Day of Wrath: Remembering Anna Pedersdotter Absalon

It’s impossible to recall all of the victims of the great European Witch Hunt; there are simply too many. But I have made it my task to spotlight at least some, those who may stand for all of the others, both known and unknown; those whose lives and deaths serve to memorialise all of the martyred and butchered children of the earth.

I’ve only just become aware of the case of Anna Pedersdotter Absalon, who was burned alive in Bergen in 1590, having been found guilty of a charge of witchcraft, the most noted case of its kind in the history of Norway.

Anna is unusual in that most of the victims of the witch hunt were poor women, women at the outer fringes of society. But she was not. Anna was the wife of Absalon Pedersen Bayer, a Lutheran minister and humanist scholar, who taught at the University of Bergen. She and her husband were prominent in the local Reformation, seeking to destroy the old holy images in the area, considered to be idolatrous. Those who held to the Catholic faith resisted in any way they could. People like Absalon were too powerful and well-connected to be attacked, but Anna, as a woman, like all others, was vulnerable to an accusation of witchcraft, used, in her case, with a clear political intent.

In 1575 she was charged with having used witchcraft and sorcery to kill Bishop Gjeble Pedersen, her husband’s uncle, in order to make Absalon bishop in his stead. Her husband, calling on the intervention of the King of Denmark himself, then ruler of Norway, managed to have the charges dismissed. Absalon died soon after, leaving Anna wealthy and vulnerable to accusations that simply refused to go away.

In 1590 the case was finally reopened, with Anna now old, cantankerous and friendless. The usually accusations of maleficia were presented, and Anna was indicted on several cases of murder by magic. With courage and presence of mind, she rebutted these charges, including one that she had caused the death of a child.

Proceedings continued with the introduction of a diabolic element. Anna’s own servant testified that her mistress had turned her into a horse and ridden her to a Sabbath at a mountain called Lyderhorn, where she and other witches plotted to raise a storm to wreck ships arriving at Bergen. Even as a horse this servant seems to have lost nothing of her human comprehension. It was on the basis of such testimony that Anna was condemned and burned. All the way to the site of her execution she called out her innocence.

I suppose Anna might have been completely forgotten if it had not been for Hans Wiers-Jenssen, a Norwegian playwright, who brought the story to public attention in the early part of the twentieth century. Anne Pedersdotter, his play, was translated into English by John Masefield. Later still it inspired the making of a film, Day of Wrath, directed by Carl Theodore Dreyer. It was screened in his native Denmark in 1943, then under Nazi occupation, a time when the echo of an old witch hunt would resound among the new.

The Popish Plot-an English Political Witch-Hunt

The Popish Plot was a wave of anti-Catholic hysteria that overtook England from 1678 onwards, but the political roots of the crisis go back several years, and has to be viewed against a background of the growing distrust between Parliament and the Crown.

It is also important to understand that for English people of the day Catholicism was not simply a set of religious beliefs: it was, rather, an all-embracing ideology, with strong associations with Continental despotism, represented, above all, in the person of Louis XIV.

This would have had little bearing on England but for one thing: in the early 1670s James duke of York, the brother and heir of King Charles, who had no legitimate heirs, was known to have converted to Catholicism. The anxiety this caused led to an ever more vocal opposition to royal policy, from the alliance with the Catholic French against the Protestant Dutch, to Charles' attempts to introduce, by royal prerogative, a measure of toleration for Catholics and Protestant Dissenters.

It was a highly unstable political mixture that, by the late 1670s, simply needed one spark to cause a major explosion. This came in 1678 when one Titus Oates, in collaboration with a half-mad clergyman by the name of Israel Tonge, started to spread rumours that there was a plot by the Jesuits to kill the king. This story went through various metamorphoses; but in the final version the assassination was conceived as part of a grander strategy to replace Charles with the Catholic James. Nothing may have come of these stories but for the mysterious assassination of Edmund Berry Godfrey, a magistrate who had been appointed to look into the whole affair.

It was this murder that really sparked off all that was to follow. It gave substance to the stories of Oates and Tonge, made all the more credible when it was found that Edward Coleman, secretary of the duke of York, was in treasonable correspondence with the French. England was now gripped by collective hysteria. Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, chief among James' enemies, was soon demanding that the Catholic duke be exluded from the succession, thus beginning the Exclusion Crisis.

Shaftesbury and his allies, loosly known as the 'Country Party', to distinguish them from the supporters of Charles and James, known as the 'Court Party', formed the Green Ribbon Club, opposed to Catholicism, Absolutism and James in equal measure. Their enemies began to refer to them as Whigs, after a group of extreme Presbyterian rebels in Scotland. The Green Ribbons responded in kind, referring to their enemies in Parliament as Tories, after Irish Catholic bandits.

It was on this inauspicious basis that English party politics took shape, which was to be the chief legacy of the Popish Plot. In the end Charles managed to sidestep, though not resolve, the issues that had been raised by dissolving the Oxford Parliament in 1681, bringing the Exclusion Crisis to an end. James duly succeeded to the throne in 1685, held up by a wave of Tory reaction against the Whigs and the murderous excesses of the Popish Plot.

But fear of Catholic Absolutism did not go away; and in 1688 sections of the Whig and Tory parties united to remove James from the throne in the so-called Glorious Revolution. Soon after Parliament passed an act outlawing any future Catholic succession, and the Whigs and Tories became a permanent part of the English political landscape.