KNOWN AS THE ‘cradle king’, James had become the nominal ruler of Scotland at the age of just 13 months, following the enforced abdication of his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1567. She had subsequently fled to England, where she remained Elizabeth I’s captive for almost 20 years, until her execution in 1587.
The lonely and often dangerously volatile childhood that James endured may account for the fearful, suspicious, almost neurotic nature that became increasingly manifest in adulthood. From his earliest infancy, he had endured a series of shocks. Whilst still in his mother’s womb, he had been threatened by the murder of his mother’s favourite, David Rizzio, which had almost caused Mary to miscarry. At only a few months old, he had survived the murder of his father, the despised Lord Darnley. As a youth, he had narrowly escaped a host of plots and assassination attempts. In 1579, John Stewart, Earl of Mar, younger brother of James III, was accused of ‘consulting with witches and sorcerers, in order to shorten the king’s days’. Before he could be brought to trial, he was ‘bled to death in his own lodgings’.1 Twelve witches, and three or four wizards, were subsequently accused of being his accomplices and were burned at Edinburgh.
Throughout this turbulent time, James had been taught to revile the weakness and licentiousness of his absent mother, and this deepened into a more general antipathy towards women. His mother’s violent death also seems to have inspired a dark fascination with magic. ‘His Highnesse tolde me her deathe was visible in Scotlande before it did really happen,’ related Sir John Harington many years later, ‘being, as he said, “spoken of in secrete by those whose power of sighte presentede to them a bloodie heade dancinge in the aire”. Hereat, he namede many bookes, which I did not knowe, nor by whom written; but advisede me not to consult some authors which woulde leade me to evile consultations. I tolde his Majestie, “the power of Satan had, I muche fearede, damagede my bodilie frame; but I had not farther will to cowrte his friendshipe, for my soules hurte.”’2
A fragile and sickly child, for the first six or seven years of his life James had been unable to stand up or walk without assistance. ‘His legs were verey weake, having as was thought some foule play in his youth, or rather before he was borne, that hee was not able to stand at seven yeares of age,’ remarked one of his earliest biographers.3 As a young man, he had been able to indulge his love of riding only by being tied on to his horse, and throughout his life he tended to walk while leaning on the shoulder of an attendant. Little wonder that he had always preferred studying to physical pursuits.
Although far short of being a great intellectual, James’s mental abilities compensated to some degree for his physical deficiencies. He was a product of the strict Scottish Reformation. From an early age he was trained by scholars of the Protestant faith, and he grew up with a strong aversion to Catholicism. Because the latter was closely entwined with sorcery in the minds of many of his contemporaries, it was perhaps natural that the King of Scots should develop a deep-seated suspicion of witchcraft. The scholarly nature of his burgeoning interest in the subject was attested to by a contemporary, who described how he was ‘ever apt to search into secrets, to try conclusions, as I did know some who saw him run to see one in a fit whom they said was bewitched’.4
In 1589, beset by political turmoil at home and abroad, James resolved to strengthen his position by making an advantageous alliance with a foreign bride. His choice fell upon Anne of Denmark, and on 18 June his earl marshal left Scotland on a mission to Copenhagen to arrange the contract. The marriage was celebrated by proxy on 20 August, and Anne set sail for her new country. But three weeks later, there was still no sign of her fleet approaching Scotland. On 12 September, Lord Dingwall, one of James’s closest advisers, arrived at Leith with grave news. He told how he had ‘come in company with the Queen’s fleet three hundred miles, and was separated from them by a great storm: it was feared that the Queen was in danger upon the seas’. Upon hearing the news, King James, who had been waiting anxiously at Seton House, overlooking the Firth of Forth, became ‘very impatient and sorrowful for her long delay’, and ordered a fast to be held to ensure his bride’s safe arrival. When October arrived with no further tidings of the lost fleet, James dispatched Colonel Stewart to Norway ‘to see what was word of the Queen’. Keen to play the romantic hero, he wrote an impassioned letter for the colonel to give to Anne, in which he spoke of ‘the fear which ceaselessly pierces my heart’ and his longing to see the object of ‘all his love’.5
It did not take Colonel Stewart long to reach Norway, and he soon sent word back to James that Queen Anne’s fleet had been battered back by violent storms. With the onset of winter, her sailors had decided to abandon the voyage until the weather turned more clement. In a display of uncharacteristic bravery and decisiveness, James immediately declared that he would sail across the North Sea and collect his bride himself. The reason for his haste had less to do with romantic notions than a determination to prove his masculinity. Rumours were abounding about his relationship with his new favourite, Alexander Lindsay, who was whispered to be the King’s ‘nightly bed-fellow’.6 In a letter to his subjects written shortly before his departure, James lamented that ‘the want of hope of succession bred disdain. Yes, my long delay bred in the breasts of many a great jealousy [suspicion] of my inability, as if I were a barren stock.’ He thereby justified his sudden departure, assuring his people: ‘I am known, God be praised, not to be intemperately rash nor conceity [flighty] in my weightiest affairs, neither use I to be so carried away with passion as I refuse to hear reason.’7
The Scottish king reached Norway without incident, and finally met his bride in Oslo on 19 November. The Danish nobles who had assembled to greet him observed that he was ‘a tall, slim gentleman thin under the eyes’, very richly dressed in red and gold velvet. They looked on in astonishment as, without hesitation, James strode up to Anne and gave her ‘a kiss after the Scots fashion at meeting, which she refused as not being the form of her country’. Desperate to avoid further humiliation, James urgently whispered some words of encouragement in her ear, which evidently had the desired effect, for shortly afterwards ‘there passed familiarity and kisses’, and the encounter was declared ‘a joyful meeting on all sides’.8 The couple were married four days later.
Now in the midst of a Scandinavian winter, James had no intention of braving the seas again until the weather grew warmer. He therefore spent a pleasant few months with his new wife at Elsinore Castle in Denmark, where he ‘made good cheer and drank stoutly till the springtime’.9 But the Scottish king’s visit was not all about revelry and overindulgence. On his travels through his wife’s native land, he met a number of intellectuals and philosophers, including a leading Danish theologian named Niels Hemmingsen. As well as being a staunch Calvinist, Hemmingsen was also a noted demonologist. He and James had a lengthy debate about theological issues, and the Scottish king afterwards confessed to being so impressed by the elderly theologian that their meeting stood out as one of the highlights of his visit. Similarly influential was James’s meeting with Tycho Brahe, a renowned astronomer. Brahe was a fervent believer in the existence of witchcraft, and attempted to convince James of its dangers. Witches were actively hunted out in Denmark, where the theory of a demonic pact had been widely accepted. The Scottish king was apparently greatly inspired by the Danish example, and it was during this visit that the seeds of his own witch hunting fervour were sown.
James’s pleasant sojourn in Denmark could not last for ever, and with the onset of spring he could no longer ignore the calls of his advisers to return to Scotland and bring order to the rebellious subjects who had made the most of his absence. But despite the milder weather, the crossing was once more to prove difficult. The royal fleet was battered by violent storms and one of the ships was lost. James immediately placed the blame on witches, claiming that they must have cast evil spells upon his fleet. Thenceforth, his fascination with witchcraft deepened into a dangerous obsession.
Witchcraft had been on the Scottish law books since 1563, but until now it had gone virtually unprosecuted. All of that changed with James’s return from Denmark. Fired up by the likes of Hemmingsen and Brahe, he was determined to introduce similarly harsh measures against witches in his native land. His turbulent sea voyage presented him with the perfect opportunity. With bewildering speed, a hundred suspected witches were arrested and examined, and their ‘devilish’ plot to drown the Scottish king and his new wife was uncovered.
During the course of the interrogations, one of the prisoners, Agnes Sampson, alleged that the plot had been masterminded by James’s deadliest enemy, Francis Stewart, Earl of Bothwell. A staunch Roman Catholic, Bothwell had a strong bloodline to the Scottish throne because his father was the illegitimate son of James V. But his claim was only valid while James remained without an heir, so the earl had good reason to prevent the passage of the king’s new wife. According to Sampson’s account, Bothwell had promised ‘gold and silver and victual’ to all those who agreed to help bring about the King’s death.10 He was also said to have been a skilful necromancer who held frequent communication with witches.
