How a King made Scotland the witch-hunt capital of Europe

Between the years 1652 and 1656, Scotland’s Privy Council and law courts were both scrapped by Cromwell and the imported English judges took a dim view of evidence obtained under torture – the usual way that the prosecuting authorities obtained “hard” evidence of witchcraft was sleep deprivation leading to hallucination – and the number of successful prosecutions fell to almost nil.

In 1657 the courts were fully restored and the number of prosecutions soared, with 18 burned in Edinburgh alone in 1658, and when King Charles II was put back on the Scottish and English thrones in 1660, the grandson of the great “Witchfinder King”, James VI and I, stood by as hundreds more people were accused of witchcraft.

The phenomenon of King James taking such a personal interest in the prosecution of witches – make that his paranoid persecution of women – has tended to overshadow the role played by organised religion in the horrendous centuries of the “burning time” which lasted from the mid-16th century until 1727 when Janet Horne became the last person in the UK to be executed for witchcraft. To put that in context, her judicial murder took place 20 years after the Act of Union and between the two main Jacobite uprisings, and less than 50 years before Adam Smith published the Wealth of Nations at a time when Scotland was recognised for the Enlightenment.

We will deal with Janet Horne’s case last, but why did Scotland become so obsessed for so long with witchcraft, and how many died? Let’s concentrate on the statistics first to put things in context.

The marvellous Survey of Scottish Witchcraft by Edinburgh University’s history department – by far the largest and best scholarly work on the subject – has identified a “total number of 3837 people who were accused of witchcraft in Scotland.” Of that number, 3212 of these are named and there are a further 625 unnamed people or groups included in the survey’s database. The best guess is that around 4000 people were accused in the “burning time” and slightly less than two-thirds, or about 2500 people, of whom 85 per cent were women, were found guilty and put to death, usually by being burned.

That gives Scotland the unenviable record of burning more witches per head of population than any other country in Europe where most experts agree around 50,000 to 60,000 people were executed as witches in total, i.e. Scotland accounted for 5 per cent of all witch burnings in the whole of Europe.

The vast majority of those accused were aged between 30 and 60, with only 11 per cent over 60, and that at a time when life expectancy was much lower than it is today.

What is really fascinating is the places of origin of those accused. The survey states: “Thirty-two per cent of named accused witches came from the Lothians. Strathclyde and the west produced 14 per cent, and 12 per cent were from Fife, 9 per cent from the Borders, Grampian including Aberdeen produced 7 per cent, Tayside and the Highlands and Islands produced 6 per cent each, 5 per cent were from Caithness, Orkney and Shetland, and 2 per cent from Central region. The remainder came from unknown locations.

“The population of early modern Scotland was more evenly distributed than it is today, so the preponderance of witches in Scotland’s central belt is really striking. The top county for witch-hunting was Haddingtonshire (East Lothian).”

That may well have been largely due to the long and pernicious influence of the North Berwick witch hunts that came about because of King James VI’s obsession with witches, which we will learn about.

He was not alone in that obsession – a book called Malleus Maleficarum, which translates as Hammer of the Witches, was written in what is now Germany in 1487 by Brother Henricus Institoris of the Dominican order of monks. His real name was Heinrich Kramer and he had a grudge against the city of Innsbruck that had kicked him out three years earlier after he tried to prosecute “witches”. The resourceful brother went to the Pope, Innocent VIII, who issued a bull, a decree, backing Kramer.

It is interesting to note the Pope’s words: “It has recently come to our ears, not without great pain to us, that in some parts of upper Germany, many persons of both sexes, heedless of their own salvation and forsaking the catholic faith, give themselves over to devils male and female, and by their incantations, charms, and conjurings, and by other abominable superstitions and sortileges, offences, crimes, and misdeeds, ruin and cause to perish the offspring of women, the foal of animals, the products of the earth, the grapes of vines, and the fruits of trees, as well as men and women, cattle and flocks and herds and animals of every kind, vineyards also and orchards, meadows, pastures, harvests, grains and other fruits of the earth.”

In other words, blame your disasters on witches. Interestingly, Pope Innocent VIII is the same man who appointed Torquemada to head up the Spanish Inquisition…

Kramer’s book on every aspect of witchcraft took the courts of Europe by storm, and when the Reformation came along, both Roman Catholic and Protestant monarchs and the various churches’ authorities began to treat witchcraft in the same way as heresy – to be rooted out by burning.

For numerous historical, cultural and above all religious reasons, Scotland became the witch-burning capital of Europe in the late 16th and 17th centuries.

