Published in 2013
12 hours and 21 minutes
Tracy Joanne Borman OBE FRHistS FSA (born 1972) is a historian and author from Scothern, Lincolnshire, England. She is most widely known as the author of Elizabeth’s Women, a portrait-gallery of the powerful women who influenced Queen Elizabeth I.
Elizabeth’s Women was serialised and became a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week in September 2009. Borman appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, also in September 2009. In 2013, she was appointed Joint Chief Curator of Historic Royal Palaces alongside Lucy Worsley. In 2024 she became Historic Royal Palaces’ Chief Historian.
In 2021, Borman also authored an immersive audiovisual step inside a story walking tour for Kensington Gardens entitled Tales of a Mistress in the Georgian Court on the BARDEUM mobile app.
In July 2022 Borman was made Chancellor of Bishop Grosseteste University in Lincoln.
What is this book about?
September 1613.
In Belvoir Castle, the heir of one of England’s great noble families falls suddenly and dangerously ill. His body is ‘tormented’ with violent convulsions. Within a few short weeks he will suffer an excruciating death. Soon the whole family will be stricken with the same terrifying symptoms. The second son, the last male of the line, will not survive.
It is said witches are to blame. And so the Earl of Rutland’s sons will not be the last to die.
Witches traces the dramatic events which unfolded at one of England’s oldest and most spectacular castles four hundred years ago. The case is among those which constitute the European witch craze of the 15th-18th centuries, when suspected witches were burned, hanged, or tortured by the thousand. Like those other cases, it is a tale of superstition, the darkest limits of the human imagination and, ultimately, injustice – a reminder of how paranoia and hysteria can create an environment in which nonconformism spells death. But as Tracy Borman reveals here, it is not quite typical. The most powerful and Machiavellian figure of the Jacobean court had a vested interest in events at Belvoir. He would mastermind a conspiracy that has remained hidden for centuries.