Rumours of witchcraft had long been employed to do away with political opponents, as Elizabeth Woodville and Anne Boleyn had found to their cost, and Bothwell’s enemies at court seized upon Sampson’s testimony as an ideal opportunity to be rid of him. He was duly called before the Privy Council on 15 April 1591, and although he stoutly denied the charges against him, he was summarily imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle. He escaped two months later, and the Privy Council put out an urgent appeal for his capture, declaring that the earl had ‘had consultation with necromancers, witches and other wicked and ungodly persons, both without and within his country, for bereaving of his Highness’s life’. Moreover, he had given himself ‘over altogether in[to] the hands of Satan, heaping treason upon treason against God, his Majesty and this his native country’.11 But Bothwell had considerable support across Scotland, and not only evaded escape, but turned from prey into predator, terrifying James by raiding the royal palaces of Holyroodhouse and Falkland while the king was in residence. On one such occasion, James heard a disturbance in the chamber next to his own. Rushing to see what had happened, he was aghast to discover his mortal enemy kneeling next to his sword – a sign that Bothwell considered he had control of the palace but would not use his power to harm the king. Paralysed by fear, James (who believed the earl had satanic powers) screamed that Bothwell might take his life, but he would never have his immortal soul. Upon the arrival of some courtiers, the king regained his com-posure and bargained with the earl. It was agreed that Bothwell would be tried for his offences, but then acquitted and released into exile.
The women with whom he was said to have conspired were less fortunate. They had been arrested and interrogated as soon as the ‘conspiracy’ had come to light. At the same time, arrests had been made in Denmark. Soon after James and Anne’s departure, an investigation had been launched into why her first attempt to embark for Scotland had failed. Peter Munk, the admiral of the fleet, was questioned by the authorities. He was quick to deflect the blame on to Copenhagen’s governor, Christoffer Valkendorf, for failing to keep the navy in order, and took his complaint to Denmark’s supreme court. The latter found in favour of Valkendorf and declared that gales had been the cause for the fleet’s aborted voyage. However, the governor pointed out that these gales may have been generated not by nature but by witchcraft. At around the same time, an English spy in Copenhagen reported that Munk ‘hathe generated five or six witches to be taken in Coupnahaven, upon suspicion that by their witche craft they had staied the Queen of Scottes voiage into Scotland, and sought to have staied likewise the King’s retorne’. The threat or implementation of torture was used to wring confessions out of all of the women, who admitted to sending demons to climb aboard Anne’s ship and pull it under the waves.12 They were sentenced to death.
Meanwhile, in Scotland, the first to confess was a young woman named Geillis (or Gilly) Duncan, a servant in the house of David Seaton, deputy bailiff of the small town of Tranent on the shores of the Firth of Forth, about nine miles east of Edinburgh. She had recently gained renown for her skill in curing diseases, ‘and for doing other things which gave rise to the belief that the agency by which she worked was something more than natural’.13 Her master’s suspicions were further aroused when he discovered that she was secretly leaving his house every other night. Together with some of his acquaintance he interrogated Geillis and subjected her to ‘grievous torture’, which included the use of ‘pilliwinks’ – a device similar to thumbscrews.14
Geillis subsequently made a full confession. According to her testimony, she had been part of an extensive network of witches – the names of 70 conspirators are listed in the records – who had plotted the king’s death and that of his new bride. They included Agnes Sampson, described as ‘a woman not of the base and ignorant sort of witches, but matron-like, grave, and settled in her answers’.15 She confessed that one All Hallows’ Eve ‘she was accompanied . . . with a great many other witches, to the number of two hundred, and that all they together went to sea, each one in a riddle or sieve, and went into the same very substantially, with flaggons of wine, making merry and drinking by the way, in the same riddles or sieves, to the kirk of North Barrick, in Lowthian, and that after they had landed, took hands on the land, and danced this reel or short dance, singing all with one voice, “Comer go ye before, comer go ye/If ye will not go before, comer let me.”’16
On another occasion, after hearing that the new queen had embarked for Scotland, they had undertaken a gruesome ritual which involved taking a cat and christening it with the name of their intended victim (presumably either Queen Anne or King James) and then binding the severed genitalia and limbs of a dead man to each of its legs. The witches then sailed out to sea and tossed the cat into the waves, whereupon ‘there did arise such a tempest in the sea, as a greater hath not been seen’.17 They had used similar means to impede James’s voyage to Denmark, and when both he and Anne had finally embarked for Scotland, Satan himself had appeared to the witches and ‘promised to raise a mist, and cast the king into England, for which purpose he threw into the sea a thing like a foot-ball’. One witness claimed to have seen ‘a vapour and smoke rise from the spot where it touched the water’.18
King James himself presided over the interrogation of Agnes Sampson at Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh. When she ‘stood stiffly in denial’ of the charges against her, she ‘had all her hair shaved off, in each part of her body, and her head thrawn [wrenched] with a rope according to the custom of that country, being a pain most grievous’. All of this continued for an hour, while the king looked on with ‘great delight’. There then followed the most dramatic moment of the interrogation when James, responding to something that Agnes had said, leapt up in fury and declared her a liar. But she calmly took him to one side and convinced him of her magical powers by telling him certain ‘secret matters’ that had passed between him and his new wife on their wedding night. Whether she made a calculated guess or had genuine psychic ability, James was astounded at her revelation. ‘The King’s Majesty wondered greatly, and swore by the living God, that he believed 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.’19 He immediately ordered that the torture must stop, for he was now convinced that she was telling the truth. This had no doubt been the purpose of Agnes’s audacious ploy. Even the prospect of death was more welcome than the prolonged agony and humiliation of torture. Although she escaped the horror of burning, which a number of her co-conspirators had suffered, her fate was hardly less appalling. She was taken to the castle hill in Edinburgh and bound to a stake, then ‘wirreit’ (strangled) until she was dead. Her remains were then burned to ashes.20
Barbara Napier, another woman who was implicated in the case, was rather more fortunate. As the crowds gathered to witness her execution in May 1591, her friends made the claim that she was pregnant. This was enough to bring proceedings to a halt until such time as it could be proved whether Barbara really was in this condition. The jury refused to find her guilty of treason on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence. When he heard of this, James was so enraged that he called for a new trial against her and began legal proceedings against the jury members themselves. He instructed his agent: ‘Try by the mediciners’ oaths if Barbara be with bairn or not. Take no delaying answer. If you find she be not, to the fire with her presently’, adding that she should be first disembowelled so that the crowds might see that she had not been with child.21 There is no record of Barbara ever having been executed, so either she really was pregnant and by the time she gave birth the king’s wrath had cooled, or his advisers persuaded him that, legally speaking, he was on shaky ground. The affair rankled with James, and he was quick to point out that he himself had almost lost his life as a result of this witchcraft conspiracy, warning his subjects: ‘If such troubles were in breeding whilst I retained my life, what would have been done if my life had been taken from me?’22
The trial of the North Berwick witches made a profound and lasting impression upon the young king. Agnes Sampson had testified that the Devil hated him ‘By reason the king is the greatest enemie hee hath in the world’.23 This cast James in the role of avenging knight of the Christian faith – a role that he wholeheartedly embraced. He became convinced that the more vigorously he persecuted those suspected of conspiring with the Devil, the less power the Devil would have over him or his kingdom. By setting himself up as God’s chief advocate on earth, he acquired a dangerously free hand to hunt down witches with as much severity as he wished. The speech that he made at the acquittal of Barbara Napier made this ominously clear: ‘As I have this begun, so purpose I to go forward; not because I am James Stuart, and can command so many thousands of men, but because God hath made me a King and judge to judge righteous judgement.’24
With all the passion of a religious zealot, James set about convincing his subjects of the evil that lay in their midst. As soon as the North Berwick trials had ended, he commissioned Newes from Scotland, a pamphlet that relayed the whole saga in scandalised language aimed at whipping up popular fear of witches. Cases of witchcraft became increasingly prevalent in Scotland from the late sixteenth century, to the extent that it was ‘an object of more universal and unhesitating belief than in almost any other country’.25 King James VI was said to have taken an ‘extraordinary interest’ in all of them.26
The Scottish king’s growing obsession with witches led him to incite his subjects to be ever more watchful for signs of ‘devilish practises’ in their local communities. Others went a step further by making up cases in order to gratify the king’s curiosity. Even men of high rank became involved, such as in 1596 when John Stewart, the master of Orkney, was accused of having employed witches to bring about the death of Patrick, Earl of Orkney. This case, like so many others, was probably motivated by ambition or revenge, but the involvement of such prominent persons gave credence to the growing belief in the existence of witches.
The following year, James VI became the only monarch in history to publish a treatise on witchcraft. The book was the result of painstaking and meticulous work on James’s part, and must have taken years to complete. Early versions of the manuscript still survive and show more than a hundred amendments made by the king’s own hand. The finished version, Daemonologie (literally, the science of demons), was an 80-page quarto which went through several editions and was later translated into Latin, French and Dutch. Although lacking in original or profound ideas, the fact that it had been written by a king made it enormously influential.
