REVIEW
Lucy Worsley has to hold back tears as she gets
serious about the witch hunts
4/5
In her new series, Lucy Worsley Investigates, the
historian has ditched the twinkle for sober research - and it suits her
By
Jasper Rees
24 May 2022
• 10:00pm
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/0/lucy-worsley-has-hold-back-tears-gets-serious-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.
1. Princes
in the Tower
Air date:
May 15, 2022
Lucy
Worsley investigates what really happened to the two princes who disappeared in
1483.
2. Madness
of King George
Air date:
May 22, 2022
A close
look at the life of George III, including the effect of his mental illness on
Britain and how the assassination attempt on his life changed psychiatry.
3. The
Black Death
Air date:
May 24, 2022
Lucy
Worsley reinvestigates and reveals new evidence about some of British history's
biggest unsolved mysteries.
4. The
Witch Hunts
Air date:
May 24, 2022
Lucy
Worsley reinvestigates and reveals new evidence about some of British history's
biggest unsolved mysteries.
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