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FROM POETRY MAGAZINE

Judge How He Fleeceth the Country
BY PAUL BATCHELOR
Frontispiece to Matthew Hopkins’s The Discovery of Witches
Frontispiece to Matthew Hopkins’s The Discovery of Witches
[Note: Each month we feature a guest post from a contributor to Poetry’s current issue. Paul Batchelor’s “The Discoverer’s Man” appears in the July/August 2015 issue. Previous posts in this series can be found on the Editors’ Blog.]

There’s something disreputable about dramatic monologues. It’s easy to write a passable one but almost impossible to write a good one. They are never fashionable, but there’s never a shortage of them either. I’m not sure that I would mount a defence of the form even if I could. Instead, I want to talk about some of the models I had in mind when writing ‘The Discoverer’s Man’, a dramatic monologue set in the 1680s and spoken by an old man who in his youth acted as a witch-finder’s assistant.
The exploits of my Discoverer and his Man are based loosely on those of the real-life witch-finders Matthew Hopkins (c.1620-1647) and John Stearne (c.1610-1670). I began the poem after reading Witchfinders: a Seventeenth-century English Tragedy by Malcolm Gaskill, which led me to the accounts provided by Hopkins and Stearne themselves (the phrase ‘Judge how he fleeceth the Country’ is taken from Hopkins’s self-justification, The Discovery of Witches). Hopkins, the self-styled ‘Witchfinder General’, is the most famous witch-finder, for reasons that are not altogether clear. The speaker of my poem is an assistant to an unnamed Hopkins-like figure, but the real-life Hopkins himself started out as a Man to Stearne. My Elizabeth Bell is based on Elizabeth Clarke, Hopkins’s first victim; and my John Knowles is based on John Lowes, the vicar whose execution represented Hopkins’s most remarkable success. My description of Knowles’s execution draws on various accounts of similar deaths in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, a work that Hopkins would have known well. Many of the incidental details of the witch-hunts (e.g., the names of Bell/Clarke’s familiars) were too good to be left out: that a starved and sleep-deprived old woman being tortured by her neighbours would name one of her devilish familiars ‘Newes’ (ie. gossip) is a heartbreaking detail. Similarly, when my Discoverer promises never to accuse anyone, he echoes Hopkins and Stearne, who only ever went where they were invited.
At a certain point, I realised that researching the historical record was inhibiting me. The poem went cold and progress slowed. In the end it took five years to complete, and only when I knew I was nearly finished did I begin a second wave of research, in which I tried to check that the things I’d invented weren’t too far off the mark. In the mean time, what helped me to bring my characters back to life (to me anyway) was thinking of three less obviously relevant figures: Tony Blair, Nick Leeson, and Myra Hindley.
Tony Blair led the Labour party to a landslide win in the 1997 U.K. general election, having stood for vaguely-defined ‘change’, which turned out to mean a continuation of neoliberal economics augmented with higher public spending. Officially, of course, it was the Labour party that won; but really it was Blair and his acolytes. Although what he led was not quite a personality cult, the Labour party has been gripped by an identity crisis ever since he stepped down as Prime Minister. The public euphoria with which his 1997 victory was greeted is easy to forget now that Blair is an almost universally loathed figure in Britain. I’d like to think that everybody hates him because he invaded Iraq in order to protect us from Weapons of Mass Destruction that turned out to be no more real than the Evil Spirits the witch-finders battled. But this can’t be the whole story. Blair won a general election in May 2005 pretty comfortably, long after the truth about WMDs had been revealed. The fact is Britain was mysteriously ready to believe in Blair, and then, at a certain point, it was ready to turn on him. Similarly, Hopkins went from being welcomed as a kind of saviour figure to being demonised within the space of a generation or so. Blair has since got religion and is now a practising Catholic. I knew from quite early on that I wanted my speaker to misquote the Bible as part of his attempted self-justification.
Nick Leeson is the derivatives broker whose actions led to Barings Bank (whose customers included the Queen) being declared insolvent on 26 February 1995. Leeson engaged in unauthorised speculative trading and hid his losses in secret accounts until they ran to over $1.4 billion. In the 90s, this seemed like a lot of money for a bank to lose. I am very attracted to the idea of Leeson as the Monster to Margaret Thatcher’s Frankenstein, as though the Thatcherite vision of liberated provincial youth came true, only to produce an agent of chaos who brought down a 233-year-old institution; but I realise that this is probably wishful thinking. Like Leeson, Hopkins came from what we’d call a lower-middle-class background. Hopkins was the third son of a clergyman in rural Suffolk, and the family’s respectability came from Matthew Hopkins’s grandfather, a yeoman farmer who restyled himself a gentleman after enclosing the common land upon which the poor depended. A stable English society would have checked the rise of such an ‘obscure’ figure, but the social, religious and political chaos of the civil war era allowed Hopkins to flourish, much as it did Oliver Cromwell, or William Dowsing, the puritan iconoclast. In the 1990s, it was the ethical and procedural chaos of market deregulation that gave Leeson his chance.
I don’t know whether readers outside of the U.K. will have heard of Myra Hindley. She was a serial killer, who, along with Ian Brady, kidnapped, tortured and murdered five children, burying their bodies on Saddleworth Moor in northern England, between July 1963 and October 1965. Brady, by his own account, was the leader, with Hindley his eager assistant. One of the strange things about the public interest in the case was the almost obsessive focus on Hindley: when I was growing up in the 80s, she seemed like a mythical figure, a bogeyman, often invoked as a symbol of the danger ‘out there’. The interest never really abated until Hindley died in prison of bronchial pneumonia in 2002. Unlike Brady, who was perceived as having been ‘born bad’, Hindley was disturbing because it was just about possible to imagine an alternative world in which she didn’t meet Brady and turned out—well, not exactly ‘normal’, but at least not homicidal. The motivations of serial killers (in real life or in fiction) are usually banal; what drives their enablers is a much more interesting question. I wanted the fanatical, inhuman Discoverer in my poem to remain a shadowy presence. His Man—the ordinary guy who fell under his spell, promulgated his myth, eased his progress, and then returned to society—would be my speaker and real subject.
These figures interested me because they are simultaneously characters in the story England tells itself, and chancers who seized an opportunity to tell a story of their own. At a certain point, through some confluence of historical and personal circumstance, they were presented with the occasion to seize control of a bigger narrative, to identify and project some aspect of their own self-image, and to implicate others in their version of events. On a smaller scale, much the same processes—projection and identification; suspicion and discovery—are practised by the speaker and implied listener of a dramatic monologue, as well as the writer and the reader.
Tags: dramatic monologue, Paul Batchelor, Poetry guest blogger
Posted in From Poetry Magazine on Wednesday, July 8th, 2015 by Paul Batchelor.