The Black Legend of Prince Rupert’s Dog: Witchcraft and Propaganda during the English Civil War by Mark Stoyle (review)

By Mark Stoyle’s own admission, “all that we know for certain about Boy could be written on the back of a beer-mat” (p. 163). Despite this impediment, Stoyle has crafted a book that exhaustively tracks the beginnings of Prince Rupert’s demonic dog Boy, his role in the British Civil Wars, and his emergence as a propaganda tool during the early 1640s. Although Stoyle’s book makes for a wonderfully detailed study of popular print during the civil wars, the elements of the book that deal with witchcraft are a little less developed.

The real strength of the book is Stoyle’s meticulous treatment of the popular print produced about the life of Boy and his master Prince Rupert. Stoyle expertly tracks this print (while constantly referring back to the civil wars), and artfully shows how Boy’s demonic image in print (an apparently Royalist invention) was manipulated by the Parliamentarians and eventually used against its inventor. Stoyle’s work on the pamphlet Observations upon Prince Rupert’s White Dog Called Boy is one of the triumphs of the book. Through close textual analysis, Stoyle suggests that John Cleveland, a royalist polemicist, may have been the author of this anonymous piece. Although Stoyle is not the first to suggest this, his work on the pamphlet adds to the evidence for this argument. Stoyle’s reconstruction of Boy’s life must be applauded. The very nature of Boy’s tale, however, often forces Stoyle to adopt a speculative position, one that sometimes favors the common-sense argument over historical “fact.” This is impossible to avoid when studying a character about which so little is known, and Stoyle is the first to acknowledge the limitations of these assumptions. There are times, however, when one feels that the speculation goes too far, and that it might have been better to accept that there are some things about this demonic dog that will never come to light.

In his introduction, Stoyle quite rightly suggests that “until very recently, historians of witchcraft and historians of the Civil War have tended to regard themselves as operating in two quite separate intellectual fields” (p. 4). Of course, there are exceptions to this, which Stoyle acknowledges (most notably work by Diane Purkiss and Malcolm Gaskill); but, generally, most scholars treat these fields separately. Stoyle’s desire to combine these two fields is admirable, and his book represents an important first step in writing broader, more comprehensive histories of witchcraft. However, the strength of Stoyle’s study of the civil war leaves one feeling that the witchcraft material is slightly underresearched.

Toward the end of the book, Stoyle begins to suggest that the Observations (the pamphlet about Boy’s devilry) played a prominent role in reigniting witchcraft literature in the 1640s. This is a huge claim, and is very difficult to either prove or disprove. Stoyle claims that the Observations was the first pamphlet “entirely devoted” to witchcraft to be published in England since 1628. However, in 1635 a pamphlet was published in England about the witchcrafts of the Flowers family. This pamphlet was a longer version of one from 1619. Its existence demonstrates that witchcraft beliefs were circulating in popular print during the 1630s and that, instead of the fifteen-year gap that Stoyle suggests, there was actually only an eight-year gap between witchcraft pamphlets. This gap is still significant, but not as extreme as might first be imagined. While it is true that the number of witchcraft pamphlets were decreasing throughout the 1620s and 1630s, it seems difficult to argue that one pamphlet “re-energised” and “re-legitimised” (p. 109) public debate on witchcraft in England.

Stoyle also makes ambitious claims about the influence of the Observations on future witchcraft pamphlets. He suggests that it may have “helped...