The Women and the King: Scottish Witch Hunts Under James VI

In 1590, the king of Scotland fomented a witch hunt in North Berwick, implicating as many as 200 people, convicting 70, and executing as many as 50. He participated in the “questioning” of the accused, tearing confessions of treason and weather magic from their trembling lips. He sent those whom he “believed” conspired against him to their deaths. Why? Reading his witch-hunting treatise, Demonologie, one might assume it was because he feared the threat that magic-users posed to his country. But perhaps the shrewd and savvy king had other, more earthly reasons to stir up a panic that destroyed those who moved against him.

The Women and the King: Scottish Witch Hunts Under James VI

Written and researched by Averill Earls, PhD

Recorded and produced by Averill Earls and

Marissa: In fall 1589, James VI of Scotland sailed across the turbulent North Sea to take a bride: the 14-year-old Anne of Denmark. (Yes, gross start. Sorry. It gets worse, but not in the way you’re thinking?) He’d already sent one of his representatives to marry Anne in proxy the previous summer, but when she attempted to sail from Copenhagen in August, stormy seas forced most of her fleet to take refuge in Oslo. Her letter explaining the situation arrived in October, letting James know that “Winter is hastening down on us, and fearing greater danger, all this company is forced to our regret, and to the regret and high displeasure of your men, to make no further attempt at present, but to defer the voyage until the Spring.”^[1] Evidently relieved to learn she was alive, and in a kind of youthful romantic gesture, James and 300 of his retinue sailed to Norway so that he could get his bride himself. He arrived in Oslo in November, and he and Anne were married in the Old Bishop’s Palace. They traveled to Denmark together, and spent the winter and early spring in Elsinore and Copenhagen. They finally made their way to Scotland in April 1590, though their ship was also nearly sunk in yet another bout of terrible storms at sea. But they did, eventually, land at Leith on May 1, 1590, the King and his new queen.

Averill: The near disaster of Anne’s initial voyage was troubling to the Danish government. Admiral Peder Munk accused the Minister of Finance of having equipped the royal ship so insufficiently that it had been unable to withstand the weather. The Minster insisted that the storms were supernatural, created by witches, and no ship made by man could have withstood them! He demanded that Ane Koldings, a famous witch who was already in the Copenhagen prison, be interrogated on the matter of storms sent to destroy Anne’s ship. Though her original trial had nothing to do with weather magic, under torture, Koldings confessed that she was part of a coven that had met to sink the princess’s ship. She named all of her accomplices–which included the wife of the local mayor. After she was executed for her previous conviction, all those she named were arrested. In the months that followed, Denmark had its own first major witch panic, which resulted in the execution of 17 people. The news of the Danish “plot” against the Scottish king and his new queen reached Scotland, and James became convinced–or convinced by others–that the conspiracy was in Scotland too. And so King James VI of Scotland, undoubtedly with the encouragement of his retinue but also from the depths of his own political and religious aspirations, fomented a witchcraft panic to consolidate his own power.^[2]

I’m Averill Earls

And Marissa Rhodes

And we are your historians for this episode of Dig

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Averill: As always we want to pause and acknowledge the scholars upon whose work this episode is built. Julian Goodare is one of the most prolific scholars of Scottish witchcraft and witch hunts, and I used several of his books, articles, and edited volumes for this episode. The authors collected in The Scottish Witch Hunt in Context were particularly helpful in shaping this episode, as was Brian Levack’s various works on the state and witch hunting. All of Scottish witchcraft history is beholden to the ground-breaking work of Christina Larner’s Enemies of God: the Witch-Hunt in Scotland, published two years before her death in 1983. The popularity of witchcraft history and the expansive historiography also means that there are a lot of primary sources that have been published in sourcebooks and online. Lawrence Normand and Gareth Roberts’s Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland is focused explicitly on the North Berwick trials, and provides essential context, as well as annotated versions of the key texts from the North Berwick trials, including the Newes From Scotland, and interrogation notes. Some of these books are harder to come by if you don’t have access to an academic library, but some are available on archive.org or through your public library’s inter-library loan system – so if you want to learn more, you’ll find the bibliography for this episode at digpodcast.org.

Marissa: The 1591 Newes from Scotland described Geilis Duncan, a “maidservant” who “took in hand to help all such as were troubled or grieved with any kind of sickness or infirmity, and in short space did perform many matters most miraculous.”^[3] The Newes goes on to say that Duncan’s employer, magistrate David Seton, found her apparent gift for healing suspicious. Seton suspected “that she did not those things by natural and lawful ways, but rather it to be done by some extraordinary and unlawful means.” So Seton, with the help of “others,” tortured Gellis Duncan with thumbscrews and a noose they tightened around her neck. They demanded to know exactly how she achieved such (allegedly) miraculous cures for those she offered healing advice, and particularly they wanted her to admit that she’d done those things unlawfully – that she’d used witchcraft. She refused to confess.

