in 1651, when a young couple were condemned by their peers as witches. Drawing on detailed primary sources, this narrative reveals the terror and paranoia of early colonial America.
