On the morning of Thursday 29 June 1682, a magpie came rasping, rapping and tapping at the window of a prosperous Devon merchant. Frightened by its appearance, his servants and members of his family had, within a matter of hours, convinced themselves that the bird was an emissary of the devil sent by witches to destroy the fabric of their lives. As the result of these allegations, three women of Bideford came to be forever defined as witches. A Secretary of State brushed aside their case and condemned them to the gallows; to hang as the last group of women to be executed in England for the crime. Yet, the hatred of their neighbours endured. For Bideford, it was said, was a place of witches.

Just before Christmas, 1720, a letter was addressed to James Francis Edward Stuart – the “Old Pretender” – recommending a young, Scots academic to his employ. Andrew Michael Ramsay was, he was info...

Major-General Thomas Harrison. Millenarianism, Fifth Monarchism and the English Revolution, 1616-1660, by David Farr, Farnham, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing, 2014, xii + 304 pp., £75.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-4094-6554-6Having finished his business unexpectedly early, on 13 October 1660, Samuel Pepys: went out to Charing-cross to see Major-General Harrison hanged, drawn and quartered - which was done there - he was looking as cheerfully as any man could do in condition. That night, Pepys confided to his diary that: is said he said he was sure to come shortly at the right hand of Christ to judge them have now judged him. And his wife doth expect his coming again. 1 His, carefully encrypted, entry was intended as a private means of externalising, and of making sense of, the great public events in which he was now, increasingly, a most willing actor and recorder. Supremely reflexive, Pepys realised he stood at a political, generational and cultural watershed, as the Republic gave way to a Restored Monarchy, as the imminent God became increasingly transcendent and as the Early Modern psyche became recognisably Modern. If George Thomason chose, after more than twenty years, to stop collecting his pamphlets at the Restoration; then, it is equally significant Pepys started work on the most famous of his diaries at almost the same time. One language had ceased, and another had begun; at once, coarser, more pragmatic and grasping.On the one side of this divide, Samuel Pepys appears as clubbable, intellectually curious, wryly cynical and wholly materialistic; on the other, Thomas Harrison seems to be a seeker after heavenly signs and portents, an idealist enraptured by the word of God and finding his surest expression in the sounds of battle. It is hardly surprising, therefore, the youthful Pepys was disquieted by - and wholly unable to comprehend - either the Millenarian expectations of the veteran soldier or his willingness to accept a martyrdom, carefully choreographed by his enemies, in order to exact from him the maximum in terms of pain and humiliation.Briefly the second most powerful man in the land, the confidant of Cromwell, the breaker of Parliaments and the driving force behind both the Assembly of the Saints and the regicide, Thomas Harrison commands, and deserves, our attention. Yet, he is also a paradoxical, troublesome and troubling figure in the eyes of posterity, just much as he ever was for his contemporaries. He was no ascetic: his brand of Puritanism was far from dour, hallmarked by a love of display and a certain vanity - which makes him appear all the more human - and which revealed itself in his delight in fine clothes and bright colours. Sir Thomas Herbert saw him gallantly mounted and armed; a velvet montero was on his head, a new buff coat upon his back and a crimson scarf about his waist richly fringed. 2 Lucy Hutchinson was infuriated by his upstaging of her husband, before the new Spanish ambassador, so that he alone might appear [great] in the eies of strangers to parliament; and Charles I found himself, for once, thoroughly out-charmed by one who looked like a soldier and [whose] aspect was good, during his escort under guard to Windsor and London, in December 1648.3 Having risen from the ranks of the mercantile, Middling sort-his father had been a butcher and was elected as Mayor of Newcastle-under-Lyme on no less than four occasions - Harrison had few qualms about enriching himself, through his sinecure as Lieutenant of the Ordnance, and in consolidating his social position. He kept a good stable, rented a substantial house on Highgate Hill and owned lands in Bedfordshire and Staffordshire, as well as the manor of Tottenham. Royalist critics sneered at his pursuit of ambition and luxury, while the Parliamentarian memorialist Mrs Hutchinson cattily observed this man's sonne ... of meane education, and no estate before the warre had gather 'd an estate of two thousand [pounds] a yeare . …

Amid the failures of plots and risings, and the ruin of the first Whig party, it was reported to the authorities that the Duke of Monmouth had once declared his frustration with the Earl of Shaftes...

This review article provides an examination, viewed through the prism of Mark Stoyle's "The Black Legend of Prince Rupert's Dog," of the reputation of Prince Rupert of the Rhine during the English Civil War and Restoration. In particular, it focuses upon the injection of violence into civil society by the Prince and his troops; and the manner in which the experience of war re-activated fears and theories of witchcraft, bringing to prominence the figure of the familiar spirit. Through the comparison of recent biographical studies with the primary sources that illuminate and underpin Rupert's career, the Prince emerges as a more equivocal figure but also, arguably, as a far more capable statesman and military commander.