The Cradle King (22 page)

Witchcraft had been on the Scottish lawbooks from 1563, but went virtually unprosecuted until 1590. In the winter of 1590–91, however, there was an explosion of witchcraft investigations and prosecutions in Scotland. Perhaps the Danish visitors suggested witchcraft to the Scottish authorities. Perhaps James himself had been influenced by his discussions with Niels Hemmingsen, a noted demonologist. Whatever the cause, between November 1590 and May 1591 more than one hundred suspects were examined, and in all, more than three hundred witches were said to have gathered at various times and at various locations in Scotland. Among their activities, they were accused of raising the ferocious storms which buffeted the King and Queen at sea; to have attempted to bring about the King’s death by burning his effigy in wax; and to have indulged in disgusting sexual rituals in the Kirk of North Berwick in the presence of the Devil. A large number of the one hundred witches examined were executed.
⁶
James was at first sceptical, and accused the North Berwick ‘witches’ of lying. According to a publication sanctioned by James, a witch named Agnes Sampson took him to one side and told him ‘the very words which passed between the King’s Majesty and his Queen at Upslo [Oslo] in Norway the first night of marriage, with the answers each to other, whereat 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’.
⁷

At the end of January 1591, a further complication emerged. The same Agnes Sampson testified that she had met with nine other witches and the Devil at night near Prestonpans. There a body of wax made by Sampson was wrapped in a linen cloth and delivered to the Devil, being passed around the circle as they chanted, ‘This is King James the Sext [Sixth], ordered to be consumed at the instance of a nobleman Francis Earl Bothwell.’
⁸
Sampson, it was alleged, had ‘said that there would be both gold and silver and victual from my Lord Bothwelf’.
⁹
Called before the Privy Council on 15 April, Bothwell denied the charges but was imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle the next day. At first, according to Melville, James was ‘not willing to credit [Bothwell’s] devilish accusers’.
¹⁰
But another witness, Ritchie Graham, was produced to testify that Bothwell had asked how long the King would live, in itself an act of treason. Bothwell thought, probably with good reason, that the witnesses were being primed by his political opponents: to the King and Council he claimed that ‘this practice with Graham was devised against him’ and ‘alleged that this matter grew not only by Graham, but sprang from his enemies’.
¹¹
Two years later, Bothwell explicitly identified Maitland as the leader of these ‘enemies’.
¹²
A correspondent in Durham reported that Bothwell ‘stands upon his truth’ and begged to be able to settle the matter ‘by combat’ against his accuser ‘however so mean a person’, but that this would not happen: ‘We say that he shall die.’
¹³
Presumably fearing this outcome, Bothwell escaped from his gaol on 21 June; four days later the Privy Council issued a proclamation claiming 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’. 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’.
¹⁴
Not everyone was convinced. A letter ‘To the Nobility’ circulated, defending Bothwell and berating Ritchie Graham’s charge as an ‘incredible and unnatural accusation led against a noble personage by an infamous person moved by the disposition and humour of his devilish nature’. The court, it continued, was controlled by evil counsellors, who ‘in gilded and painted palaces … execute their power at the dictates of hatred and favour’ and ‘obscure that great Majesty that … is due unto his sacred person’.
¹⁵

By the time that Robert Bruce admonished the King from the pulpit in June 1591 that he must exercise justice on the witches, ‘although it should be with the hazard of his life’,
¹⁶
James needed no encouragement. As the interrogations and trials progressed he had become fascinated by the witchcraft phenomenon. He took a particular interest in the trial of Barbara Napier, who was arrested for consulting with witches, and was known to be a friend of Bothwell. During her interrogation, she claimed to be pregnant, a strategy that, if successful, would save her from the death penalty. James was unsympathetic. To Maitland in April 1591, he ordered: ‘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, and cause bowel [disembowel] her publicly.’
¹⁷
When Napier’s jurors allowed her to live, he berated them personally for their verdict. The reasons he gave are telling. Witchcraft was a secondary issue: his main concern was that he as King had been thwarted in his wishes. He believed Napier to be guilty of treason, and he could not believe the presumption of the jury in finding her innocent. ‘Yet this I say, that – howsoever matters have gone against my will I am innocent of all injustice in these behalfs, and for my part my conscience doth set me clear, as did the conscience of Samuel, and I call you to be my judges herein. And suppose I be your King, yet I submit myself to the accusations of you my subjects in this behalf, and let any one say what I have done. And as I have this begun, so purpose I 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.’
¹⁸
He had almost died as a result of this witchcraft, he pointed out – not that he feared death for himself, but he was concerned for ‘the common good of this country, which enjoyeth peace by my life … as you may collect by mine absence, for if such troubles were in breeding whilst I retained life, what would have been done if my life had been taken from me?’

