in Exodus: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”
After an extended sojourn in Denmark, where he may have been educated about the dangers of witchcraft, the king returned to Scotland in 1590 with a new queen and an appetite for burning witches. Given his feelings about marriage, and women in general, it seems somehow fitting that the deeply misogynisticmonarch would, at the time of his nuptials, become a rabid witch hunter.
Scotland had largely avoided the witch persecutions that had swept Europe for centuries. But King James changed all that in the winter of 1590–91 when he encouraged a series of trials based on allegations that more than three hundred witches had gathered at various places and times to work treasonous spells against him. The king was convinced that these so-called servants of Satan conspired to kill him by raising rough seas on his voyage home from Denmark, concocting evil potions, and melting his waxen image while chanting curses.
The king was an enthusiastic participant in many of the trials—cross-examining some defendants, triumphantly heralding the tortured confessions of others, and exhorting juries to send them to the stake. He took particular interest in the case of Barbara Napier, a known associate of his enemy the Earl of Bothwell, * who claimed in her interrogation that she was pregnant. If in fact she was, she would be spared the death penalty if convicted. James, however, wanted to see her reduced to ashes.
“Try by the mediciners’ oaths if Barbara Napier be with bairn [child] or not,” the king instructed his minister John Maitland. “Take no delaying answer. If you find she be not, to the fire with her presently, and cause bowel [disembowel] her publicly.”
James was indignant when the jury in the Napier trial failed to convict her. He was the Lord’s anointed, and
he
said she was guilty. How dare they decide otherwise! It was bad enough that the king’s sacred person had been endangered by the evil arts Barbara practiced, but as he said in a rebuke to the recalcitrant jury, the realm had been endangered as well.
The king insisted that he did not fear death personally. Rather, he was concerned for “the common good of this country, which enjoyeth peace by my life … as you may collect by mine absence, for if such troubles were in breeding whilst I retained life, what would have been done if my life had been taken from me?”
Lest anyone doubt the power of these evil women—witches who worshipped at the feet of Satan, then had sex with him—James attested to the fact that he, too, had been a skeptic. But, as detailed in a tract sanctioned by the king called
News of Scotland
, a witch by the name of Agnes Sampson took him aside and revealed “the very words which passed between the King’s Majesty and his Queen at [Oslo] in Norway, the first night of their marriage, with their answer to each other: where at the King’s Majesty wondered greatly, and swore, by the living God, that he believed that all the devils in hell could not have discovered the same, acknowledging her words to be most true, and therefore gave the more credit to the rest that is before declared.”
The tract did not include the words the king spoke to his bride on their wedding night, though it’s easy to imagine that, because she was not a man, poor Anne must have found his pillow talk wanting.
King James had worked hard to root out the witches who threatened his life and the peace of Scotland, consigning scores of them to the flames. Nevertheless, there were still some who persisted in their skepticism—including the English author Reginald Scot, who with his 1584 treatise
The Discoverie of Witchcraft
set out to methodically disprove the belief that Satan had human mistresses. The king responded with his own book,
Daemonologie
, in which he set out to educate the doubters and, as he wrote, refute “the damnable opinions of two principally in our age, whereof the one called Scot an
After an extended sojourn in Denmark, where he may have been educated about the dangers of witchcraft, the king returned to Scotland in 1590 with a new queen and an appetite for burning witches. Given his feelings about marriage, and women in general, it seems somehow fitting that the deeply misogynisticmonarch would, at the time of his nuptials, become a rabid witch hunter.
Scotland had largely avoided the witch persecutions that had swept Europe for centuries. But King James changed all that in the winter of 1590–91 when he encouraged a series of trials based on allegations that more than three hundred witches had gathered at various places and times to work treasonous spells against him. The king was convinced that these so-called servants of Satan conspired to kill him by raising rough seas on his voyage home from Denmark, concocting evil potions, and melting his waxen image while chanting curses.
The king was an enthusiastic participant in many of the trials—cross-examining some defendants, triumphantly heralding the tortured confessions of others, and exhorting juries to send them to the stake. He took particular interest in the case of Barbara Napier, a known associate of his enemy the Earl of Bothwell, * who claimed in her interrogation that she was pregnant. If in fact she was, she would be spared the death penalty if convicted. James, however, wanted to see her reduced to ashes.
“Try by the mediciners’ oaths if Barbara Napier be with bairn [child] or not,” the king instructed his minister John Maitland. “Take no delaying answer. If you find she be not, to the fire with her presently, and cause bowel [disembowel] her publicly.”
James was indignant when the jury in the Napier trial failed to convict her. He was the Lord’s anointed, and
he
said she was guilty. How dare they decide otherwise! It was bad enough that the king’s sacred person had been endangered by the evil arts Barbara practiced, but as he said in a rebuke to the recalcitrant jury, the realm had been endangered as well.
The king insisted that he did not fear death personally. Rather, he was concerned for “the common good of this country, which enjoyeth peace by my life … as you may collect by mine absence, for if such troubles were in breeding whilst I retained life, what would have been done if my life had been taken from me?”
Lest anyone doubt the power of these evil women—witches who worshipped at the feet of Satan, then had sex with him—James attested to the fact that he, too, had been a skeptic. But, as detailed in a tract sanctioned by the king called
News of Scotland
, a witch by the name of Agnes Sampson took him aside and revealed “the very words which passed between the King’s Majesty and his Queen at [Oslo] in Norway, the first night of their marriage, with their answer to each other: where at the King’s Majesty wondered greatly, and swore, by the living God, that he believed that all the devils in hell could not have discovered the same, acknowledging her words to be most true, and therefore gave the more credit to the rest that is before declared.”
The tract did not include the words the king spoke to his bride on their wedding night, though it’s easy to imagine that, because she was not a man, poor Anne must have found his pillow talk wanting.
King James had worked hard to root out the witches who threatened his life and the peace of Scotland, consigning scores of them to the flames. Nevertheless, there were still some who persisted in their skepticism—including the English author Reginald Scot, who with his 1584 treatise
The Discoverie of Witchcraft
set out to methodically disprove the belief that Satan had human mistresses. The king responded with his own book,
Daemonologie
, in which he set out to educate the doubters and, as he wrote, refute “the damnable opinions of two principally in our age, whereof the one called Scot an
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