Averill: They searched her body forcibly until they found what they decided was a “devil’s mark,” and then, humiliated, broken, and with their supposed evidence on her body, she “confessed that all her doings was done by the wicked allurements and enticements of the devil, and that she did them by witchcraft.”^[4] They threw her in prison, and after a period in the dismal, damp, cold, and hungry confinement of a medieval Scottish prison, she started naming “notorious witches”: Agnes Sampson, Robert Grierson, Janet Bandilands, Barbara Napier, Marion Ranking, Jokkie Gray-meil, and several others. What began as a single man’s violent crusade against his employee spiraled into Scotland’s first major witch panic. The North Berwick trials led to the implication of over 100 individuals, the recorded trials of nearly 70, and the execution of somewhere near 50 people. And it was through and because of King James VI himself that the trial of a single healer turned into a trial of dozens for treason by witchcraft. 

Marissa: It is worth noting here that many, perhaps even most, of Scotland’s witch trials were shaped by misogyny and patriarchal structures of oppression. Like in England, anywhere between 75-90% of Scottish people accused of witchcraft were women, a larger proportion than for Europe as a whole. According to Julian Goodare, “They tended to be in later middle age. Statistics on age are difficult, but, from a small sample, 22 per cent were in their thirties, 41 per cent in their forties, and 13 per cent in their fifties.”^[5] There were, of course, also men accused and tried, but fewer were found guilty and executed than women. In isolation, without the broader 1590-91 panic, Geilis Duncan’s case might be boiled down to the misogynistic violence of her employer. David Seton did not like that Duncan left his house “every other night.” He also did not like that she seemed to have gained a gift for healing–a side hustle that could well have given her the option long-term to ditch him entirely. We have no way of knowing the full dynamics of that particular household. Was she one of the many servants in early modern Britain who had to submit to the sexual advances of her employer? Were her nightly disappearances from the house in an effort to dodge him? We only have the words she was alleged to have uttered after her fingers were mangled, her throat squeezed closed with a rope over and over again, and her body stripped naked in front of a panel of searchers–and unsurprisingly none of her complaints about the man she worked for, if she had any, survived. Instead the Newes preserves her “confession,” and the names she cried out in hopes that she might save herself by giving up someone else.

Averill: So while this episode is focused largely on the role of the king and state in Scottish witch trials, we’d be remiss not to point to this undercurrent of all of the trials we’ll discuss in this episode. As Julian Goodare and Ronald Hutton both remind us, witch hunts and accusations were (and are) often tools for enforcing social norms. At various points in British history, women with independent economic power defied social norms; men who failed to provide for their families or keep their wives in check defied social norms; women who refused to marry defied social norms; men who slept with other men defied social norms. And these rules were always changing–because they, like the very concept of ‘illegal magic use,’ were social constructs only given power when the people accepted them as ‘truth’–but the realness of their consequences is captured in the violence and suffering of witch hunts.

Marissa: The Newes from Scotland was a pamphlet commissioned by the king, James VI that “reported” the North Berwick trials. There are also four surviving dittays, or indictments, of people caught up in the North Berwick trials. The Newes was, at best, propaganda. The dittays capture the nonsensical “confessions” extracted from the accused. While the actual questions are not recorded, there is a sense that the questions were leading.

Averill: North Berwick was the first of Scotland’s five largest witch panics. Two of those five panics took place under James’s rule. There were, as Julian Goodare notes, many smaller panics throughout the life of the Scottish witchcraft law, which was passed in 1563, and abolished in 1736. The law was passed not as a panic measure, but created the infrastructure to incite panics.^[6] And undoubtedly those who raised James to be the king he became intended for witch hunting to be a useful political tool. There were minor panics in 1568–a year after the three-year-old James took the throne–and in 1577, when he was old enough to understand the reports about this “ magical” plague that threatened God’s kingdom in Scotland, and perhaps even clever enough to recognize the accusation of witchcraft for the tool it was.

Marissa: The sensational reporting of the Newes was clearly intentional. It justified the hunt for witches who had ill intentions towards the King and his new wife. It also crafted, in its narrativization of the various arrests, interrogations, and trials, a conspiracy of witches that almost certainly wouldn’t have existed without much leading questioning and violent torture. It presented the ravings of tortured women and men as “evidence” of treason and maleficia. But to write this episode off as some kind of collective psychosis or the superstitions of the Scottish people would be a grave mistake. While belief in magic and witchcraft was certainly as real in 1590 as it is in many communities around the world today, the driving force of this violent episode in Scotland’s history was politics. And, as Lawrence Normand and Gareth Roberts suggest, we should consider the North Berwick panic as one that didn’t end in 1591, but instead was dragged out for much of the rest of the decade, ending only with the 1597 panic that spread throughout the Lothian region. Whether we interpret this decade as one of grassroots fear of witches and the devil, or if we should see it as a moment in which a young king was consolidating his power and removing or threatening rivals–is up for debate.

