The Witch Hunter Who Helped Shape America’s Witch Trials

Matthew Hopkins is the most notorious witch hunter in English history. Between 1644 and 1647, Hopkins and his associate John Stearne traveled across East Anglia, claiming they could identify witches and help bring the accused to trial. Their efforts ultimately led to around 100 executions.

“In the whole of the 16th and 17th centuries, around 500 people were executed for witchcraft,” says Malcolm Gaskill, author of Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy. “We know that about 300 were put through the trial process because of Hopkins and Stearne, and around 100 of them were executed. So they are responsible for a fifth of all England’s witch trial deaths in just a few years.”

Hopkins’ witch hunts had consequences beyond England, though. They would set the stage for the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, nearly 50 years later. 

Following King Henry VIII’s Witchcraft Act of 1542, James VI of Scotland, later James I of England, helped fuel fears of sorcery in the late 1500s. In 1597, James published “Daemonologie,” a treatise arguing that witchcraft was real. When James was crowned King of England in 1603, he oversaw the passage of an even stricter Witchcraft Act. In the years that followed, witch trials continued, including the infamous Pendle case of 1612, which resulted in the execution of 10 people in Lancashire, England.

“People are hypersensitive to the idea that there are others amongst them who are giving themselves to the devil in a very extreme way and becoming witches,” Gaskill says. 

Although belief in witchcraft remained widespread across Europe, witch trials declined in England after Charles I ascended to the English throne in 1625. His relative indifference to witchcraft accusations, combined with legal restrictions on torture, helped bring prosecutions down.

But not everyone shared the king’s indifference. Among them were the Puritans, who opposed Charles I for what they saw as his tolerance of Catholicism. They sought a stricter, more godly society. Born in the early 1620s, Matthew Hopkins was the son of a Puritan clergyman and grew up steeped in these religious beliefs.

“Hopkins’ life is saturated in godliness from an early age,” says Marion Gibson, author of Witchland: A Deadly Moral Panic in Seventeenth-Century Britain. “With that comes the idea that you really ought to be trying to reform and purify your community wherever you are.”

Hopkins’ first known act of witch-hunting took place in March 1644 in Manningtree, England. At that point, the English Civil War had been raging for nearly two years; authorities were preoccupied by the conflict, and “the law had been turned upside down,” Gaskill says. 

It was against this backdrop of upheaval that Hopkins began to suspect witchcraft was taking place in his own community. According to Gibson, Hopkins believed he overheard people outside his home discussing a gathering to worship the devil.

“He thinks he hears conversations between witches and their animal familiars,” which are spiritual entities that take the form of ordinary pets to assist witches, says Gibson. “He thinks he hears them say, ‘We need to go to Elizabeth ‘Bess’ Clarke’s house.’”

Hopkins and Stearne went to visit Clarke, an impoverished, middle-aged woman believed to have had a disability. “They torture her. They don’t let her sleep for three days, which is a very effective way of making people confess,” Gaskill says. After several pets entered Clarke’s home, she reportedly claimed they were her children with the devil and confessed to being a witch, Gaskill adds. Clarke was later convicted of using witchcraft to kill an infant.

“That really got the ball rolling,” Gaskill says. “Witchcraft confessions have a way of breeding other accusations.”

Four women, including Clarke, were executed for witchcraft in Manningtree in 1645. “Hopkins feels like he’s uncovered this nest of witches,” Gibson says. Soon after, he dubbed himself the “witchfinder general,” a title never officially recognized by the English Parliament.

Buoyed by his work in Manningtree, Hopkins set out across Essex County throughout 1644 and 1645 to investigate claims of witchcraft in other communities, explains Gaskill. Hopkins would often write ahead to communities to make sure he wouldn’t be run out of town. On various occasions, he was even invited.

“He’s summoned to Great Yarmouth by the town council in August 1645,” Gibson says. “There is a group of 10 people who are accused, many of whom are widows, while there’s also some younger women and a man.”

Hopkins and Stearne usually traveled with a group of women, including Frances Mills, Mary Phillips and Grace Norman. The women would “examine the bodies of female suspects to see if they had any demonic marks on them, because Hopkins and Stearne were too modest to do so,” Gibson says. The “devil’s marks” were usually just moles, scars or skin tags.  

Hopkins and his team would deprive accused people of sleep, sometimes for up to three days in a row. “In modern terms, that amounts to torture,” Gibson says. There would also be a team of watchers, working in shifts, who kept an eye on the accused, waiting for them to crack or for their animal familiars to appear. 

By the summer of 1645, the witch hunts had resulted in the imprisonment of 140 suspects in Suffolk, England, bringing Hopkins’ efforts to national attention. “It is debated in Parliament, but the ministers and magistrates who are sent to investigate just join in with the witch hunt,” says Gibson. 

Communities grew skeptical of Hopkins’ actions by 1646. After discovering that Hopkins was charging people for his work, “a vicar from the Midlands sends him a letter accusing him of witch-hunting for money,” says Gibson. Hopkins insisted he only asked for enough money to cover his expenses. 

When Hopkins and Stearne failed to uncover witches, communities that paid for the service felt shortchanged. When they did identify suspects, local authorities were left to shoulder the cost of housing and feeding the accused in overcrowded jails, adding to the economic strain already caused by the English Civil War.

“The enthusiasm wanes for witch-hunting,” Gaskill says. “People become cautious and uncomfortable about evidence that seems forced.”

By 1647, Hopkins’ health was deteriorating, and criticism of his witch-hunting methods was mounting. “Hopkins knows things are going wrong for him,” Gibson says. “He writes ‘The Discovery of Witches,’ a pamphlet where he justifies what he did, says he didn’t do it for money and didn’t torture people.”

Hopkins died in August 1647, likely from tuberculosis. Witch-hunting declined in England following his death.

Yet Hopkins’ influence extended far beyond England. Throughout the 17th century, Puritans from East Anglia emigrated to the New World, settling in communities such as Cambridge and Salem, Massachusetts. Many retained deeply held beliefs about witchcraft, and “The Discovery of Witches” was circulated among Puritan communities in New England.

“They have all come from the same communities as Hopkins and Stearne and would have known about what they did,” Gibson says. “In that sense, the idea that there are witches in the world and they need to be caught just transfers across the Atlantic.”

Fears of witchcraft eventually erupted in Salem. Between 1692 and 1693, more than 200 people were accused of practicing witchcraft, 19 were hanged and one man was pressed to death. The trials became one of the most notorious episodes of mass panic in American history.