ABSTRACT
This account, with its intense consciousness of status and hierarchy, deals with one of the most high-ranking victims of witchcraft of his era, Francis Manners, Earl of Rutland. Manners probably commissioned or at least approved it, for it is a flattering representation of his nobility and godly resignation in the face of attack by witches, who allegedly killed his sons and endangered his daughter. The earl’s family emerges spotless from the narrator’s wordy, sycophantic exposition – as we have come to expect from similar accounts. Nevertheless, the witches’ appended examinations (as is usual in pre-trial documents) suggest that the earl had given them cause for wishing him ill, by demoting or dismissing one of their number from his service. This motive is not, however, allowed to the witches by the author – they are shown as poor, dishonest, ignorant, atheist and malign, in sharp contrast with their victims and the godly and educated narrator. The pamphleteer’s representation of the injustice of the Manners family’s sufferings recalls other gentlemanly narratives of ‘motiveless’ attack from families of witches.