Averill: Julian Goodare suggests that the Reformation set off the panic around witchcraft, but that each and every actual panic was enabled by local government.^[7] By the 16th century, personal salvation was the responsibility of the individual in all the protestant and Catholic churches. Witchcraft, and magic use more generally, had always been part of European spiritual and cultural traditions. But in places where traditional religions gave non-Christian leaders too much power, or where there was conflict between a Reformation church and a Catholic church, or where there was just a broader challenge of getting an entire nation to adhere to a new set of religious practices, beliefs, or structures, Christian leaders could coalesce their power by asserting that witches were enemies of God. Perhaps more radically, they insisted that there was no longer a difference between “good” magic users and “bad” ones–anyone who claimed to use magic must have obtained those powers by diabolical or nefarious means, and so must be punished.

Marissa: But these theological power struggles would have had little in the way of actual impact without the infrastructure and authorization of local governments, because in most European states by the 16th century, it was the king–the state–that held the power to decide if someone should live or die. Even in places like Scotland, where witch trials began with religious courts, the actual criminal trial had to be approved by the central government’s privy council, which spoke on behalf of the king. Sometimes, as in the 1590 trials, the king even approved the commission of a trial himself.

Averill: When Seton interrogated Geilis Duncan, the Danish had already executed 17 people. The people accused in North Berwick may have been aware of the events in Denmark, or the interrogators may have asked leading questions to create a fictitious connection between Ane Koldings and the North Berwick “coven.” According to the surviving 1590-91 dittay, Duncan told her torturers that a group of local witches met at the abandoned Kirk (church), and that they met with someone from “Coppenhown, where after they had gotten her name they commoned [talked] together.”^[8] The implication in these often nonsensical confessions was that the witches from Denmark had conspired with the witches from Scotland to sink first Anne’s and then James’s ship. The news of Duncan’s “confession” reached James VI.

Marissa: James, with his Privy Council, traveled to North Berwick to take over the trials as early as November 1590, right after he returned to Scotland with his bride. In June 1591, he told Barbara Napier’s jurors that he had been “siftying out” the witches for the better part of a year. Among those he “siftyed” was Agnes Sampson. Sampson was a well-known cunning woman in North Berwick–and would have been known to Geilis Duncan when she was forced to give up the names of her “co-conspirators”–who, as Lawrence Normand and Gareth Roberts put it, “we see a cunning woman turned into a witch.”^[9] In December of 1590, the king “by his own special travel” forced Sampson to confess. The surviving transcript of her interrogation sees her denying most of the things her interrogators insisted she’d done–healing people, taking their clothes, performing unnatural cures. She insisted that she only prayed and gave ‘natural’ remedies. At one point the interrogators wrote that “she grants that she healed Laird Parkie’s lass, who had the power of her side tane from her, by her prayer only. This she granted with difficulty.”^[10] But over time, and presumably with the pressure of sleep deprivation and possibly also physical torture, her statements grew more desperate. Eventually she “confesses that the devil said to her the king should hardly come home, but that the queen should never come except he fetched her with him.”^[11] The justiciary commission found Sampson guilty, and executed her in January 1591.

Averill: The North Berwick hunt, under James VI and his Privy Council, resulted in the arrest and interrogation of at least 70 (but as many as 200) people. Among those were a potential usurper to James’s throne–the earl of Bothwell, James’s first cousin. Named in one of Agnes Sampson’s confessions, the accusation was the first in a series of events that led to Bothwell’s ruin, and ensured that he could not be a serious contender for the throne.^[12] As Normand and Roberts point out, many of the witch trials in the 1590s started as local disputes, but then the central government–James and his allies on the Privy Council–fanned the flames. The Newes presented the 1590-91 panic as a battle for the very soul of Scotland. James’s Demonologie speaks much the same kind of rhetoric.

