The Witches of Warboys: the Throckmorton Children's Fits

Warboys. A village in the Fens of Huntingdonshire, about 7 miles north-east of Huntingdon. In 1589 its manor house belonged to Robert Throckmorton, squire of Warboys and a friend of Sir Henry Cromwell. He lived there with his wife Elizabeth and their five daughters, Joan, Elizabeth, Mary, Grace and Jane.

November 1589. Jane fell ill. She would "sneeze very loud and thick for the space of half an hour together." Then she lay quiet, as one in a great trance and swoon. Then her belly began to swell and heave until she could not bend. One leg shook. Then another. Then her head, "as if shee had binne infected with the running paulsie." While the fits held her she could not see, hear or feel. They came six or seven times a day and could last half a day. Afterwards she remembered nothing.

An elderly neighbour came to the house. Alice Samuel, aged 76. She arrived during one of Jane's fits and sat by the chimney. Jane said: "did you euer see one more like a witch than she is: Take off her blacke-thrumbed cappe, for I cannot abide to looke on her."

Within about two months all five sisters were stricken, girls aged roughly 9 to 15. The servants followed. "Twelue in the whole," the pamphlet records, "all of them being in one house." The girls said spirits tormented them. Only they could see them. Pluck, Catch and White. Three cousins all called Smack. Jane's was Blue. One account says the demons often appeared as chickens. The girls shrieked when the parson tried to pray. They found relief only near Alice Samuel. Young Elizabeth's fits stopped if someone played cards with her.

Medicine failed. Doctor Barrow of Cambridge tried three medicines, and Master Butler examined Jane's urine. Barrow then spoke of "some kind of sorcerie & witchcraft."

March 1590. Lady Cromwell, wife of Sir Henry Cromwell, came to Warboys and confronted Alice. She cut off a lock of her hair, and Mrs Throckmorton burned it. Alice answered: "Madam, why do you use me thus? I never did you any harm as yet." That night Lady Cromwell dreamed of a cat that Mother Samuel had sent, a cat that "offered to pulcke of all the skin and flesh from her armes." She fell ill. In 1592, she died.

In late December 1592 Alice confessed to the parson. She took it back. Then she confessed again before the Bishop of Lincoln. In April 1593, at the Huntingdon Assizes, Alice, her husband John Samuel and their daughter Agnes Samuel were tried for the murder by witchcraft of Lady Cromwell, under the 1563 Witchcraft Act. All three were convicted. All three were hanged. The jailer, searching the old woman's body, reported "a little lump of flesh, in manner sticking out as if it had been a teat." After the Samuels died, none of the children showed any further sign of possession.

To later readers the fits looked selective. Some have read the case as fraud or performance, others as epilepsy. Deborah Hyde, writing in The Skeptic in 2021, set it beside modern outbreaks of tics. Anne Reiber DeWindt read it through village social conflict.

Sir Henry Cromwell used the Samuels' confiscated property to fund an annual sermon against witchcraft at All Saints' Church, Huntingdon. It ran into the early 19th century. Barbara Rosen judged that the case "attracted probably more notice than any other in the sixteenth century." George Lyman Kittredge called it "the most momentous witch-trial that had ever occurred in England" and argued it influenced the Witchcraft Act of 1603/04.