An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present - Doreen Valiente 2018

Royalty, its connections with Witchcraft

The name of King William Rufus has often been linked with witchcraft. ’Rufus’ means ’red’, which, as the colour of life, is sacred to the Old Religion. Rufus was the Red King. The grandson of Robert the Devil, he was openly pagan, and disliked by the Christian monks who compiled the chronicles of history. Hence his notoriety as a ’bad king’, though in fact he was no worse a king than most of his contemporaries.

His death in the New Forest “on the morrow of Lammas”, one of the Great Sabbats of the Old Religion, is still one of Britain’s historical mysteries. (See LAMMAS.)

Less well-known is the tradition that the Plantagenet kings favoured the Old Religion, and some of them actively, though secretly, followed it. The name Plantagenet is derived from Planta genista, the old name for the broom plant, which was their badge. Another old name for the green broom is hag-weed, meaning ’witch-weed’, because it made the brooms that witches were popularly supposed to fly upon.

Evelyn Eaton’s remarkable historical novel The King is a Witch (Cassell, London, 1965) is based upon the connection of the Plantagenets and especially Edward III, with witchcraft.

The foundation of the Order of the Garter by Edward III certainly seems to have been connected with the Old Religion. (See GARTERS AS WITCHES’ SIGNS.) His son, associated with him in the Order, was always known as the Black Prince. No really adequate reason for this title has ever been given; except that it was supposedly because he wore black armour. It could, however, have had quite another significance. The male leader of a coven was sometimes known as “The Man in Black”.

The lady whom the Black Prince married was called ’The Fair Maid of Kent’; and again, the female leader of a coven was sometimes known as ’The Maiden’. All these things, taken singly, could be mere coincidence. Added together, they make a significant picture.

Their son, who became the tragic Richard II, adopted a badge, the White Hart, which is an emblem directly connected with the Old Religion. As the white roebuck hidden in the thicket, it appears in bardic myths, sometimes as a symbol of the human soul, sometimes representing the secret of the Mysteries, and sometimes standing for the sacrificed Divine King himself.

The idea of the Divine King, who has to die at the end of an appointed term, in order that his blood may bring prosperity and fertility to the land, goes back to the remotest antiquity. The whole mystique of royalty and kingship is involved in it. So is the feeling of the sacredness of the king’s person, the belief in the Divine Right of Kings, and so on.

Margaret Murray, in her book The Divine King in England, argues that Britain’s earlier kings were in fact ritually killed. Sometimes, she says, another victim was offered in their place, so that the king might live for a further term of years; but eventually he had to make the supreme sacrifice, because that was the real purpose and secret of kingship.

A suggestion of witchcraft in connection with the Plantagenet dynasty appears again in the time of King Edward IV. The story began in a place which to this day has a reputation for hauntings and uncanny happenings, namely Whittlewood Forest in Northamptonshire. Here Edward IV first met the beautiful Elizabeth Woodville, under a tree which was long after known as the Queen’s Oak.

She was a widow, whose husband had fought on what proved to be the wrong side in the Wars of the Roses. On his death in battle, his estates had been forfeited. Elizabeth pleaded with the king to restore them, for the sake of her orphaned children. The king, enchanted by the fair lady he had met under the oak tree, did far more. He fell headlong in love with her, and they were secretly married, early on May Day morning, in the nearby town of Grafton.

The circumstances of this romantic meeting in the fairy-haunted forest, and the secret marriage on the morrow of one of the witches’ Sabbats, no doubt suggested to many people a connection with the Old Religion. Moreover, Elizabeth’s mother, Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford, was later accused, during a troubled period of rebellion, of practising witchcraft; though at the time the affair came to nothing.

It was not forgotten, however. When King Edward IV died in 1483, by the terms of the king’s will his brother Richard was named as Protector of the Realm and guardian of the young prince who was heir to the throne. But before the boy could be crowned Parliament proclaimed the late king’s children illegitimate, saying that his marriage with Elizabeth Woodville was unlawful.

One of the grounds for this declaration was that the marriage “was made of great presumption, without the knowing and assent of the lords of this land, and also by sorcery and witchcraft, committed by the said Elizabeth and her mother Jacquetta Duchess of Bedford, as the common opinion of the people, and the public voice and fame is through all this land”.

It has often been presumed by historians that because the accusation of witchcraft against Elizabeth Woodville was instrumental in placing Richard III on the throne, it was therefore without any foundation. However, the circumstances of her marriage to King Edward IV were certainly unusual, and it seems possible that it was a marriage according to the Old Religion rather than a Christian one. No adequate reason was ever given for Henry VII’s action in depriving the widowed Elizabeth Woodville of all her possessions, and shutting her up in a nunnery for the rest of her life—even though he had married her daughter by Edward IV.