Marissa: The enthusiasm that James VI had for witch-hunting is contested. Jenny Wormald argues that his role in the North Berwick trials was maneuvered by others involved who incited his fear and panic, and that he served more as skeptic and mitigator in the 1597 trials.^[13] Julian Goodare, while persuaded by her assessment that James was persuaded by others in 1591, contends that interpreting James as the “skeptic” who intervened on behalf of the accused requires selective reading and/or misreading of the surviving sources.^[14] Wormald also regards James’s 1597 Demonologie, which she argues was written or at least finished in response to the 1597 panic, as the work of a skeptic–claiming that he didn’t believe what he wrote, and that Demonologie was his way of reckoning with the murder of hundreds of women in 1597 Scotland. Goodare rejects this assessment, as do several other scholars of the text. Lawrence Normand and Gareth Roberts, who have produced a really valuable edited documents collection that includes a well-footnoted and modernized edition of Demonologie, point to the clear influence of the North Berwick dittays (indictments) on the king’s writings.^[15]

Averill: It is entirely possible that Demonologie was drafted before James was involved in the 1597 panic. Certainly there were multiple drafts of the completed text, as Goodare points out–because the king’s adviser, James Carmichael, made extensive revisions to the second draft.^[16] In many ways, Wormald’s reading–or, perhaps, unreading–of Demonologie is giving an otherwise celebrated Scottish king the benefit of the doubt. But his actual involvement in both 1590-91 and 1597, and the actual text of his treatise, are challenging points to ignore. Whether or not he believed what he wrote matters less than the influence he had on Scottish witch-hunting in the subsequent 70 years. And there is ample evidence of his involvement in the two major panics during his reign, in 1590 and 1597. Together the text and his well-publicized witch-hunting proclivities surely speaks to his investment in this work as a tool of some kind.

Marissa: The Scottish witch panics all started small, contained to a single accusation, until the broken wheels of justice enabled their spread throughout a single community and, as in 1597, to the surrounding towns. Notably, there were regions of Scotland that were never impacted by witch trials or witch panics; the western Highlands, like most of Ireland, has no recorded incidents of witch trials. Belief in fairy abductions and forces of nature bringing illness was common, but the onus of responsibility for those misfortunes were not laid on the shoulders of community members. But for the lowlands, coastal towns, and the Lothian region in particular, witch trials were common from the medieval period through the 18th century. Liv Helene Willumsen estimates that in total, around 2,500 people were executed, 85% of whom were women.^[17]

Averill: Accusations mostly arose from local quarrels, like Seton’s accusations against Duncan. Victims of accusations tended to be unliked community members, or between social equals, regardless of the individual’s actual reputation for magic-use. Most complaints were lodged by men. Once an accusation was made, one of the religious authorities, the kirk sessions or a parish commission, would interrogate (and torture – usually through sleep deprivation) the accused. Then the church authorities / community would submit the case to the central body – the Privy Council in Edinburgh – which would decide if the case should go to criminal trial. The Privy Council could “grant a ‘commission of justiciary’ authorizing the group of laymen to constitute themselves as criminal judges to convene a court to try the named suspect or suspects.”^[18] Ninety percent of Scottish cases were tried in these local “courts,” and only 1 in 10 were dealt with by the actual formal central court system in the capital. Trials were by jury at both levels, but most of the local trials convicted, compared to the higher acquittal rate of the central court. If convicted, witchcraft sentencing was typically “strangled at the stake and then body burned.”^[19]

Marissa: As Ronald Hutton points out, there were societies where there was not significant witch-belief at all, which meant that there weren’t witch hunts.^[20] Compared to England, Scotland, Germany, and Russia, in these other places misfortune was traditionally ascribed to something besides witches – fairies, nature spirits, ancestors, etc.^[21] If there were no witches–embodied in community members or traveling outsiders–then there was no one to put on trial. The foundational belief in the “witch” or ill-intentioned magic-user was not a theoretical entity in most of Europe (besides Ireland, Siberia, and a handful of other places), but an actual person whose magical powers could heal or harm, depending on the whims of the individual. Sometimes the origin of those magical powers mattered. A demonic pact was common in Scotland, like continental western and central Europe, distinct from the English.^[22]

Averill: According to Stuart Clark, regional belief systems for understanding witchcraft were not what caused witch hunts; and instead, witch hunts likely produced the intellectual explanation for witchcraft that came to define those places.^[23] In the midlands and coasts of Scotland, as in western Europe, the elite who theorized the origins of witchcraft believed that witches got their power through demonic pacts with the devil. Some of the elite in Scottish society may have actually believed in the ability of the witch to heal or harm, but more broadly, witch panics were a tool of control.^[24] According to Stuart McDonald, “The witch-hunt needs to be seen as part of this broader programme, a programme which attacked everything from the celebration of Christmas to going to holy wells, from sexual behaviour to the use of charms to cure cattle and sheep.”^[25] In other words, witch panics were a way for elites to assert their power. Behaviors and practices that empowered or collectivized the common people outside of the purview of elites’ control were labeled immoral or illegal. For centuries, since the Romans deployed it, Christianity was a tool of the elite. The decentralized folk practices, sexual mores, healing, pagan celebrations that persisted were the power of the people. So elites used fear and theology to fracture the bonds of the peasants.  

