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What Did Thomas Plume Think About Witchcraft? Reconstructing the Intellectual Outlook of a Little-Known 17 Th -Century English Sceptic

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What Did Thomas Plume Think About Witchcraft? Reconstructing the Intellectual Outlook of a Little-Known 17 Th -Century English Sceptic THE ESSEX SOCIETY FOR ARCHAEOLOGY & HISTORY Volume 2 · 2011 What did Thomas Plume think about witchcraft? Reconstructing the intellectual outlook of a little-known 17 th -century English sceptic. Alison Rowlands INT RODUCT ION for further study) of the sort of low-key, quotidian scepticism Thomas Plume was an Anglican cleric who lived between represented by Plume, as it may have played a much more 1630 and 1704. His name has lived on (at least as far as the significant role in keeping witch-hunts in check than has eastern region of England is concerned) because of the Plume hitherto been recognised. Library in his home town of Maldon, Essex, and the Plumian Thomas Plume was born in the Essex town of Maldon Professorship of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy and baptized on 18 August 1630, the second son of Thomas at the University of Cambridge, both of which he founded and Helen Plume. 5 Thomas senior had both wealth (he was by bequest and both of which survive to this day. 1 Plume’s a landowner and also traded in coal) and significant political life coincided not just with the turbulent political events of status in Maldon, acting as one of the town’s two bailiffs on mid-seventeenth-century England but also with the largest six occasions between 1627 and 1649 and as an alderman ever English witch-prosecution – the East Anglian Witch from 1624 to 1653 (and probably as the lead alderman from Hunt of 1645–7 – and its aftermath in late-seventeenth- 1636). He was also a Presbyterian who became an elder of century debates about the reality of witchcraft. But what did the Dengie classis. 6 Thomas junior was sent to school in the Plume think about the subject? This article seeks to answer county town of Chelmsford, about ten miles from Maldon, this question, drawing for evidence on Plume’s life-history at the age of eight or nine, probably as a boarder, before and probable personal experience of the East Anglian witch- moving on to Cambridge in 1646: 7 he was formally admitted hunts; on anecdotes about witc hcraft and magic that Plume to Christ’s College on 24 February 1646, aged fifteen years wrote in a personal notebook in the late 1640s; and on the and six months. 8 Despite his father’s Presbyterianism and contents of the Plume Library (the c. 7,400 volumes which willingness to conform to rule by Parliament, which might the avid bibliophile Plume collected during his life-time and have been expected to encourage Thomas junior in the same bequeathed to Maldon to enable local clergymen who could political and religious direction, the latter displayed royalist not afford to buy books themselves to attain adequate levels feelings from his earliest Cambridge days. The notebook of of erudition). 2 accounts he kept as a student begins with a Cavalier verse Plume never published anything on the subject of inveighing against the ‘accurst Anarchy, sedition, murther and witchcraft, so why does he matter to its seventeenth-century rapine’ occasioned by the Civil War, and calls on supporters of history? As we shall see, he emerges as a post-Restoration Charles I to redouble their efforts in the King’s cause; 9 a second Anglican cleric who, while supporting Henry More and Joseph notebook, in which Plume recorded verses and anecdotes while Glanvill’s insistence on the existence of spirits, remained at Cambridge between 1646 and 1650 10 likewise contained critical of the excesses of popular superstition and of the three royalist poems. 11 The anti-Catholic, anti-Puritan and religious radicals who tried to exploit such superstition, either anti-Parliamentarian tone of sixteen of the 245 anecdotes this in the form of witch-hunts or pretended exorcisms. He was second notebook contains, coupled with some notes Plume thus a sceptic who seems to have believed that proper religious made on a sermon about communion, have led Plume’s education, rather than the heavy hand of the law, was the biographer, Tony Doe, to conclude that ‘he was beginning to best remedy against alleged witches, demoniacs and cunning hold, even at this early stage of his life, proto-Anglican beliefs folk, but who generally did not accord any of these subjects of a moderate nature’. 