The evidence.
A witch kissed the arse of the Devil
Scotland was not alone in falling victim to witchcraft panics; Burgundy, Italy, Switzerland, Germany and Scandinavia all endured outbreaks of witch panic. Burning witches alive was common in Germany and other parts of Europe in the late C16th and the early C17th. Note in Scotland the convicted were usually strangled first.
After the Reformation split Europe into Protestant and Catholic in the C16th, both sides worried about witches. But during this period of religious reform, Protestant rulers were most committed. Witch-hunting was virtually an extension of the Protestant Reformation as parish ministers and government authorities sought to create a “godly state” in which everyone worshipped correctly; sin was wiped out; and disorder prevented.
Scotland’s witch hunts were frequent. From 1590, intense panics erupted in Scotland: 1590-91, 1597, 1628-1631, 1649-1650 and 1661-62. As a result, c2,500 accused witches out of a population of a million people were executed, mostly women - 5 times the average European execution rate!
Scottish Parliament criminalised witchcraft in 1563, just before King James VI's birth. Nearly 30 years passed before the first major witchcraft panic arose in 1590, when King James and his Danish Queen were personally targeted by witches. These enemies conjured dangerous storms to try to kill the royals during their North Sea voyages.
One of the first accused in this panic was Geillis Duncan, from Tranent in East Lothian. In the late 1590 her employer accused her and tortured her into a confession in which she named several accomplices. Duncan later retracted her confession, but by then the panic was well under way.
So Scotland’s widespread panics over witches was largely determined by the role of King James VI. He sanctioned witch trials after an alarming confession in 1591 from an accused witch, Agnes Sampson, revealing that 200 witches heard the devil preach to them, to plot the king’s ruination.
Supervised by King James VI of Scotland
Image credits: History of Scotland
Many witches were put to death. During the North Berwick trials (1590) alone, 100+ people were implicated. The Scottish king personally supervised the torture of witches, whenever he could.
Six years later another panic broke out. Again witches were reported to be conspiring against King James personally. A woman named Margaret Aitken, Great Witch of Balwearie, claimed a special power to detect other witches, many of whom were put to death on her word alone. This panic halted abruptly when Aitken was exposed as a fraud. This incident embarrassed witch-hunters greatly, so partly to justify the recent trials, King James published his intellectual treatise, Daemonologie in 1597.
Daemonologie explained how Satan operated in the world. He was the leader of fallen angels who became demons. These demons made pacts with people and granted them powers to work harmful magic. Thus witchcraft was a secret conspiracy between humans and demons, and against this conspiracy, true Christians’ only hope was to appeal to God.
Consider the witches in Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth. First performed in 1606, the play was a compliment to the newly crowned King James I and his book Daemonologie.
After the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603, King James VI inherited her throne and moved south to London as King James I of England. There was a new religious opponent: militant Catholics. Catholic conspiracies threatened his claim on the English throne, in much the same way the North Berwick witches had threatened him in Scotland. After the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, Guy Fawkes’ plan to blow up Parliament and kill the king, James turned away from hunting witches in favour of rooting out Catholic conspiracies.
Daemonologie explained how Satan operated in the world. He was the leader of fallen angels who became demons. These demons made pacts with people and granted them powers to work harmful magic. Thus witchcraft was a secret conspiracy between humans and demons, and against this conspiracy, true Christians’ only hope was to appeal to God.
Consider the witches in Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth. First performed in 1606, the play was a compliment to the newly crowned King James I and his book Daemonologie.
After the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603, King James VI inherited her throne and moved south to London as King James I of England. There was a new religious opponent: militant Catholics. Catholic conspiracies threatened his claim on the English throne, in much the same way the North Berwick witches had threatened him in Scotland. After the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, Guy Fawkes’ plan to blow up Parliament and kill the king, James turned away from hunting witches in favour of rooting out Catholic conspiracies.
Even though King James’s attentions shifted, witchcraft fear had already permeated Scottish society, and witch-hunting took place in areas near the centres of state power eg Fife and Lothian. And fear of the devil was at its peak when the state was determined to enforce religious uniformity.
Most practical measures to weed out witches were taken by the local leaders of Scottish society, the lairds/local aristocrats and ministers. They formed kirk sessions/parish committees to supervise the people and to bring them to godliness. Kirk sessions were not criminal courts, but they could arrest and interrogate suspects and pass cases on to the secular authorities. Especially extramarital sex cases!
The main type of an accused witch was an elderly, crabby female – a woman who irritated her neighbours. But once the initial suspect was tortured to name accomplices, they too could be accused of having made a pact with the devil. Remember that 85% of the convicted witches were women.
Sleep deprivation was the most common method of torture. After 3 days without sleep, the suspect would lose the ability to resist the questioners, and would also start to hallucinate, giving very strange confessions. These were not sober accounts of real activities; they were fantasies from terrified women, desperately trying to satisfy their interrogators.
In the late C17th religious pluralism became more acceptable. New scientific ideas undermined the dogmatic certainty about witchcraft. Courts refused to accept confessions that might have been extorted by torture. Witch-hunting became less vital to the state, and there were no more national panics after 1662.
In the small fishing town of Pittenweem in 1704, an event illustrated what happened when the locals feared witches, but the authorities would no longer execute them. Four of the women confessed to witchcraft, then retracted their confessions. The central authorities in Edinburgh forbade a trial, and the suspects had to be released. For all the horror of mob justice, the Pittenweem case was among Scotland’s last witch panics.
In 1736, Britain's Parliament repealed the old (1563) witchcraft statute. Since then small monuments have been erected in Scotland to witch panic victims, 400 years ago.