Marissa: There were a number of environmental factors that fueled the 1597 witch panic, but the most important one was the fraught political situation. There were several natural disasters: cold summers meant that there were bad harvests for five years, 1594-99, and in summer 1597, plague hit Scotland and ravaged the already starving population. The local elites, who were technically responsible for the health and well-being of their peasants and tenants, blamed “witches” for these misfortunes. This was a popular tactic in 16th and 17th century Europe among elites, particularly when it turned the public’s ire away from the leaders and pitted them against one another. James VI, as king, almost certainly utilized witch hunting to similar ends–to distract the public from disasters, but also to consolidate his own power by undermining the influence of his enemies and demonstrating that no one, not even the nobility, were safe from witchcraft accusations.

Averill: James VI arrived at his majority in 1587. For nearly 18 years, others ruled for him. He arranged the marriage with the Danish princess–and she was, reportedly, infatuated with him, though by the end of her life they didn’t live together. She bore him three children who survived infancy, the first in 1594. He was aware that he was on a path to inherit the English throne as well. Undoubtedly he needed to make bold moves to demonstrate his control over the government and his strength as a ruler. One year before the North Berwick trials, James survived an attempted coup in Scotland. Similarly, before the 1597 witch hunt, he was having trouble with resistant radical presbyterians who did not like his tolerance for Catholics. The radicals gained control of the Presbyterian church in 1592, and attempted a coup in December 1596. James had to flee Edinburgh.^[26] Cooperation between James and the church broke down in 1597 — with the 1597 witch panic in Scotland following closely behind.

Marissa: We don’t have complete records from the 1597 panic, but Julian Goodare estimates that upwards of 400 people were tried.^[27] In addition to trial records from Aberdeenshire, there are archival snippets that suggest the most intense witch-hunting episodes engulfed Aberdeenshire, Fife, Perthshire, Glasgow and surrounding areas, and Stirlingshire. Probably around half were convicted and executed. Significantly, like the 1590-91 panic, King James VI’s involvement led to the witchcraft accusations being tied to treason. Torture confessions revealed that the Perth “covens” involved wanted to drown King James and his son.^[28]

Averill: Margaret Aitken was accused and arrested in Fife in April 1597. During her interrogation, and undoubtedly to spare her own life, she claimed to be able to identify other witches by looking them in the eye, where she could see the devil’s mark. In the following months, per a commission approved by James VI, Aitken was taken from town to town, where she “identified” witches for trial. In Glasgow, presbyterian minister John Cowper used Aitken to send dozens to their deaths. Only after her “witch-finding” led to the imprisonment, torture, and death of  hundreds of (mostly) women, was she exposed as a fraud. When Aitken admitted to falsifying her powers, Marion Walker, an active resistor of Cowper’s witch hunts, distributed Aitken’s confession which brought this period of witch panic to an end, in August 1597. The shock of the revelation, and what it meant as gross miscarriages of justice, moved the privy council to issue a proclamation on August 12 in the king’s name. James was, almost certainly, involved in the drafting of the proclamation. Julian Goodare suggests that the proclamation’s effect was modest, too little too late for most of the people targeted by the witch-hunt of that year; but that many of the councillors involved in writing it intended for it to inject caution into the processes by which Scotland dealt with witchcraft accusations. The privy council would be more discerning when handing out commissions of justiciary, and try to prevent commissions from coming directly from the king through back-channels.

Marissa: The 1597 panic was the second-worst witch hunt in Scottish history in terms of people impacted, but, Goodare suggests, it may have been so bad that it created a brief reprieve. There wasn’t another significant witch hunt until 1620, despite the Witch Hunter king remaining on the throne for another 28 years. Councillors in Edinburgh, those responsible for approving the kirk and presbytery investigations into actual criminal trials, used the order of 12 August to “curtail witch-hunting.” It didn’t end witch-hunting; different regions of the country continued to be beset with intense violence against alleged witches until near the end of the seventeenth century. But the councillors succeeded in tempering the obviously broken system for a time.

Averill: When, or if, James VI grew out of his crusade against witchcraft is hard to say. Certainly when he ascended the English throne in 1603, he brought with him a reputation for his anti-witchcraft crusade. William Shakespeare is said to have written Macbeth for the new king, with its first staging estimated in 1606 or 1607. Undoubtedly those around him when he was king only of Scotland encouraged his enthusiasm for interrogation, for rooting out “evil” that threatened him and his kingdom. England, on the other hand, had no “panics” like those in Scotland before or during James’ lifetime. Perhaps England’s set of precedents tempered James’s direct involvement in witch hunts during his reign. However, James also ushered in a new era in witch prosecution; within a year after taking the throne and becoming King James VI and I, he sharpened the existing witchcraft law in England.

