After hearing these confessions, even though they had been extorted by torture, King James and his advisers came to believe a witchcraft conspiracy threatened his reign. There the devil preached to them and encouraged them to plot the king’s destruction. It was revealed that 200 witches-even some from Denmark-had sailed in sieves to the church of the coastal town of North Berwick on Halloween night in 1590. King James sanctioned witch trials after an alarming confession in 1591 from an accused witch, Agnes Sampson.
Duncan later retracted her confession, but by then the panic was well under way. In late 1590 her employer, David Seton, accused her and tortured her into a confession in which she named several accomplices. One of the first accused in this panic was a woman named Geillis Duncan, from Tranent in East Lothian. Nearly three decades passed before the first major witchcraft panic arose in 1590, when King James came to believe that he and his Danish bride, Anne, had been personally targeted by witches who conjured dangerous storms to try to kill the royals during their voyages across the North Sea. The act made being a witch a capital offence. Scottish Parliament had criminalised witchcraft in 1563, just before James’s birth. Scotland’s susceptibility to widespread panic over witches and witchcraft was, in part, determined by the role of one man: the Scottish ruler King James VI, who, following the death of Elizabeth I, became King James I of England in 1603. ( Watch an animated history of Martin Luther's starting the Reformation.)Īs a result of these panics, out of a population of roughly a million people, about 2,500 accused witches, most of them women, were executed – five times the average European execution rate per capita. In numerical terms, Scotland’s witch hunts were severe. Witch-hunting could be seen as an extension of the Protestant Reformation as parish ministers and government authorities sought to create a “godly state” in which everyone worshipped correctly, and sin and ungodliness were wiped out. ( See how Satan and his punishments were depicted in the Middle Ages.) They perceived the unholy and evil as the source of unrest and disorder. During this period of religious reform, rulers wanted to prove their godliness. After the Reformation divided Europe into Protestant and Catholic in the early 16th century, both sides hunted witches. Burgundy, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and Scandinavia all endured outbreaks of witch panics during this time. Witch-hunting plagued Europe, beginning in the 15th century when the idea that witches worshipped the devil began to take hold. Scotland was not alone in falling victim to witchcraft panics in the late 16th century and first half of the 17th century.
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