The book masqueraded as an intellectual debate on the likelihood of the existence of witches, being written as a dialogue between two educated and informed men, but it was clear that the Scottish king was already a devout believer. In the preface, he declared that he wished to convince the ‘doubting hearts of many’ that the ‘assaults of Satan are most certainly practiced’. He spoke of ‘the fearful abounding at this time, in this country, of these detestable slaves of the Devil, the witches or enchanters’, and accused those who had attempted to disprove their existence as being ‘of that profession’.
The lengthy debate between ‘Philomathes’ (the doubter) and ‘Epistemon’ (the believer) begins with the latter – who is clearly a mouthpiece for James’s own views – setting out his reasons for believing in the existence of witches. He claims that witchcraft is ‘clearly proved by the Scriptures . . . and by daily experience and confessions’.27 There follows a detailed discussion about the various magical arts, and how witchcraft differs from necromancy, astrology from astronomy, and so on. This proves (as it was no doubt intended to) the impressive array of works that James had consulted, which made him one of the leading authorities on the subject.
Although James tried to mask his maniacal obsession with witchcraft by constructing an apparently calm and rational debate between two intellectuals, the hatred and terror that he felt towards the ‘instruments of Satan’ becomes increasingly apparent as the book progresses. In particular, his description of witches’ power verges on the hysterical, as he lays virtually all of the evils of the world at their door. Not only could they ‘make men or women to love or hate [each] other’, they could ‘lay the sickness of one upon another . . . bewitch and take the life of men or women . . . raise storms and tempests in the air . . . make folks to become frantic or maniac . . . make spirits either to follow and trouble persons, or haunt certain houses . . . And likewise they can make some to be possessed with spirits, and so to become very demoniacs.’28 His hysteria proved dangerously infectious. Anyone who read and was influenced by the book (and there were many) would henceforth look with suspicion upon their neighbours when even the slightest misfortune befell them. Moreover, the king made it plain that the only way to rid the world of such evils was to hunt down, arrest and execute the perpetrators. By offering their life as a ‘sacrifice’ to God, the authorities would lift the curse placed upon the witches’ victims.
As well as to convince those who doubted the existence of witchcraft, the purpose of Daemonologie was to inspire those who persecuted witches in Scotland and England with new vigour and determination. James described witchcraft as ‘high treason against God’, which meant that all manner of horrors were justified in wringing confessions from them and meting out punishments.29 Realising that some might be reluctant to prosecute witches for fear of recrimination, James cleverly argued that this would only happen if they were not severe enough in their punishments. ‘If he [a magistrate] be slothful towards them, God is very able to make them instruments to waken and punish his sloth,’ he claimed. ‘But if he be the contrary, he according to the just law of God, and allowable law of all nations, will be diligent in examining and punishing them, God will not permit their Master [Satan] to trouble or hinder so good a work.’30
One of the most dangerous pieces of reasoning in the book concerned the condemnation of those accused of witchcraft. According to James, ‘God will not permit that any innocent person shall be slandered with that vile defection.’31 In short, an accusation was a sufficient proof of guilt. Moreover, he argued that even those who were suspected of being present at sabbats – which the magistrates and members of the jury knew to be imaginary – should be condemned and executed because God would not have allowed them to be accused of being present unless they really had been. Little wonder that under his direction the witch hunts gathered such terrifying momentum, and the atmosphere of fear and suspicion within local communities soon reached fever pitch.
Upon the subject of how a convicted witch should be punished, James was emphatic: ‘They ought to be put to death according to the law of God, the civil and imperial law, and municipal law of all Christian nations.’ His personal preference was for death ‘by fire’, but he admitted that the method of execution depended upon the laws and customs of each country. None should be spared, except children – for, James argued, ‘they are not that capable of reason as to practice such things’. Otherwise, a prince or magistrate should not hesitate to exact the ultimate punishment. James warned that ‘not to strike when God bids strike, and so severely punish in so odious a fault and treason against God . . . is not only unlawful, but doubtless . . . comparable to the sin of witchcraft itself’.32
By the time that Daemonologie was published, witchcraft had already been a statutory crime in Scotland for over 30 years. It was a capital offence to use spells and invoke the power of the Devil, who ‘will attend them in some familiar shape of Rat, Cat, Toade, Birde, Cricket etc.’.33 James now established a commission to hunt out witches in his kingdom. Before long, an ever-increasing number of women were being summarily arrested and tried, and almost half of them were executed – often on the flimsiest of evidence. His subjects were actively encouraged to inform upon those whom they believed to be witches. Inside every church was a wooden box or chest into which anyone could post a scroll of paper with the name of the person they suspected, together with a few cursory details of their crime. These chests were opened every 15 days by officials specially appointed to the task, and action would duly be taken against the persons named therein. The system was praised by the notorious French witch hunter Jean Bodin, who claimed that otherwise ‘poor simple people fear witches more than they do God or all the magistrates, and do not dare to come forward as accusers, or as informers’.34 But the image of a community too terrified to name the evildoers in their midst did not bear much relation to reality. The anonymity of the Scottish system tempted many men and women to make accusations not just against suspected witches, but against neighbours with whom they had quarrelled or any other members of the community against whom they bore a grudge. The potential for abuse was therefore considerable.
With such incentives to concoct a case against members of the community, it is little wonder that many thousands of innocent people were accused and tried as witches. Even George Gifford, one of the most influential witchcraft writers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, admitted that the general climate of fear, suspicion and vengeance was likely to produce many false accusations: ‘These things taking root in the hearts of the people, and so making them afraide of Witches, and raising up suspitions and rumors of sundry innocent persons, many giltles.’35
Although the witch hunts gathered a terrifying momentum from the mid sixteenth to the mid seventeenth centuries, they had their origins much earlier in history. The Bible contains many references to witches, sorcerers, necromancers and other practitioners of the dark arts. One of the most striking episodes is in the first Book of Samuel, which tells how, on the eve of a great battle, King Saul of Israel sought out a woman who was known to communicate with the dead. Rather than obtaining the hoped-for guidance from her, his encounter merely invoked the wrath of Samuel’s ghost, who berated Saul for consulting with a witch.36 There are many other illustrations of witchcraft in the Old Testament. ‘In the tyme of Moses it was very ryfe in Egypt,’ claimed one source. ‘The Devill was exceeding crafty from the beginning. Alwaies labouring to seduce and deceive after the woorst manner.’37 The punishments for witchcraft prescribed by the Bible were of the severest kind. According to Exodus: ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’ Meanwhile, Leviticus urged: ‘A man or also a woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death. They shall stone them with stones; their blood shall be upon them.’38
The beginning of serious official action against witches was signalled by a papal bull issued in December 1484 by Pope Innocent VIII.39 The bull, which was widely printed and circulated, decried those who had ‘abused themselves with devils, incubi and succubi, and by their incantations, spells, conjurations, and other accursed superstitions and horrid charms, enormities and offences, destroy the offspring of women and the young of cattle, blast and eradicate the fruits of the earth, the grapes of the vine and the fruits of trees’. In order to eradicate such evil, Innocent VIII gave great powers to the inquisitors responsible for rooting out such ‘heretical depravity’, urging them to employ ‘the necessary, appropriate and legally ordained inquisition into and punishment, correction, castigation and improvement of such excesses, crimes and misdeeds.’40
The significance of the bull was that it declared that witchcraft was heresy. Until then, witches had been viewed merely as magicians who could command special powers to do good or evil. But now they were condemned as Devil-worshippers who had rejected God and the Christian faith in order to serve Satan. This was a crime against the church which must not be left unpunished. It was easy to justify this, thanks to the various references within the Bible to the importance of doing away with sorcery of all kinds. The fact that the Bible appeared to sanction the persecution of witches gave enormous power to those who sought to eradicate them from society. It also proved one of the most enduring justifications for the witch hunts. Even as late as the mid eighteenth century, the Methodist preacher John Wesley claimed that ‘giving up witchcraft is, in effect, giving up the Bible’.41
Although there was ample justification for the bull, it is unlikely that Innocent VIII was acting out of a genuine concern for the evil that witches might inflict upon the population. It is no coincidence that the great witch hunt coincided with the Renaissance, a period in which the church’s authority was severely threatened. By whipping up a climate of fear and suspicion, and setting itself up as the chief means of protection against the powers of darkness, the papacy and its representatives spied its best chance of survival.
