‘A Dog's Elegy’
‘A Dog's Elegy’
From Newbury to Marston Moor, September 1643 to July 1644
This chapter explores how the rumours about Boy continued to mutate and develop during 1643-44, and considers, in particular, the way in which those rumours apparently fed into the famous account of how a Royalist ‘witch’ was slain by Parliamentarian soldiers on the eve of the battle of Newbury in late 1643. The discussion then turns to investigate the wider connections which existed between ‘the Boy myth’ and the Parliamentarian conviction that there were many witches among the king's female camp-followers. The chapter concludes by telling the story of Boy's death at the battle of Marston Moor in July 1644 - and by investigating the gleeful reactions which the news that Prince Rupert had lost his ‘Mephistophiles’ provoked in the Parliamentarian press. [120 words]
Keywords: Witch of Newbury, Spies, Camp-Followers, Sorceresses, Propaganda, ‘Whorishness’, Cross-dressing, Prostitutes, Necromancy, Catholicism
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