Marissa: Though, as Julian Goodare points out, the English were still capable of falling prey to the neighbor-on-neighbor violence of a witch panic (as they did during the English Civil War), the opportunities for panics were far fewer in the English system. In Scotland, as in Spain and Germany, initial investigations into witchcraft accusations were led by religious authorities. In Scotland that was the kirks and presbyteries; in Spain and places like Würzburg, Germany it was the Inquisition. In England, accusations were taken directly to local magistrates, who then conducted an investigation before deciding to prosecute. This approach tended to empower neighbors to punish the unpopular or undesirable individuals of their communities: the beggar women, the poor and disabled whom the community disliked. But, as in the medieval period, this system also allowed for the targeting of abusive or disliked elite women, like Eleanor Cobham and Margery Jourdemayne in 1441. Still, with James’s ascension to the throne and his expansion of the Witchcraft Act, England saw an increase in witch trials over the course of the 17th century. English witch trials became common enough that Justices of the Peace–who often had no training in law, and were instead just the local nobles, with varying degrees of education–needed guidance for how to deal with people accused of witchcraft. In 1618, barrister and justice of the peace Michael Dalton’s Countrey Justice laid out detailed procedures for investigating and prosecuting suspected witches, a text that was used by secular justices of the peace all across England. So perhaps James was tempered by the systems in place in England; but surely he in turn had an impact on England’s witch-hunting activities. Though not, as far as we have evidence, anywhere nearly as directly as he did in Scotland.

Averill: James has often been represented by historians as a shrewd, moderate ruler in English history, largely because of his efforts to make peace with Spain and avoid embroiling England in more wars, and his modest religious tolerance. He was never the truly religiously tolerant king that his early Catholic supporters hoped he’d be. In “Protestant” England, Catholic priests were outlawed, and had to minister in secret. Catholic nobles were forced to the margins of society by Elizabeth I’s Religious Settlement, which required that anyone holding a public office swear an oath to the monarch as head of the Church and State. When he took the English throne, many Catholics were optimistic that James VI and I might usher in a new era for them–perhaps even convert to Catholicism, which had been the religion of his martyred mother, Mary Queen of Scots. And indeed, James swore that he would not “persecute any that will be quiet and give an outward obedience to the law.”^[29] But his reign was not nearly as proactive in ending the persecution of English Catholics as hoped. James did not repeal any of the policies that limited Catholic religious practice. Several Catholic plots to force his hand, or even to kill him, were formulated (and failed): the Bye Plot of 1603, the Main Plot of 1603, and then, after James denounced the Catholic Church because the Pope sent Queen Anne a rosary, the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. James was moderate in his response to the Gunpowder Plot: he insisted it was the machinations of a handful of radical Catholics, and that he did not hold the rest of England’s–or Europe’s–Catholics responsible.

Marissa: His response to the Gunpowder Plot–an actual plan by a group of people to kill him–is, perhaps, surprising. In comparison to how he responded and involved himself in the alleged threat of the North Berwick “witches” and the 1597 Scottish hunt, James’s response to the 1605 Gunpowder plot seems quite reasonable. It is difficult, really, to reconcile these two men as one and the same; perhaps this is why Jenny Wormald regards Demonologie as something it isn’t, and works the evidence to support a thesis exonerating the Witch-Hunting King as a skeptic who wrote a 400+ page treatise on the threat of witchcraft as a way of convincing himself he was over it. But as Tamara Wallace points out, the persona he projected throughout the 1590s witchcraft panics may have been just as calculating and calculated as his measured response to the gunpowder plot.^[30] 

Averill: Scottish witch-hunting slowed down over the next 25 years of James’s reign, but perhaps he’d gotten what he wanted out of the first two. His involvement in both the 1590-1 and 1597 panics was to root out treason by witchcraft.   spends a great deal of time suggesting that any magic use, even when purported to be for “good”, was illegal and a problem. Still, it’s clear that when it came to actual witch hunts, he was more interested in demanding consequences for treason by witchcraft. In these moments of biblical but also political tension, he was able to reaffirm the divine right of kings, his divine right to rule. He did much the same with the Gunpowder Plot – he survived an assassination attempt, by the grace of God! But while Guy Fawkes and his associates were going to use a bomb to kill the king, the alleged witches of North Berwick and Perthshire were casting curses against the king – perhaps literally, but because of the nature of “evidence” in witch trials, more figuratively than anything else. Perhaps in his quest for absolutist control in Scotland and eventually England, James was brokering against treason of the mind.