Significant though it undoubtedly was, the papal bull only related to Germany. However, it was closely followed by the publication of Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), an enormously influential work which used the bull as its justification to spearhead a great witch hunt across the Continent. Written by two Dominican friars in Cologne, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, the book was reprinted 13 times by 1520, and a further 16 times by 1660. Echoing the words of the bull, the authors whipped up popular fear and suspicion of the ‘very many persons’ at large in communities across Europe who were intent upon committing ‘unspeakable superstitions and acts of sorcery’ against men, women, children, animals and crops. These malcontents would not rest until they had ‘killed, suffocated and wiped out’ anyone who was unfortunate enough to cross their path.42
The idea that witches did not work alone but were part of a widespread anti-Christian sect struck terror into the hearts of all those who read the book – just as the authors intended. At this time, there were many who doubted the existence of witches, a fact that Kramer and Sprenger confronted head on as ‘obstinacy’ and ‘heresy’. Among them was the leading light of the Italian Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci. Although he did not altogether rule out the possibility that witches existed, he claimed that only the uneducated really believed in them: ‘Undoubtedly if this necromancy did exist, as is believed by shallow minds, there is nothing on earth that would have so much power either to harm or to benefit man.’43 By creating the idea of a witchcraft conspiracy, the authors cleverly lent a new urgency to the eradication of the dark arts. It was one thing to have a troublesome old woman in the community whose curses, spells and potions might or might not be effective; quite another to imagine her as part of a mass conspiracy led by the Devil which aimed at the destruction of Christianity. The idea was quick to take hold. After all, did not the Bible teach that ‘rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft’?44
As well as providing a comprehensive and extraordinarily detailed account of the various forms of witchcraft and sorcery, the Malleus Maleficarum also set out the methods that the ecclesiastical and secular authorities should employ to punish the crime. The exact wording that judges should use in beginning proceedings was stipulated, as well as the number of witnesses required, how their statements should be recorded, and the means by which the accused should be interrogated – including the methods of torture to be employed if they proved unwilling to confess.45
The Malleus Maleficarum was in effect a step-by-step guide to the successful hunting down and prosecution of witches, which made it easy – indeed, essential – for those in authority to reach a guilty verdict. Although it became enormously influential on the Continent and ran into many editions, its significance should not be overstated. It did not, on its own, spark the witch craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Neither was its influence on the same scale in every country: it would be a full century before its potential was realised in England. There were also those (albeit small in number) who refused to adhere to its ‘silly and godless absurdities’.46 But from the late sixteenth century, it became an invaluable source of reference for all those involved in the arrest, interrogation and trial of witches. Its contents were devoured by the pamphleteers and polemicists of the late Elizabethan era, who used it as an inspiration for their own works.
Stoked by the Malleus Maleficarum and other incendiary publications aimed at whipping up public fear and suspicion, the witch craze rapidly took hold in Continental Europe. Between the early fifteenth and mid seventeenth centuries, as many as 100,000 people were tried as witches, of whom at least 40,000 were executed. Around half of these lived in German lands within the Holy Roman Empire, which formed the epicentre of the European craze. Mass executions of literally hundreds of witches took place in Germany and France, and one notorious trial in northern Spain lasted for five years and involved a staggering 7,000 cases.47
The ‘Grand Tour’ of Europe that Francis Manners had undertaken as a young man coincided with the very peak of the witch hunts. He had also visited the two countries where the persecutions were so intense that they served as a model for the rest of Europe to follow. In frequenting the courts of Germany and France, Manners could not fail to have encountered evidence of witch hunts, interrogations and trials. Given that witch-burnings were popular spectator sports, he may well have taken his place among the audience. The German witch hunt, in particular, was notorious for its brutality, as one contemporary observed: ‘That Nation was so carried away with that darksome Idolatrous opinion of Witches power, that seldom came any thing cross, but some were accused to have occasioned it as Witches.’48
The effect of this experience upon Francis is not recorded in any of his letters or papers. Was he revolted by the barbarity of the torture and executions, or did they inspire in him a dangerous fervour to bring such women to justice in his own country? The horrific events that would unfold at Belvoir Castle suggest it was the latter. He certainly harboured a fascination with witchcraft from that time forwards. Among the archives at Belvoir Castle are papers from 1582 and 1591 relating to the trial of Richard Bate, a surgeon from Burton upon Trent, who was accused of making wax effigies of his mother-in-law and her children (except his own wife) so that he might cause them to perish and thus inherit their property.49 That these should be preserved at Belvoir, despite their not being connected to the estate, perhaps reflects the family’s interest in the subject.
James, too, was heavily influenced by Continental demonology, and his kingdom adopted strikingly similar means of interrogation and execution of suspected witches. The number of executions in Scotland is difficult to ascertain, but scholars have estimated that the figure was as high as 4,000 during the period from the mid sixteenth to the mid eighteenth century.50 This was striking for such a small country, and was more than double the execution rate in England. Those women who were convicted met the hideous death of burning at the stake, apparently to prevent the resurrection of the body. The Earl of Mar was so traumatised by witnessing a mass burning in 1608 that he recounted it to the Privy Council in all its horrific detail. Describing the ‘sic ane crewell maner’ in which some of the women died, he told how others of them had broken free of the fire ‘half brunt’ before being captured and cast back into the flames to meet their deaths.51 A similarly harrowing tale was of the elderly and confused Janet Horne, the last witch to be executed in Scotland, who was seen warming herself by the fire that she was to be burned in, thinking it had been lit for her comfort.
Burning was also the common form of execution on the Continent, where many thousands of people went to the flames. However, with the exception of Spain and Italy, most witches were garrotted at the stake before the flames had consumed their bodies. Even this horrific death was considered insufficient punishment by the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum. They noted, rather regretfully, that most of those convicted were burned at the stake, rather than being ‘thrown to wild beasts to be devoured by them’. The reason for this ‘milder’ punishment was that ‘the majority of them are women’.52
Shocking though it is, the total number of executions does not convey the intensity of the witch hunt. In addition to the official trials and executions, there were possibly many thousands of other people who suffered a more random form of justice at the hands of neighbours through assaults, lynchings and summary executions. Neither does it account for the thousands more who endured the terror of living under suspicion of witchcraft or who were ostracised by their local community. Any woman – particularly if she was old and poor – must have felt like a hunted animal. Even children were not exempt. The records attest that a child as young as three was imprisoned on suspicion of witchcraft, and the youngest person to be executed was just eight years old. Witchcraft was therefore a much more common feature of life in communities across Europe than the formal statistics suggest.53 The influential French magistrate Pierre De Lancre declared himself to be ‘horrified’ by ‘the multiplicity and infinite number’ of witches in the Pays de Labourd in south-west France. ‘They estimate that there are thirty thousand souls in this country of Labourd,’ he wrote, ‘and that among all these people there are very few families who do not come into contact with witchcraft in one way or another.’54
Neither do the official figures take account of the scores of people who were accused, driven into exile, given lesser penalties or who died in prison.55 Even those who were acquitted were often blighted for life by their experience – either physically or psychologically. As well as suffering the terror of interrogation and torture, they were all too often treated as social pariahs for ever afterwards.
If therefore a witch has been convicted as a witch, she will always be known as a witch, and consequently presumed guilty of all the impieties that witches are well known for. And even if the sentence is not carried out, the accusation, her reputation and the widespread rumour will be enough to establish a strong presumption and the infamy of the deed. For if the law requires that a woman accused of wantonness but released remain with a bad record for the rest of her life, how much more ought one to regard than a woman ill-famed and dishonoured who has the reputation of being a witch? For it is a most powerful presumption that when a woman is reputed to be a witch, she is one.56
There are numerous examples of women whose lives were blighted by such dangerously skewed logic. A Hertfordshire woman named Jane Wenham was described as having ‘become so odious to all her neighbours as to be deny’d in all probability the common necessaries of life . . . The more firmly her neighbours believed her to be a witch . . . the worse they would use her.’57 When ‘Goodwife Gilnot’ of Barham in Kent was acquitted in 1641, she returned to a miserable existence in her local community, vilified by her neighbours and deprived of her livelihood. ‘If she be esteemed such a kind of creature everybody will be afraid of her,’ remarked an unsympathetic contemporary, ‘and nobody set her a-work, inasmuch as truly she will be utterly undone.’ Another accused witch, Sarah Liffen of Great Yarmouth, was said to have died alone and miserable, being ‘so forlorn and wretched a person as she labour’d under the imputation of being a witch, and the youth and other rude folks in the town . . . did often insult and affront her as she walk’d, and at her own house’. Others suffered worse torments. In 1612, Mary Sutton was beaten with a cudgel ‘till she was scarce able to stir’.58 Life was little better for the surviving relatives of a convicted or reputed witch. When a young couple in Lorraine were both accused of witchcraft, it emerged that they had decided to marry after attending the execution of their respective parents, ‘so that they would have nothing to reproach one another with’.59
The onset of the Protestant Reformation in the early sixteenth century, and the Counter- (or Catholic) Reformation which followed, provided a dangerous new impetus to the witch hunts. Both movements sparked an increased awareness of the presence of the Devil in the world, and a determination to wage war against him. Despite being directly opposed on matters of doctrine, the leaders of the two reformations were equally vociferous on the need to eradicate the evils of witchcraft. Martin Luther, who spearheaded the Protestant Reformation, declared that all witches were the whores of the Devil and should be burned. Another Protestant reformer, John Calvin, quoted Exodus in insisting that witches ‘must be slain’.60 As active preachers who regularly addressed large crowds of people, men such as these were enormously influential in whipping up popular fear and suspicion.
