ART VANDALS ECHO THE WITCHFINDER GENERAL
Libby Purves
No sooner were the Van Gogh vandals jailed than others, albeit with a different flavour of soup, did it again. This time two of those arrested were older adults but although the retired are well represented, climate activism has notably recruited youth ever since Greta Thunberg’s first school strike. Gaza and gender protests show a similar pattern of indignation: those aged 16 to 24 are barely 11 per cent of the population but estimated as roughly a third of demonstrators.
Older generations recall 1960s Vietnam, civil rights and university demos fuelled by young blood. All ages hit the streets at times but youth is better at scaling buildings and tolerating crowds, less preoccupied with daily responsibilities and fears and easily frustrated by any world built by its elders.
Fair enough: we’re all frustrated, but eventually we mesh into the system by canvassing and voting or channel it into charity or community efforts. But in the impatient youngest there can easily rise something darker and deeper: the leading edge of real fanaticism. Some Extinction Rebellion videos show it in their cavalier dismissal of others’ rights; some Palestine campaigners tip over into violent intent, as do gender-identity extremists, Islamist jihadis and teenagers who threaten asylum hotels.
Every time you see such hot, bold spirits hurling themselves into the blessed relief of righteousness, you notice the older adult figures behind them. A few are there to identify out of vanity (look at those XR celebrity backers flying in to show how they hate fossil fuel). But many are actively exploiting that ever-renewing spring of beautiful vigour: they’re running an emotional Ponzi scheme that sucks in the cheap energy of youth with dubious promises.
I was reflecting on this because of a remarkable new play by Joanna Carrick which reaches the capital — Southwark Playhouse — in a few weeks’ time. I saw The Ungodly, a small dramatic powerhouse, a year ago in Ipswich. Its roots are in local history, tightly researched in parish records but explored and “workshopped” during Covid in community work and audio productions, including disabled people and inmates at HMP Warren Hill.
It deals with the dark period in the early 1640s when, within three years, more women were hanged as witches than in the previous 160, the whole religious Reformation. The key figure is Matthew Hopkins, the self-appointed witchfinder general.
What I had never realised is that this figure’s reign of terror began when he was 24 and ended with his death three years later. His fanaticism was fed by Puritan “lecturers”, and the fragility of his audience aggravated by crop and cattle failures and high infant mortality. In a remote agricultural community, ruin always looms and scapegoating is tempting. An old lady muttering crossly to herself might be uttering a curse; let her name her cat oddly and you suspect it of being Satan’s spirit manifesting through “condensed and thickened air”.
But central to this particular cataclysm of suspicion and persecution was the fire burning in Hopkins: portrayed growing up as a geeky, insecure, stammering teenager who hated his tavern job, repelled by coarse older drunkards and uneasy with the frank sexual carnality of farmhouse life. He is not like the hysterical girls in The Crucible: his puritanism is more like calm relief, an achieved identity that simplifies the universe. Point the finger, condemn the target as evil and quote “You shall not suffer a witch to live” from the Book of Exodus — though actually that’s only one line, oddly sandwiched between rules on debt and dowries and a ban on bestiality. With extreme Puritans the Bible is always the Old Testament; none of that soft Jesus reluctance to cast the first stone. When the poor old women get rounded up, the young witchfinder’s worried half-sister Susan asks him: “Will they hang? All?” He replies: “They must!”
It’s a fascinating play, with echoes impossible to ignore. Not only because of the dangerous certainties everywhere today but because headlong youthful conviction is a perennial phenomenon requiring respect and containment. It holds both hopeful beauty and malicious danger, and anyone with spirit remembers it burning, even for a football team or pop idol.
At my convent school (in Tunbridge Wells), despite the Cold War artful nuns invited a communist speaker to the sixth form, perhaps as a homeopathic dose. He wore purple gym shoes and gave us all pocket-sized Communist Manifestos. I well remember the excitement of Marx’s prose.
The passion of recruited youth has fed honourable causes. Think of the International Brigades in 1930s Spain, of the Arab Spring, Jan Palach in Wenceslas Square. It serves armies too, for good or ill: here’s Rupert Brooke in 1914 thanking God that wartime “caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping … as swimmers into cleanness leaping, glad from a world grown old and cold and weary”.
We, the old and cold and weary, may be exasperated by soup-flingers, scared by jihadis and scornful of the hysteria against JK Rowling. But it is not enough to condemn or mock kids whose rage against fossil fuel is accompanied by selfies from exotic holidays.