Marissa: James’s role in the Scottish witch panics is clear both from the way it was represented in the resulting publications, but also in the memory of him as the “Witch Hunter King.” But his death did not end Scotland’s tendency towards panic, nor the state’s infrastructural flaws which facilitated those panics. The 1628-30 panic shortly after James VI’s death involved over 372 people, mostly between and around Edinburgh and Glasgow, with some up along the northeast coast. At least seven of the accused were from the upper class, including one noblewoman and a laird, and all seven were women. A fair number of men were also accused, mostly of the middling sort. In fact, large and small panics continued in Scotland until at least 1723 before the law was repealed in 1736. Despite those privy council members realizing as early as 1597 that the system was broken, and despite the hundreds of women and men whose lives were destroyed by accusation, imprisonment, interrogation, and trial (not to mention execution if found guilty), real, meaningful change took a long time to come. But after the law was abolished, witch hunting in Scotland ended. As Goodare points out:

Once the specific machinery for witch-hunting – the laws, the commissions of justiciary, the traditions of how to extract a confession – had been removed, Scotland was back where it had begun in the late Middle Ages. Witches existed in the popular mind, but had to be coped with in the same ways that they had been coped with before witch-hunting began.^[31]

 There was no longer a formal infrastructure, no matter the churches’ opinions on the matter, for killing alleged magic users in Scotland. Which is, without a doubt, a good thing.

Averill: One of the things I think we can learn from studying the history of witchcraft – particularly the history of the criminalization of witchcraft – is that all crime is a social construct. People, usually people in power, decide what is “criminal,” and that can and does change. Politicians and kings decided it was a crime to use or sell healing charms and curses, just like they decided it was a crime for men to have sex with men, or for a Black man to drink from the same water fountain as a white man. And then, with the stroke of a pen, it wasn’t. (Which is not to say that communities didn’t find ways to police or enforce social norms beyond the law.)  Now, with few exceptions, putting someone on trial for witchcraft is unthinkable in places like Scotland, the United States, Germany–all these countries that were taken by the 16th-18th century witch panics. Change, the legal and social destigmatization of particular practices, acts, ways of being, took time, but eventually change does come. I wanted to end on a hopeful note: because we can end the persecution of things like immigration status, gender identity, anti-fascist protest, and seeking reproductive healthcare. Change is possible. Which isn’t much comfort for those living through the horrors of modern witch hunts, but I hold on to hope for the daughters of the witches that this round of kings will not be able to burn.

Marissa: Thank you for joining us today. As always, we invite you to follow us on BlueSky and Instagram at dig_history. If you have a comment or question or want to share some kind words with us, you can always email us at hello@digpodcast.org – we love listener mail! If you’re an educator, we’ve got a compendium of episodes you can use in the classroom – and free teaching resources, including full lesson plans! – on our website, digpodcast.org. You’ll also find full bibliographies, the scripts for all of our episodes, resources, and a link to our swag store at digpodcast.org. Thanks for listening. 

Bibliography

Katherine Brice, The Early Stuarts 1603–1640 (1994)

Ed. Julian Goodare, The Scottish Witch-hunt in Context (Manchester University Press, 2002).

Julian Goodare, “Frameworks for Scottish Witch Hunting in the 1590s,” The Scottish Historical Review Oct 2002)

Julian Goodare, “Witchcraft in Scotland,” The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, ed. Brian Levack, 300-317

Christina Larner, Enemies of God (1981)

Brian Levack, “State Building and Witch Hunting in Early Modern England,” in Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (2010) 213-226

Lawrence Normand and Gareth Roberts, Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland,

Tamara Wallace, “The Witch-Finder King: A Study of James I of England and his Relationship to Witchcraft,” Undergraduate Thesis, University of Victoria (2023)

Liv Helene Willumsen, “WITCHCRAFT AGAINST ROYAL DANISH SHIPS IN 1589 AND THE TRANSNATIONAL TRANSFER OF IDEAS,” IRSS 45 (2020)

Jenny Wormald, “The Witches, the Devil, and the King,” in Freedom and Authority: Scotland c. 1050-1650 (2000)

