The End of Matthew Hopkins
If Hopkins hoped to use his ill-gotten fortune to propel him onto greater heights, he was mistaken. For the tide was beginning to turn against the Witch Finder General. People began to tire of the witch craze as it hit their own pockets. More and more towns were levying taxes specifically to pay the witchfinder- and the citizens resented it. People began to grumble that money was Hopkins’s primary motive for his witch-finding. Hopkins hotly denied this claim, explaining he only ever visited towns that invited him. Any funds received were to cover his expenses- or voluntary donations out of thanks. However, his justifications began to fall on increasingly deaf ears.
Finally, in spring 1646, a small country vicar found the courage to make a public stand against Hopkins. John Gaule, the vicar of Great Stoughton in Huntingdonshire, took to his pulpit and openly preached against Hopkins’s. Not content with limiting his opinion to his parishioners, Guale then went public. He collected evidence of Hopkins’s abuses and publishing them in a pamphlet “Select Cases of Conscience Towards Witches and Witchcraft. The book was well written and convincing enough to win public favor and Hopkin’s reputation was further eroded.
In 1647, in an attempt to revive his credibility, Hopkins published a pamphlet, The Discovery of Witches. The booklet attempted to answer many of the questions raised by Hopkins’s critics regarding his motives- as well as describing the Witch Finder’s methods. However, the pamphlet’s explanations were either vague – or unoriginal. For many of Hopkins’s ‘tests’ were based upon those of James I in his Daemonologie. However, the booklet failed in its primary purpose because the times were changing. By the end of 1646, the first round of the English Civil War was over. Charles I was safely in Parliament’s hands and civic order was being restored. As a result, the social hysteria that had led to Matthew Hopkins’s witch hunting epidemic began to melt away.
In 1647, Matthew Hopkins disappeared from the historical record. One explanation was he was executed for witchcraft. Insider knowledge of Witchcraft was an accusation that had already been thrown at Hopkins. He had answered it in The Discovery of Witches by claiming that pure experience was his guide. However, according to William Andrews, a 19th Century writer on Essex folklore, one Essex town Hopkins visited believed he had to be a witch. So they tested Hopkins by swimming him in the local pond. According to some versions, Hopkins sank and drowned. However, in others, he floated. The locals promptly hung Hopkins on the spot-which explains why there are no records of a trial.
Execution for the very crime he had persecuted so many others for may have been a fitting end for Matthew Hopkins. Sadly, however, it seems his death was much more mundane. Realizing his time as a witch hunter was over, Hopkins parted company from his faithful team and returned to Manningtree with his ill-gotten fortune. There he may well have stayed, living a long and comfortable life. However, in 1648, John Stearne wrote his own book “A Confirmation and Discovery of Witchcraft.”In it, he revealed that Hopkins had died in 1647 “peacefully after a long sickness of a consumption.” Church records show that Hopkins did indeed die in Mistley. He was buried on August 12, 1647.
Where Do we get this stuff? Here are our sources:
Matthew Hopkins, John S Morril, Encyclopedia Brittanica, August 8, 2018
Matthew Hopkins, Witch-Finder General, Ellen Castelow, Historic UK
Witch Finder Witch? BBC ‘Legacies: Legends Local to You’ (Essex)
The Discovery of witches, Matthew Hopkins, Project Gutenberg, 1647
Matthew Hopkins, Witch Finder General, George Knowles, Witch Trials.co.uk