Richard III, who was defeated and killed at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, was the last of the Plantagenets. His famous banner of the White Boar is another example of a device connected with the Old Religion. The boar’s curving tusks, resembling the crescent moon, are still valued as amulets and luck-bringers; and white pigs were sacred to the Druidic moon goddess Cerridwen. Some historians now believe that Richard was by no means as villainous as the Tudors made him out to be. There is even a society which exists for the purpose of clearing the name of Richard III.

With the arrival of the Tudor dynasty, many changes took place in England. One by one, any possible claimants to the throne that remained of the older stock were ruthlessly eliminated. But the sovereigns of England continued to be crowned, with Christian ceremony, upon the pagan Stone of Destiny that forms the basis of the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey. King Edward I brought this mysterious stone from Scotland in 1297; and it was sanctified by a legend that it was the stone upon which Jacob had rested his head at Bethel. However, the Saxon kings were also crowned upon a sacred stone, which is still preserved at Kingston-on-Thames. According to ancient Celtic legend, the Lia Fail, or Stone of Destiny, is one of the four treasures of the Tuatha De Danaan, the people of the goddess Dana, and its origin is certainly pagan. (See TAROT CARDS.)

One of the ancestors of our present Queen, Janet Douglas, Lady Glamis, was burned as a witch. Her execution took place in 1537 on the Castle Hill at Edinburgh. She was accused of having plotted to take away the life of King James V of Scotland, by poison and witchcraft. Her beauty and her noble birth made the case long remembered. By some accounts, she was entirely innocent of the charge, and the motive behind the accusations against her was political intrigue.

Others, however, have claimed that Janet Douglas was indeed a witch, and that some part at any rate of the famous haunting of Glamis Castle is attributable to her. A spirit that was her familiar, the legend says, continues to trouble the castle, and so does the phantom of the lady herself.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries accusations of witchcraft in high places were numerous. They were often made against someone the ruling monarch wanted to get rid of; because a charge of witchcraft was a very difficult thing to disprove. Frequently, too, people in high positions did employ witches, astrologers and other practitioners of occult arts, for their own purposes. If anything went wrong and awkward revelations became public, it was usually the low-born witch who was hanged or burned at the stake, while their aristocratic employer escaped the severest punishment.

King James I, in whose reign the most severe law against witchcraft was passed, had good reason to fear witches. Some years earlier, in Scotland, a number of witches had conspired against him, in the hope of putting their own Grand Master, Francis, Earl of Bothwell, on the throne. Bothwell had a claim to the Scottish throne if James died without an heir. However, their plot was discovered, and many of them were burned at the stake, having confessed that they had made an image of the king “so that another might rule in his place, and the government might go to the Devil”.

Bothwell himself was imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle. But before he could be brought to trial, his friends organised his escape. For some time the king lived in terror of Bothwell. But when a son was born to James and his queen, Bothwell realised that his chances were slender, and decided to leave the country. He settled in Naples, probably because it was near Benevento, the witch centre of Italy; and he continued to be known there as a practitioner of magic.

King James had, very naturally, taken a close personal interest in the examination of the North Berwick witches who had been Bothwell’s followers. One leading witch, Agnes Sampson, he questioned himself, and she told him such strange things, says a contemporary account, “that his Majesty said they [the witches] were all extreme liars”. Stung by this remark, Agnes Sampson had proceeded to prove her powers to him. “Taking his Majesty a little aside, she declared unto him the very words which passed between the King’s Majesty and his Queen at Upslo in Norway, the first night of their marriage, with their answer each to other. Whereat the King’s Majesty wondered greatly, and swore by the living God, that he believed that all the Devils in hell could not have discovered the same: acknowledging her words to be most true, and therefore gave the more credit to the rest which is before declared”.

James I virtually declared war on witches; and under the Puritan Commonwealth they had an even worse time. But the restoration of Charles II must have seemed to them as if the old connection between royalty and the Craft of the Wise had returned. The incident of the fugitive king being saved by hiding in the oak-tree at Boscobel is often depicted in contemporary designs. The way in which the king’s face looks through the foliage very much resembles the old picture of the Green Man, the pagan god of the woods. (See GREEN MAN.)

The belief that the sovereign’s touch could cure diseases is certainly connected with the sacredness of the royal blood, and this again goes back to the ideas of the Old Religion. The last British monarch to carry out public ceremonies of touching the sick was Queen Anne. The chief, though not the only disease supposed to be healed by the royal touch, was scrofula, which was called ’the king’s evil’ for this reason.