Post Script: Right now in the US and parts of Europe, states are mobilizing very similar panics against several vulnerable populations, but it’s the current treatment of immigrant and refugee populations that bears the most resemblance to the witch hunts of the 16th century. (We could of course also talk about trans people, abortion-seekers, and many others). The powerful people in the US, Britain, France, etcetera, blame immigrants and refugees for the ills of society: housing prices and housing shortages, health care costs, unemployment rates, the economic sickness of all these countries. The US government is waging a war against Brown and Black immigrants, locking adults and children in private prisons and detention centers across the US, terrorizing communities, illegally arresting and detaining citizens and immigrants alike. Like the contexts of witch panics outlined by Stuart McDonald and Stuart Clark, this witch hunt originates from those in power seeking to pit the common people against one another, to create panic and division among populations that should be working together to challenge the structures that oppress them all. Because the economic crisis we find ourselves in was not ushered in by our immigrant neighbors – it was wrought by the corrupt politicians on both “sides” of the aisle,  the greedy capitalist pigs and billionaires exploiting the labor of the rest of us. Where this modern witch hunt deviates from most of the 16th and 17th century Scottish cases, however, is in the role of disputes between neighbors. With few exceptions, most people are not turning in their immigrant neighbors to the “witch hunters”. In fact, in Minnesota and California and Vermont and New Jersey, and all these places where there have been surges of ICE activity with the untrained thugs, neighbors are standing in the way of the witch hunters, are raising money for lawyers and to pay bills, are making grocery runs and driving kids to school, are sacrificing their literal lives for their neighbors. Which is not to say that some, maybe even many, are immune to the distraction tactics of the witch hunters. How many people bought that ridiculous story about Haitians eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio? How many rated the “border with Mexico” as one of their major concerns for the 2016 and 2024 elections? Too many. But despite a more powerful, father-reaching media machine – one that King James VI probably would have salivated over, had he access to it – there’s something heartening about the way communities have resisted the panic that the people in power have attempted to incite. The skeptics are, hopefully, slowly outnumbering the fearful and superstitious.

I guess we’ll find out in November which way the pendulum is swinging, and how successful the self-proclaimed king’s witch hunt has been in cementing his power.

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^[1] Miles Kerr-Peterson and Michael Pearce, “James VI’s English Subsidy and Danish Dowry Accounts, 1588-1596”,  Miscellany of the Scottish History Society XVI, Edinburgh: Scottish History Society  (2020).

^[2] Brian Levack, “State Building and Witch Hunting in Early Modern England,” in Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (2010) 213-226.

^[3] News from Scotland, reproduced with annotations in Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland, ed. by Lawrence Normand and Gareth Roberts, 311-312.

^[4] News from Scotland, reproduced with annotations in Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland, ed. by Lawrence Normand and Gareth Roberts, 311-312. 

^[5] Julian Goodare, “Witchcraft in Scotland,” The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, ed. Brian Levack, 300-317; 302.

^[6] Julian Goodare, The Scottish Witch-hunt in Context, Ed. Julian Goodare, 5.

^[7] Goodare, The Scottish Witch-hunt in Context, Ed. Julian Goodare, 6-8.

^[8] Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland, ed. by Lawrence Normand and Gareth Roberts, 136.

^[9] Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland, ed. by Lawrence Normand and Gareth Roberts, 141.

^[10] Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland, ed. by Lawrence Normand and Gareth Roberts, 142.

^[11] Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland, ed. by Lawrence Normand and Gareth Roberts, 142.

^[12] Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland, ed. by Lawrence Normand and Gareth Roberts, 38-40.

^[13] Jenny Wormald, “The Witches, the Devil, and the King,” in Freedom and Authority: Scotland c. 1050-1650 (2000) 177-80.

^[14] Goodare, The Scottish Witch-hunt in Context, Ed. Julian Goodare, 65.

^[15] Lawrence Normand and Gareth Roberts, Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland, 327-330.

^[16] Goodare, The Scottish Witch-hunt in Context, Ed. Julian Goodare, 65.

^[17] Goodare, “Witchcraft in Scotland,” 311.

^[18] Goodare, “Witchcraft in Scotland,” 303.

^[19] Goodare, “Witchcraft in Scotland,” 311.

^[20] Examples include Ireland, Siberia, the Korongo in Sudan, Andaman Islander, Tallness of Ghana, the Rijians, Nagging of New Guinea.

^[21] Hutton, The Scottish Witch-hunt in Context, Ed. Julian Goodare,  20.

^[22] Stuart McDonald, The Scottish Witch-hunt in Context, Ed. Julian Goodare,  34.

^[23] Qtd in Stuart McDonald, The Scottish Witch-hunt in Context, Ed. Julian Goodare, 46.

^[24] Stuart McDonald, The Scottish Witch-hunt in Context, Ed. Julian Goodare, 49.

^[25] Stuart McDonald, The Scottish Witch-hunt in Context, Ed. Julian Goodare, 49.

^[26] Julian Goodare, The Scottish Witch-hunt in Context, Ed. Julian Goodare, 52.

^[27] Goodare, The Scottish Witch-hunt in Context, Ed. Julian Goodare, 70.

^[28] Goodare, The Scottish Witch-hunt in Context, Ed. Julian Goodare, 62.

^[29] Katherine Brice, The Early Stuarts 1603–1640 (1994), 15-19.

^[30] Tamara Wallace, “The Witch-Finder King: A Study of James I of England and his Relationship to Witchcraft,” Undergraduate Thesis, University of Victoria (2023)

^[31] Goodare, The Scottish Witch-hunt in Context, Ed. Julian Goodare,  13.