The gulf between the saved and the damned seemed to be growing ever greater. In a society increasingly preoccupied by attaining salvation through conforming to strict standards of piety and moral behaviour, the pursuit of individuals who were believed to be intrinsically evil was given a new urgency. Helping to hunt down and condemn suspected witches relieved people’s anxiety about their own destiny, and gave them confidence in their own moral sanctity and ultimate salvation. The events that were soon to be played out at Belvoir Castle would prove just how dangerously true this was.
James’s accession to the throne of England provided a new outlet for his witch hunting fervour. From the moment that he was proclaimed king, anticipation among his new subjects at the prospect of meeting ‘the bright starre of the North’ reached fever pitch.61 ‘Manie have beene the mad caps rejoicinge at oure new Kynges cominge,’ observed the celebrated courtier and gossip Sir John Harington.62 As soon as James arrived in his new kingdom, he was subject to intense scrutiny. Some praised his ready good nature and sharp intellect. Roger Wilbraham, a London lawyer, enthused: ‘The King is of the sharpest wit and invention, ready and pithy speech, an exceeding good memory; of the sweetest, pleasantest and best nature that ever I knew.’ The Venetian ambassador, Scaramelli, was more circumspect. Marvelling at how James’s councillors stood about him ‘almost in an attitude of adoration’, he could not resist adding that ‘from his dress he would have been taken for the meanest of courtiers’. Others agreed that, in sharp contrast to the late queen, James lacked ‘great majesty’ and ‘solemnities’.63 Although ‘crafty and cunning in petty things’, he lacked astuteness in ‘weighty affairs’, which led one contemporary to coin the famous description of him as ‘the wisest foole in Christendome’.64
After half a century of being under the authority of queens, the people greeted the accession of a king with enthusiasm in many quarters, but James hardly presented a very manly figure. Of little above average height, he had remarkably soft white skin, and his beard was sparse. His large eyes held a look of vacant intensity, which often deepened into suspicion or apprehension. One observer remarked that his eyes were ‘ever rowling after any stranger came into his presence, in so much, as many for shame have left the roome, as being out of countenance’.65 At the same time, his tongue seemed too large for his mouth, which made his already broad Scottish accent even harder to understand, and his act of drinking very ungraceful. ‘[It] made him drinke very uncomely, as if eating his drinke, which came out into the cup of each side his mouth,’ observed one contemporary with some distaste.66 Physically weak and uncoordinated, ‘his walke was ever circular, his fingers ever in that walke fidling about his codpiece’.67 A recent commentator has described James as ‘the dribbling, bulbous-eyed, bandy-legged king’.68 Upon his arrival at the court in London, he already had his arm in a sling thanks to falling from his horse. He also complained of having been ‘very ill’ with a heavy cold ever since coming to England, and he was still grumbling about it almost two years later.69 Although the king appeared somewhat corpulent, this was because he wore a heavily quilted doublet for protection against assassins. ‘Naturally of a timerous disposition’, he had long cherished an intense fear of bared weapons and had once dissolved in panic when his own queen had come towards him with a sword in her hand, ready for a ceremony of knighting.70
James’s ‘unmanly’ nature extended to his private life. Although he had fathered five children by Anne of Denmark, their marriage was one of politics, not passion. They lived separate lives at court, and it was noted that they did not ‘converse’ together.71 ‘He was ever best, when furthest from the Queen,’ remarked Sir Anthony Weldon, one of the earliest historians of James’s reign, who concluded that this was the reason for James’s constant ‘removes’ from court.72 The king had long been rumoured to be a closet homosexual, and throughout his reign – both in Scotland and in England – he surrounded himself with a succession of beautiful young men. Each of these was rapidly promoted to an exalted position at court, and then just as rapidly dropped when a younger, more attractive man came along. In the very public world of the court, nothing remained a secret for long, and the king’s sexuality was soon whispered about in the capital and beyond. One of his subjects recorded in his diary a conversation he had had with a friend: ‘Of things I discoursed with him that were secret as of the sin of sodomy, how frequent it was in this wicked city’, and added: ‘we had probable cause to fear, a sin in the prince [James] as well as the people’.73 Sodomy was at that time a capital felony, but the king was said to have personally intervened to save a Frenchman who was arrested for the crime from the usual punishment of death. That the celebrated Virgin Queen should be succeeded by a sexual deviant was too much for some of James’s subjects to bear.
The new king took full advantage of the other diversions that the court had to offer. Indeed, so fond was he of revelry, masques, feasting and other such pastimes that he soon began to neglect the business of government. Upon his accession, there had been high hopes that he would prove an able and decisive ruler, and no matter how dazzlingly effective Elizabeth had shown herself to be in matters of state, there was still a feeling of relief among many councillors that a man had returned to the helm at last. ‘Our virtuous King makes our hopes to swell,’ declared Thomas Wilson, a protégé of Robert Cecil, ‘his actions suitable to the time and his natural disposition.’ But within a few short weeks, a disappointed Wilson was forced to admit: ‘Sometimes he comes to Council, but most time he spends in fields and parks and chases, chasing away idleness by violent exercise and early rising, wherein the sun seldom prevents him.’ The waspish Scaramelli observed with relish how quickly things had unravelled: ‘The King, in spite of all the heroic virtues ascribed to him when he left Scotland and inculcated by him in his books, seems to have sunk into a lethargy of pleasures, and will not take heed of matters of state. He remits everything to the Council, and spends his time in the house alone, or in the country at the chase.’74 This was no bias on the part of a foreign ambassador, for there were plenty of Englishmen who agreed. Among them was John Chamberlain, a well-connected London gentleman who made it his business to find out the latest gossip from court and report it to his friends overseas. He confided to his friend Ralph Winwood: ‘The King . . . finds such felicity in that hunting life, that he hath written to the Councill that it is the only means to maintaine his health, which being the health and welfare of us all, he desires them to take the charge and burden of affairs, and foresee that he be not interrupted or troubled with too much business.’75
But there was one matter of state in which James took a keen and active interest. According to one source, he ‘carried his hatred of witches with him into England, and with his reign in the latter country began the darkest period of the history of witchcraft in the southern parts of our island’.76
The English were a good deal more ambivalent than their northern neighbours, and indeed the rest of Europe, on the subject of witchcraft. Although there had been periods of intense witch hunting during Elizabeth’s reign, the laws and punishments were less severe. The earliest known reference to witchcraft in civil law was in the time of King Wihtraed (690–731). Anyone found guilty of making ‘an offering to devils’ would simply be fined. Religious leaders, meanwhile, recommended fasting for anyone found guilty of killing someone through witchcraft. The law did become progressively harsher towards suspected witches, however, and by the reign of King Ethelred in the late tenth century, it was decreed that they ‘be driven out of this country’ or else ‘totally perish’.77
For several centuries afterwards, witches were classed as heathens or heretics and dealt with by the ecclesiastical courts. By the fourteenth century, witchcraft had gained enough notoriety to be referenced by Chaucer in the Friar’s Tale. From that time onwards, most English monarchs found themselves subject to what have been termed ‘treason-cum-sorcery’ plots. Alice Perrers, the avaricious mistress of Edward III, was accused of winning the king’s favour by ‘wicked enchantments’. In 1406, Henry V wrote to the Bishop of Lincoln expressing anxiety about the many sorcerers in his diocese, ‘who perpetrate daily many horrible and detestable crimes to the damage of the people and scandal of the church, and directing him to seek them out, examine them, and detain them until they repent’.78
But it was during the reign of his son, Henry VI, that witchcraft really gained notoriety, when Margery Jourdemayne, the so-called Witch of Eye, was found guilty of conspiring with others to bring about the king’s death through sorcery. She was burned at the stake at Smithfield, and later immortalised by Shakespeare.79 One of her co-conspirators, Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester, was found guilty of using witchcraft to supplant the king with her ambitious and powerful husband. She escaped death, but after performing a public penance spent the rest of her days as a prisoner.
