Lucy Worsley has to hold back tears as she gets serious about the witch hunts
Lucy Worsley has to hold back tears as she gets serious about the witch hunts
In the 1990s Britain’s witches started to enjoy a better press thanks to JK Rowling. Four centuries earlier, not far from the very Edinburgh cafe in which she scratched out the early adventures of Hermione Granger and the boy wizards in her gang, witches were in less good odour. As grippingly related in The Witch Hunts: Lucy Worsley Investigates (BBC Two), the state-sponsored hounding of blameless women began in Edinburgh in the 1590s with the execution of Agnes Sampson.
Carefully lacing the facts together from books, documents and sessions with fellow historians, Worsley wandered into a horror story. Poor Agnes, she revealed, was a midwife and healer in a village in East Lothian who found herself snared in the cross-hairs of history.
John Knox’s Presbyterians had jostled to prominence just as the Little Ice Age and a growing population made food scarcer. To propitiate the Almighty someone needed blaming and folk healers, newly suspected of being in league with the Devil, fitted the bill. Most of them were women.
Then in 1590 the heirless James VI’s ship, bringing home his Danish bride, nearly sank in a storm in the Firth of Forth. Agnes was summoned before the king to Holyrood and had a confession of conjuring up the storm tortured out of her. As they hunted for marks of the Devil “found upon her privities”, she admitted to a fictitious 200-strong coven before being executed by strangling.
Fun times these were not, though perhaps they were not so unlike our own. Imagine the fanatics of Isis teaming up with the disinformers of Russian state TV: that was the Scotland of James VI, who, as James I, would shortly export this misogynist ideology to England.
This new series, casting Worsley as an inky-fingered sleuth shedding new light on well-worn episodes in British history, could run and run. Previously I have been resistant to her immersive style – the mob caps and the mummery would trigger my inner harrumpher.
Her director still fetishises her shoewear with close-ups of clacking Marplesque heels, but there’s now less artful twinkling and more impassioned sincerity. Here you could watch Worsley reacting in real time to unscripted discoveries. When she found a document quoting Agnes more or less verbatim, she distinctly paused to hold back a tear.
This was sober, research-based storytelling, with field trips to overgrown ruins and museum storerooms. The only glimmer of impish wit was in Forfar, where the camera spotted a black cat on the prowl.
Worsley’s true co-stars were the documents she disinterred. However, it was only if you paused on the relevant frame could you read the vilification of blameless women at its most pornographic: “It has latelye beene found that the Divell dooth generallye marke them with a privie marke, by reason the Witches have confessed themselves, that the Divell dooth lick them with his tung in some privy part of their bodie, before hee dooth receive them to be his servants.” Worsley left that bit out. As did Rowling.
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