Scottish culture has always had a fey aspect to it, an acknowledgement of ghosts, bogles, fairies, selkies and “seers” encouraged by the story telling of bards and seannachies in the lowlands and the Highlands.

The Catholic Church had tended to burn people for heresy. Witchcraft was seen as a delusion and victims were pitied and confirmed unless they were also heretics. After the Reformation of 1560, the Church of Scotland took a much harder line on witchcraft with the passing of the Witchcraft Act of 1563 but even so only a handful of people were tried and executed. And then along came King James VI.

James had a well-developed paranoia about people trying to kill him. No wonder – several people had tried to, or had lotted to do so.

In 1590, he was 24-years-old and had been on the throne in his own right for nine years. His involvement in what have become known as the North Berwick witch trials has sullied his reputation ever since.

They actually began in Denmark. James’s Queen Anne and her escort were almost shipwrecked on their voyage to Scotland after her proxy marriage in Kronborg, and the admiral of the Danish Fleet blamed a curse that had been laid upon him by a woman. Soon five women confessed under torture to encouraging the Devil to sink the ships, and two were promptly burned at the stake.

When James heard this he became convinced there was a Scottish angle and North Berwick provided him with suspects thanks mainly to Dr John Fian, or Cunningham, who handily confessed – under severe torture – to being in league with the Devil.

Dozens more were accused as the witch hunt spread. Gellie or Gilly Duncan was the first to be hanged, apparently for playing the pipes for the Devil – she is commemorated by the character Geillis Duncan in the television series Outlander.

It is thought that 100 people across East Lothian were accused, many by their neighbours – one of the most common forms of evidence in witchcraft trials, along with confessions by torture or otherwise and the finding of the “Devil’s Mark” on a person’s skin, which could be anything from a mole to a scar.

After the trials, King James, who genuinely was a scholar, published Daemonologie, an extraordinary book that included his views on magic, witchcraft and also his own “classification of demons”. Reading its introduction tells you all you need to know about the credulous James: “The fearefull aboundinge at this time in this countrie, of these detestable slaves of the Devil, the Witches or enchanters, hath moved me (beloved reader) to dispatch in post, this following treatise of mine... to resolve the doubting...both that such assaults of Satan are most certainly practised, and that the instrument thereof merits most severely to be punished.”

It is known that William Shakespeare based the witchcraft element of Macbeth on James’s book, and the monarch was enraptured by the play.

With Royal approval and the Kirk in its most righteous God-fearing, evil-rooting mode, right through the 17th century, Scotland burned witches. They included Elspeth Reoch, strangled and burned in Kirkwall in 1616 for meeting the Devil, though in truth her obvious mental problems were caused by the men who impregnated her.

William Coke and his common law wife Alison Dick of Kirkcaldy in Fife were burned alive in 1636 after she confessed to romance with the Devil and was prosecuted by the Church. The Kirk Session records from that year are still extant: “The same day, Alison Dick being demanded by Mr James Simson, minister, when, and how, she fell in covenant with the devil? She answered, her husband mony times urged her, and she yielded only two or three years since. The manner was thus He gave her, soul and body, quick and quidder full to the devil, and bade her do so. But she in her heart said, God guide me. And then she said to him, I shall do any thing that ye bid me: and so she gave herself to the devil in the foresaid words.”

Isobel Gowdie, the so-called Queen of the Witches, was burned in 1672. She confessed to being in a coven and being able to transform herself into animals. She gave one of the longest litanies of “witchcraft” ever that is still discussed by scholars today. Isobel described the genitalia of the Devil, and cast a spell on her local minister – no wonder the Kirk wanted her burned, and strangely enough no official record of her death can be found. Isobel has featured in several books and Sir James MacMillan wrote a symphonic work in her memory.

There were many, many more, most of them women persecuted by a misogynistic Church of Scotland whose Kirk Sessions and presbyteries usually conducted the inquiries that led to the charges.

Janet Horne was burned in 1727 in Dornoch for the “crimes” alleged by her neighbours – that she turned her disabled daughter into a horse and had the Devil shoe her. The alternative explanation of senile dementia was not even considered. She was the last “witch” to be executed in the UK as an increasingly secular society turned its back on mediaevalism.

The Scottish Witchcraft Act was repealed by the UK Parliament in 1735. A new crime of ‘pretended witchcraft came into force across the whole of Britain. Quite incredibly, that law was used as late as 1944 when Helen Duncan from Dundee was jailed at the Old Bailey for a contravention of the 1735 Witchcraft Act. Next week we will tell her story.