Eleanor’s sister-in-law, Jacquetta, was said to have used witchcraft to ensnare Edward IV into secretly marrying her widowed daughter, Elizabeth Woodville. The marriage caused a scandal because Elizabeth was a commoner, and her enemies claimed that as a result England suffered ‘many murders, extortions and oppressions’.80 Edward’s brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, used the rumour to justify declaring Edward’s sons illegitimate and thus open the way for his seizure of the throne in 1483.
Witchcraft cases became a matter for secular jurisdiction with the passing of the first and most stringent English witchcraft statute by Henry VIII in 1542, although church courts continued to try cunning folk, sorcerers and fortune-tellers. The 1542 Act had possibly been prompted by another treasonous plot involving sorcery. There is no evidence that it was ever enforced, and it was repealed just five years later at the beginning of Edward VI’s reign.
A new statute ‘agaynst Conjuracions Inchantments and Witche-craftes’ was passed in 1563. This was another time of uncertainty for the reigning monarch. Elizabeth I had been on the throne for just five years but was already surrounded by plots to supplant her. Concern had also recently been expressed by John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, about the ‘witches and sorcerers’ who, he said, had ‘marvellously increased within this your grace’s realm’. He warned: ‘These eyes have seen most evident and manifest marks of their wickedness. Your grace’s subjects pine away even unto the death, their colour fadeth, their flesh rotteth, their senses are bereft.’81 Just over a year later, Edmund Grindal, Bishop of London, urged the Privy Council to take action against a priest who, as well as being a suspected papist, was much addicted to ‘magic and conjuration’. Grindal pointed out that the law made inadequate provisions to deal with such offenders.82 The 1563 Act prescribed the death penalty for ‘Invocacon of evill and wicked Spirites, to or for any Intent or Purpose’, and for using ‘Witchecrafte Enchantment Charme or Sorcerie, whereby any p[er]son shall happen to bee killed or destroyed’.83 Any accomplices of the main perpetrator were also to ‘suffer pains of death as a felon or felons’. The least severe punishment for witchcraft was a year’s imprisonment, but the conditions in many gaols were so dire that this often equated to a death sentence.
The first major English witch trial took place in 1566, at Chelmsford in Essex, and resulted in the first recorded hanging for this crime. A rush of similar trials followed, reaching their peak in the mid to late sixteenth century, which coincided with the beginning of the second and most severe period of continental persecutions. The rising ‘witch panic’ was accentuated by the discovery in 1578 of a plot to kill the queen and two of her advisers by maleficent magic. A full-scale investigation was launched by the Privy Council when three wax figures were found hidden in a dunghill, one of them marked with the name ‘Elizabeth’ on its forehead. The panic felt at the heart of government rapidly filtered down to the rest of society. Belief in witches had become so prevalent that one contemporary remarked with some alarm: ‘There is scarse any towne or village in all this shire, but there is one or two witches at the least in it.’84 This may not have been an exaggeration. Compared to other crimes, it was clear that cases of witchcraft increased significantly during the period. They did so at a steady rate, rather than in a series of periodic scares. A study of three Essex villages in the late sixteenth century shows that they were less common than theft, assault, sexual misdemeanours and failing to attend church, but more frequent than murder, drunkenness, marital disputes, quarrelling, breaking the Sabbath and misbehaviour on church premises.85 In total, witchcraft cases represented 13 per cent of all criminal business, but more than half the villages in this county were involved in the prosecution of witches at one time or another.
The method of execution was less barbaric in England than in Scotland and on the Continent. Only if witchcraft was bound up with crimes of heresy, poisoning, treason or petty treason (such as if a woman murdered her husband) would the perpetrator suffer death by burning – or, an equally hideous prospect, by ‘boylynge’.86 Instead, as in other cases of felony, the gallows provided the means of execution, as one contemporary pamphleteer observed: ‘They are beyond God’s grace and the best thing to do with them is hang them.’87 Any member of the aristocracy found guilty of the crime might be beheaded. The seventeenth-century commentator William Dugdale noted that this means of execution was ‘very antient’ as a punishment for felony in England.88 Others decried the fact that witches did not suffer a crueller death. The notorious witch hunting magistrate Brian Darcy lamented that ‘An ordinary felon . . . is throttled: a sorcerer, a witch . . . defying the Lord God to his face . . . is [also] stifled.’ He openly condemned this ‘inequality of justice’ and declared that a convicted witch deserved a death that was ‘much the more horrible’.89
By the end of Elizabeth’s reign, the number of witchcraft trials and executions had declined significantly. There was also a growing scepticism about the existence of witches. Even as early as 1578, a Norwich physician named Dr Browne was accused of ‘spreading a misliking of the laws by saying there are no witches’.90 The most outspoken sceptic, though, was Reginald Scot, who poured scorn upon the existence of witches in his detailed and lengthy tract, The Discoverie of Witchcraft. He lamented that the ‘fables of Witchcraft have taken so fast hold and deepe root in the heart of man’, and that ‘the world is now so bewitched and over-run with this fond error, that even where a man shuld seeke comfort and counsell, there shall hee be sent (in case of necessitie) from God to the divell; and from the Physician, to the coosening witch’.91 Scot courted such notoriety that King James himself denounced his ‘damnable opinions’ and ordered that all copies of his book be burned.92 The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes was similarly sceptical about witchcraft, but he nevertheless believed that the guilty should be punished: ‘As for witches, I think not that their witchcraft has any real power. Even so, they are justly punished for falsely believing that they can do such mischief, joined with their purpose to do it if they can, their trade being nearer to a new religion than craft or science.’93
Meanwhile, the author and scholar Robert Burton, whose most celebrated work was published two years after the Flower women gained notoriety, agreed that old age and melancholy played tricks on the minds of those women who were suspected of witchcraft.
All those extraordinary powers which old witches were supposed to exercise, and pretended to possess; such as bewitching cattle to death, riding in the air upon a coulstaffe, flying out of the chimney top, transforming themselves into the various shapes of cats and other animals, transporting their bodies, suddenly and secretly, from place to place . . . and other ‘supernatural solicitings’ of the like kind, are all ascribed to the corrupted fancy, which is engendered by that morbid, atrabilious melancholy matter, attendant upon moping misery and rheumed age.94
Even on the Continent, where the witch hunts were still in full swing, there were some dissenting voices. The Dutch physician Johann Weyer was one of the first to publish a treatise against the existence of witchcraft. De Praestigiis Daemonum (On the Tricks of Devils) first appeared in 1563, and claimed that witches were really just confused old women, suffering from various mental and physical disorders. Likewise, that the sickness and death they were believed to inflict were the result of natural causes. Referring to witchcraft as a ‘vicious seed’ and ‘the old snake [which] stirs the fire’, and to those who believed in it as ‘dull-witted’ and ‘absurd’, Weyer urged: ‘Daily experience teaches us what cursed apostasy, what friendship with the wicked one, what hatred and strife among fellow creatures, what dissension in city and in country, what numerous murders of innocent people through the devil’s wretched aid, such belief in the power of witches brings forth.’ He went on to assert that a witch’s power existed only in her imagination. ‘Witches can harm no one through the most malicious will or the ugliest exorcism . . . their imagination – inflamed by the demons in a way not understandable to us – and the torture of melancholy makes them only fancy that they have caused all sorts of evil.’ He ended with a plea to those who dispensed justice not to ‘impose heavy penalties on perplexed, poor old women’ but to demand proper evidence.95
All of this was anathema to James. He was determined to drown out every dissenting voice within his new kingdom. It is no coincidence that Daemonologie was reprinted twice during the year of his accession. This prompted a rash of similar pamphlets aimed at whipping up popular fear of witches. Heartily though James approved of these publications, he was determined to do more in his crusade against witches. In his view, English law was by no means strict enough in prosecuting the crime. Barely a year after his accession, he therefore ordered that the Elizabethan statute on witchcraft be replaced by a much harsher version. Until now, those who practised witchcraft were severely punished only if they were found to have committed murder or other injuries through their devilish arts. In short, it was the crimes caused by witchcraft, not the practice itself, that had been the object of concern. James, however, wanted the practice of any form of magic to be severely punished, regardless of whether it had caused harm to others. His new statute made hanging mandatory for a first offence of witchcraft, even if the accused had not committed murder. And if the accused was found to have the Devil’s mark on their body, this too was enough to condemn them to death. The Act stipulated: ‘If any person or persons . . . shall use practise or exercise any invocation or conjuration of any evil or wicked spirit, or shall consult, covenant with, entertain, employ, feed, or reward any evil and wicked spirit to or for any intent or purpose . . . [they] shall suffer pains of death.’96 James’s determination to stamp out witchcraft in all forms was brutally apparent: ‘All manner of practise, use or exercise of Witchcraft, Encantement, Charme or Sorcerie should be from hencefoorth utterly avoyded, abolished, and taken away.’97
The all-encompassing nature of the 1604 Act meant that the vast majority of witchcraft cases were now dealt with by secular rather than ecclesiastical courts. This in turn made the prospect of severe punishment far stronger. Many of those previously found guilty of witchcraft in the church courts had been ordered to do public penance in front of the other villagers. This usually took place on a Sunday, and the accused would be made to wear a white sheet, carry a white wand and ‘penitentlie confesse that she is hartelie sorrie for that she hath geven vehement suspicion of wichecrafte and wicherie’.98 Now, a suspect faced the grim choice of a year’s imprisonment or death. ‘His Majesty found a defect in the statutes made before his time, by which none died for Witchcraft but they only who by that means killed, so that such were executed rather as murderers than as Witches,’ reported Edward Fairfax, who, believing his daughters to be victims of witchcraft, was a staunch supporter of the harsher regime. ‘But his Highness made a new law against the sin itself, which in itself is so abominable, and therein showed his zeal for the honour of God.’99
A testament to how eager James’s new subjects were to curry favour with him by echoing his hatred of witches came the same year that the new Act was passed. Christopher Marlowe’s dark morality play, The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, had first been performed in around 1588, five years before the playwright’s death. But it was not until 1604 that it was published – the very year that James I began his crusade against witchcraft in England. This was no coincidence: the play was one of the most shocking portrayals of witchcraft ever to be performed on stage. Its central character makes a pact with Lucifer, whereby the latter promises Dr Faustus unlimited knowledge and power for a number of years, at the end of which period Faustus will give his soul to his satanic master. The play ends with a devil coming to claim the doctor’s soul and drag him off to hell. Audiences were so aghast at the horrors that unfolded before them that some were said to have been driven mad by it, and on occasion real devils were reported to have appeared on stage, ‘to the great amazement of both the actors and spectators’. As well as terrifying people into avoiding any dabbling with necromancy, the play also intensified their hatred and fear of witches.