12 a particularly high priority in his everyday life and career. Plume maintained this position, and the loyalty to Plume is thus interesting precisely because he was neither monarch, episcopacy, and the Church of England that it a famous opponent of witch-trials (like Johann Weyer or entailed, for the rest of his life. Given his views, he dropped into Friedrich Spee) nor a radical challenger of witchcraft beliefs relative obscurity during the 1650s after leaving Cambridge, (like Reginald Scot or John Webster), but a ‘run-of-the-mill’ probably spending these years with his former Cambridge tutor, sceptic whose views (if representative of a broader swathe of William More, at Kegworth in Leicestershire, and then with his post-Restoration Anglican opinion) help explain why the great friend and mentor, John Hacket (who became the post- persecution of witches declined so markedly in England in the Restoration Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield) at Cheam in late-17 th century, despite the fact that debates about beliefs in Kent. 13 Plume’s successful career in the Church began with his the supernatural continued into the early 18 th century. 3 Robin appointment as Vicar of Greenwich in the Diocese of Rochester Briggs contended in the late 1990s that witch-hunting never in 1658, a position he held until his death (unmarried) on 20 developed anything like its full potential in early modern November 1704. He also obtained the sinecure living of Merston Europe; more recently, Erik Midelfort has reminded us that in Kent in 1662, and was made Archdeacon of Rochester, a large-scale witch ‘crazes’ were exceptional events which have prebend of Rochester Cathedral and a Freeman of the City of distorted our understanding of the broader spectrum of early Rochester in 1679. 14 Plume left relatively few personal traces modern beliefs about witchcraft and magic. 4 This is, then, in the sparse sources that survive for his parish and diocese 196 perhaps a good time to highlight the importance (and need for this period, but Doe suggests that this was at least in part 196-206 Essex4-2 ThomasPlume.indd 196 13/02/2013 09:21 WHAT D ID T HO MAS P LUM E THI NK ABOUT WITCHCRAFT ? PLATE 1: Interior of Thomas Plume’s Library, Maldon. Reproduced by kind permission of the Trustees of Thomas Plume’s Library. because he adopted a deliberately non-zealous stance towards damnable driftes .20 Late-sixteenth-century Maldon was also the disciplining of non-conformism and immorality amongst noteworthy in the history of English witchcraft for the presence his parishioners and by means of the archdeacon’s court. Doe from 1582 of Puritan lecturer George Gifford, who published concludes that, ‘unlikely as it seems in his controversial age, two works ( A Discourse of the Subtill Practises of Devilles Plume was able to pursue a non-controversial course through by Witches and Sorcerers and A Dialogue Concerning many years of preaching and administration’. 15 Plume seems Witches and Witchcraftes ) on the subject, in 1587 and 1593 to have believed that people were best persuaded of the error respectively. 21 No more Maldon inhabitants were formally of their ways by means of Christian education. He joined accused of witchcraft after 1592, 22 but memories of Gifford and the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge and the late-sixteenth-century witch-trials doubtless survived in bequeathed the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in the town and the young Plume may also have heard about the Foreign Parts £100 in his will. 16 In addition to the Cambridge women from other parts of Essex who appeared periodically on Professorship and the Library he established in Maldon, 17 witchcraft charges at the Assizes in Chelmsford after he started educational benefactions figured significantly in his will, with school there in 1638 or 1639. 23 Christ’s College, Chelmsford School, Maldon School, the Gray This trickle of witchcraft cases became a flood in the Coate School at East Greenwich and children on the Isle of summer of 1645 as a result of the witch-finding activity begun Grain near Rochester all benefiting from such bequests. 18 in March in Manningtree by self-styled Puritan witch-finders What might Plume have known about witch-trials as a Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne, with the support of the youngster? We can never know for sure, but some speculative local JPs, Sir Harbottle Grimston and Sir Thomas Bowes. 24 suggestions are possible. His home-town of Maldon had Hopkins and Stearne would go on to spread these hunts experienced relatively significant levels of interest in and throughout the Tendring Hundred and then into Suffolk, anxiety about witchcraft in the late-sixteenth century. Two Norfolk, Huntingdonshire, Cambridgeshire, the Isle of Ely Maldon inhabitants, Alice Chaundeler and her daughter Ellen and Northamptonshire: at least 100 people were executed Smythe, were executed for witchcraft in Chelmsford in 1574 and before the trials ended in September 1647. In the initial Essex 1579 respectively; 19 Smythe also attained the dubious honour phase of the process twenty-nine women from the Tendring of appearing in the 1579 witchcraft pamphlet, A Detection of Hundred were tried before the Chelmsford Assizes presided over 197 196-206 Essex4-2 ThomasPlume.indd 197 13/02/2013 09:21 THE ESSEX SOCIETY FOR ARCHAEOLOGY & HISTORY by the Parliamentarian Lord Lieutenant of Essex, the Earl of Cambridge to some extent, either personally or indirectly.
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