Other playwrights were quick to follow suit. Ben Jonson devised a number of masques for the entertainment of the king and his court. The ‘antimasque’ to his Masque of Queens included the presentation of a group of witches who represented ‘the opposites to good fame’. The playwright had clearly done a great deal of research, for he referenced a range of current and classical demonological works as his sources. He set out detailed instructions for the staging of the antimasque, describing the entering on stage of 11 witches ‘some with rats on their head; some on their shoulders; others with ointment pots at their girdles; all with spinales, timbrels, rattles, or other veneficall instruments, making a confused noyse, with strange gestures’. One of their number was ‘naked arm’d, bare-footed, her frock tuck’d, her hayre knotted, and folded with vipers; in her hand a torch made of a dead man’s arm, lighted; girded with a snake’.100
Jonson’s description of the performance of the play at Whitehall in February 1609 gives a sense of the impact that it must have had upon the king, queen and assembled courtiers.
His Majesty, then, being set, and the whole company in full expectation, the part of the scene which first presented itself was an ugly Hell; which, flaming beneath, smoked unto the top of the roof . . . these Witches, with a kind of hollow and infernal music, came forth from thence . . . I prescribed them their properties of vipers, snakes, bones, herbs, roots, and other ensigns of their magic, out of authority of ancient and late Writers . . . These eleven Witches beginning to dance, (which is an usual ceremony at their convents or meetings, where sometimes also they are vizarded and masked), on the sudden one of them missed their Chief, and interrupted the rest with this Speech . . .
The weather is fair, the wind is good,
Up, Dame, on your horse of wood;
Or else tuck up your gray frock,
And saddle your goat, or your green cock.101
But the most famous of all the literary works inspired by witchcraft, winning widespread acclaim in its day and ever since, was Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It is deliberately short in length, as James was known to have little patience for sitting through long plays; it is also significant that the occasion of its inaugural performance was a visit by Queen Anne’s brother, the King of Denmark, in 1606, given that it was James’s voyage to his wife’s native land that had prompted his obsession with witchcraft. Shakespeare wove in several references to this voyage in the play, such as when the First Witch claims that she set sail in a sieve, just as one of the North Berwick witches was accused of doing. The line ‘Though his bark cannot be lost,/Yet it shall be tempest-tossed’ almost certainly alluded to James’s near-death experience.
All the leaders of the English judiciary would have been present at this important state occasion, and this was exactly the sort of play that would inspire them with the same witch hunting fervour as their royal master. The drama centred around Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, who murdered King Duncan to seize the throne of Scotland after three witches prophesied Macbeth’s succession. Whether the witches thus caused the overthrow of the natural succession, or merely brought out Macbeth’s inherent evil, was left to the audience’s imagination. Either way, the play both confirmed and introduced new elements to the stereotypical view of a witch, with her spells and familiars. It also spawned two of the most quoted lines in English literary history:
Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.102
Macbeth instilled fear among those watching that witchcraft was not just a satanic confederacy, but a conspiracy against the state. The latter notion was all too readily accepted in England at this time because the play was performed just a few short months after one of the most notorious conspiracies in history.
Even though Catholicism had become increasingly sidelined in the religious and political life of England, many of those who on the surface conformed to the new Anglican faith held tight to the old traditions, ceremonies and relics of their Catholic past. Thus it was noted that many still had their ‘beades closely handeled’ in church, and were in the habit of crossing themselves ‘in all their actions’.103 If Elizabeth I had turned a blind eye to such things, James insisted upon a much stricter observance of the Protestant faith. When it became clear that the new king had no intention of following his predecessor’s policy of toleration, Robert Catesby and his co-conspirators hatched a plan to blow up the House of Lords during the state opening of Parliament on 5 November 1605. This was intended to be the prelude to a popular revolt in the Midlands, during which James’s nine-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, would be installed as the Catholic head of state. It was only thanks to an anonymous letter to the authorities, received in late October, that the king and his Protestant regime were not wiped out. The House of Lords was searched at around midnight on 4 November, just hours before the plot was due to be executed, and Guy Fawkes was discovered with 36 barrels of gunpowder – more than enough to reduce the entire building to rubble.
‘The meanes how to have compassed so greate an acte, was not to be performed by strength of men, or outward violence, but by a secret conveyance of a great quantitie of gunpowder in a vault under the Upper House of Parliament,’ wrote a shocked Earl of Salisbury, ‘and soe to have blowne up all at a clapp, if God out of His mercie and just revenge against so great an abomination had not destined it to be discovered, though very miraculously, even some twelve hours before the matter should have been put in execution.’104 Sir Edward Hoby was similarly aghast at the audacity of a plot that had so nearly succeeded. ‘The plot was to have blown up the King at such time as he should have been set on his Royal Throne, accompanied with all his Children, Nobility, and Commoners, and assisted with all Bishops, Judges, and Doctors,’ he told the English ambassador in Brussels, ‘at one instant and blast to have ruin’d the whole State and Kingdom of England.’105 All the conspirators were eventually rounded up, and those who were not killed in their attempt to flee met the traitor’s death and were hanged, drawn and quartered.
Although it had been thwarted, the Gunpowder Plot had seriously destabilised the Jacobean regime, ushering in a period of intense paranoia and suspicion, particularly towards Catholics. Parliament responded by passing the ‘Act for the better discovery of Popish Recusants’, whereby Catholics became liable to imprisonment and forfeiture of property for refusing an oath of allegiance. The repercussions of the plot were also stipulated in a handbook for Justices of the Peace published in 1618, which urged that ‘Popish Recusants (especially such as have bin reconciled to the Pope, or drawne to the Popish Religion, since the Gunpowder Treason, for these are by his Maiestie accounted most dangerous)’ should be dealt with strictly according to the statute book.106 In practice, though, central government did little, beyond a few recusancy fines, to bring Catholics under state control.
Since the link between Catholic or ‘papist’ practices and witchcraft had always been strong, the king’s war on witches was given a fresh impetus in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot. ‘The late divilish conspiracy did much disturb this part,’ reported Sir John Harington. ‘We know of some evil-minded catholics in the west, whom the prince of darkness hath in alliance; God ward them from such evil, or seeking it to others. Ancient history doth shew the heart of man in divers forms: we read of states overthrown by craft and subtilty.’ Before long, a widespread Catholic conspiracy was feared. ‘These designs were not formed by a few: the whole legion of catholics were consulted; the priests were to pacify their consciences, and the pope confirm a general absolution for this glorious deed, so honourable to God and his holy religion. His Majesty doth much meditate on this marvellous escape, and blesses God for delivering his family, and saving his kingdom, from the tryumphs of Satan.’107
Tensions remained high in the months that followed. In March 1606, it was rumoured that James had been murdered on a hunting trip. ‘The news spread to the city and the uproar was amazing,’ reported the Venetian ambassador. ‘Everyone flew to arms, the shops were shut, and cries began to be heard against Papists, foreigners and Spaniards.’108 Even seven years later, the atmosphere was still highly charged. At the notorious Pendle witch trial, it was alleged that the accused had hatched their own gunpowder plot to blow up Lancaster Castle. This was almost certainly a tale invented by the examining magistrates to make an example of their prisoners and heighten public interest. It is significant that the author of the trial pamphlet, Thomas Potts, a clerk of the Lancashire Assizes, dedicated it to Thomas Knyvett (uncle of Francis Manners’s first wife) – the man credited with arresting Guy Fawkes and thus saving the life of the king.
The theme of a satanic conspiracy was taken up by other pamphleteers, notably William Perkins. ‘The most notorious traytor and rebell that can be, is the witch,’ he opined. ‘For shee renounceth God himselfe, the king of kings, shee leaves the societie of his church and people, shee bindeth herself in league with the devil.’109 Meanwhile, Thomas Cooper’s extensive treatise of 1617 drew a direct correlation between the Gunpowder Plot and the dark arts: ‘Hath not the Lord enabled mee to discover the practice of Antichrist in that hellish plot of the Gunpowder-treason?’110
This same belief in the existence of a witchcraft conspiracy accounted for the rapid spread of the witch hunts across Europe. An accused witch would be asked to name her co-conspirators, and under torture would do so. Alonso de Salazar Frías, one of the judges in the notorious mass trial which began in 1609 in Navarre, northern Spain, was aghast at how quickly panic could spread once the word ‘witch’ had been whispered in a community: ‘There were neither witches nor bewitched in a village until they were talked about and written about.’111
Between 1610 and 1612, there was a sudden prevalence of accusations of sorcery across most of the Continent. The celebrated eighteenth-century philosopher Voltaire estimated that there were as many as 100,000 victims of the witch craze. Only the lands of the Orthodox church in the east and the Dutch republic in the west offered any sanctuary. The situation was mirrored in England, where one of the leading intellectuals of the day, William Perkins, warned his readers in 1608 that ‘Witchcraft is a rife and common sinne in these our daies, and very many are intangled with it.’ His contemporary, Chief Justice Anderson, agreed – ‘They abound in all places’ – and cautioned that without swift preventative action they would ‘in short time overrun the whole land’.112
By the time James visited Belvoir Castle in August 1612, the witch craze had reached fever pitch in both England and Europe. The king was accompanied by his son and heir, Prince Henry. It would be one of the prince’s last public appearances, for he died of typhoid three months later. Cultured and charismatic, Henry was adored by the English people, and there was widespread mourning when news of his death was announced. A contemporary had noted disapprovingly that, given Henry’s poor health, ‘the greatnesse of the journey’ and ‘the extreme and wonderfull heat of the season’, he ought to have been excused the long trip to Belvoir.113 But the castle had become a favoured retreat and ‘principal feature’ of the king’s progresses around his kingdom, and he and his son were rewarded with ‘verie honourable Entertainment’ for several days by the Earl of Rutland.114
The visit in 1612 was part of the king’s traditional summer progress. This annual event constituted an extraordinarily complex operation. The itinerary would be published in late spring, and the nobility of the land would find out who would have the dubious (and often cripplingly expensive) honour of hosting the king and his court. James and his sprawling entourage of councillors, courtiers, attendants and servants afforded an impressive – if slow-moving – spectacle as they made their way through the shires of England. The king and his courtiers would travel on horseback, flanked by liveried footmen. Next came the ladies of the court seated in large square coaches, bumping and jolting along the roads which in dry weather were little better than hardened, cracked mud tracks – and were considerably worse after a wet spell. Behind the ladies was a vast train of between 400 and 600 carts, loaded with baggage, tents and other paraphernalia considered essential for the visits. Hundreds of servants would either ride on top of these or walk alongside. This unwieldy, cumbersome cavalcade wound its way slowly along lanes and tracks, pausing for dinner at inns and country houses, and covering no more than 12 miles a day.
The agonisingly slow pace of the progresses accounts for the fact that they never reached the more remote parts of the kingdom. Rather, they traditionally focused upon the southern circuit, encompassing Surrey, Hampshire and Wiltshire, or a Midlands circuit including Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire. James preferred the latter circuit, and Belvoir was always the highlight of it. He expected to be entertained royally and made his displeasure felt if the hospitality was in any way lacking. In a rather half-hearted gesture to reduce the financial burden on his hosts, he limited the number of his retinue, although it was still considerable. Those houses, like Belvoir, which the king particularly favoured could face ruin as a result of his frequent visits. When Bishop Lancelot Andrewes of Winchester entertained the royal party in magnificent style at Farnham Castle in 1620, the bill exceeded £2,400, which is equivalent to around £230,000 today. Little wonder that some hosts occasionally begged to be spared a visit.
Despite the heavy burden on his estate, the Earl of Rutland was careful to show no sign of reluctance to welcome James and his court. The king evidently enjoyed the Rutlands’ famed hospitality in 1612, because he made five more visits during the years that followed. The household accounts give a sense of the magnificence – and cost – of these visits. As well as orders for vast quantities of venison, ox, veal, lamb, capon, salmon and wine with which to feed the king and his court, there are also payments for silver plate and gilt cups, gold-embroidered cloth, the stabling of horses and the ‘mending of heighe ways against the Kinge’s Majestie’s coming to hunt’.115 The king was fond of hunting, and the Vale of Belvoir provided some of the best hunting grounds in the country.
James’s visits to Belvoir were about politics as much as pleasure, however. The conversations over dinner or during the chase would have been dominated by state affairs. As a fierce advocate of the Protestant faith, James could not abide what he scathingly referred to as the ‘rotten religion’ of the papists.116 Yet he could not have failed to be aware of Francis Manners’s devout Catholicism. The earl and countess employed a renowned Catholic, Richard Broughton, as their private chaplain. In a book dedicated to his patrons, Broughton described them as ‘constant supporters of holy Catholike Religion’.117 Francis had also amassed a significant collection of works at Belvoir by professors of that religion.118 Some astonishment had been expressed by contemporaries when the earl had been honoured with the Garter in 1616, given that Roman Catholics were barred from public office.119 Moreover, as a member of the House of Lords, a privy councillor and a lord lieutenant of Lincolnshire, he had been obliged to take the Protestant oath of allegiance to the Crown.
That the king turned a blind eye to the earl and countess’s Catholicism is an indication of the high favour in which they stood. Francis also suppressed his more extreme papist beliefs in the interests of political gain. However, as his career at court developed, he increasingly clashed with other members of the Council. John Chamberlain, who had a detailed knowledge of court events, was dismayed by how much favour the king showed Rutland, ‘in regard that the wife of the former [Cecilia] is an open and knowne recusant, and he is saide to have many daungerous persons about him’.120 In an age dominated by suspicion and fear, the Catholic faith became synonymous with plots and conspiracies. Francis and Cecilia Manners were thus playing a dangerous game in expressing their faith so openly and – apparently – surrounding themselves with a group of like-minded people.
Despite the difference in their religious beliefs, James and Francis enjoyed a great deal of common ground in other areas – none more so than the need to obliterate the evils of witchcraft. In 1611, the Authorised Version of the Bible, with its condemnation of witches, was republished under the king’s watchful eye and distributed throughout the kingdom. Then, in the summer of 1612 – less than two weeks after James’s visit to Belvoir – there occurred one of the most notorious witch trials in history.
The household at Belvoir would have been well aware of this trial, for the 12 suspects had been arrested in early 1612, and their case had attracted a great deal of attention. They hailed from the area around Pendle Hill in Lancashire, and were charged with the murders of 10 people by witchcraft. Among them were three generations of the same family. The first trial, at which two of the accused were convicted, was held at York on 27 July, and the rest were brought before the Lancaster Assizes on 18 August. In total, 10 were found guilty and hanged, one was found not guilty and another died in prison. The account of the case, written by Thomas Potts, was one of the most popular works of the day and helped secure the Pendle Witches’ place in history. The Earl of Rutland could not have guessed that he would soon find himself at the centre of an even more notorious trial.