James felt that what he had learned from the witchcraft phenomenon needed to be understood by a wider audience. In 1591, he commissioned the publication of
News from Scotland,
which outlined the facts of the recent proceedings, presumably for an English audience. But he wanted to write something more scholarly – and to challenge the likes of Reginald Scot’s 1584 treatise
The Discoverie of Witchcraft,
which with great scholarship and at great length rubbished beliefs in witchcraft. So James set out to pen his
Daemonologie,
primarily to refute ‘the damnable opinion of two principally in our age, whereof the one called SCOT, an Englishman, is not ashamed in public print to deny that there can be such a thing as witchcraft: and so maintains the old error of the Sadducees, in denying of spirits’.
¹⁹

James’s
Daemonologie
takes the form of a dialogue between the sceptical Philomathes and the learned Epistemon, who answers Philomathes’ questions about withcraft. Its three books deal with magic in general, sorcery and witchcraft in particular, and finally with spirits and ghosts. Witches, Epistemon claims, can harm and even kill by chanting over wax images melted over a fire, and they ‘can raise storms and tempests in the air, either upon the sea or land, though not universally, but in such a particular place and prescribed bounds, as God will permit them so to trouble’.
²⁰

Daemonologie
affords us a rare glimpse into the composition of James’s writings. In common with many Renaissance authors, the King did not work in isolation.
²¹
Early versions of two sections of
Daemonologie,
drafted in James’s own hand, survive in manuscript form at the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
²²
James then authorised a clean copy of his treatise to be made, perhaps by his childhood friend Sir James Sempill: this copy, now in the Folger Shakespeare Library,
²³
however, also bears the signs of revisions by two persons, one of whom has been identified as James Carmichael, the Minister of Haddington,
²⁴
and the other as James himself. James made over one hundred amendments to the manuscript, ranging from deletions and insertions of single words, to the addition of entire passages. The longest of these amendments was also the last, as James added in the margin a characteristically gruesome discussion of how witchcraft can be detected by the telltale signs it leaves on the corpses of its victims: ‘if the dead carcass be at any time … handled by the murderer it will gush out of blood as if the blood was crying to the heaven for revenge…’
²⁵
When James finally published his
Daemonologie
in 1597, his belief in witches seems to have been waning: perhaps the fact that Bothwell was by then no longer a threat contributed to his less hard-line attitude. But Scotland had been bitten by the witchcraze bug, and there was a steady stream of accusations, trials and executions, fuelled by eager clergymen and lawyers, well into the seventeenth century.
²⁶

After Bothwell escaped from his gaol in June 1591, he fled to the Borders eluding capture. Although he was declared an outlaw, there was a great deal of public sympathy for him, and much of the nobility, whatever their qualms about Bothwell personally, saw James’s continuing antagonism as a dangerous Maitland-inspired threat to the nobility. This general support allowed Bothwell to roam fairly free, and he was sighted publicly in Dalkeith, Crichton and Leith. His confidence increasing, he turned up at the Canongate, to throw a brave challenge at the Chancellor. Bothwell’s unpredictable movements were guaranteed to put James into his customary panic.
²⁷
At the same time, he had to deal with an increasingly obstructive wife. Anna had taken a personal dislike to Chancellor Maitland. Although Queen Sophia had charged Maitland with keeping an eye on Anna’s interests,
²⁸
the Chancellor soon found himself torn between the Queen’s interests and his own. The quarrel focused on the ownership of Dunfermline Abbey’s lordship of Musselburgh, which both Queen and Chancellor claimed. Maitland had been granted the lordship in 1587; when he saw in 1591 that the Danes wanted it, he renewed his charter and starting selling its lands off. Anna was enraged, and displayed her fury by pointedly turning down an offer of hospitality from the Chancellor in April 1591, staying at Dalkeith while James went alone.
²⁹
Perhaps because of this, Anna started to align herself, controversially, with Bothwell, drawn to his grasp of French and of European culture. She went so far as to plead for Bothwell with the King after his escape in July 1591, but her pleas left him ‘so moved’ with anger that she wisely let the matter drop.
³⁰
It was to be the first of several interventions by the Queen for men who had fallen foul of her husband, her success rate increasing slowly but surely over the next few years.
³¹
As Melville described her
modus operandi,
‘The Queen’s Majesty, according to her custom, whenever she understands that his Majesty by wrong information is stirred up against any honest servant or subject, she procures incontinent for them [forwards their case immediately], and uses great diligence to get sure knowledge of the verity, that she may the boldlier speak in their favour.’
³²
As the Queen’s influence waxed, Maitland was threatened. He was not helped by his wife, who failed to realise that Anna was by now quite capable of understanding her gossip in Scots which implied that the Queen had been favourable to ‘Bothwell’s late attempt’.
³³
Anna was deeply insulted, and refused to cooperate with the Chancellor. When informed that the ‘dryness’ and ‘heavy countenance’ between her and Maitland was hurting ‘the King’s service’, she made an attempt to heal the rift, which was ruined when Maitland again offended her.
³⁴

On 27 December 1591, James’s fear of Bothwell was fully vindicated. In a piece of daredevil bravado Bothwell raided Holyroodhouse at suppertime with about fifty followers. He and his men attacked the doors of the King, Queen and Chancellor; setting fire to the King’s door, and taking hammers to the Queen’s, in the process killing the King’s Master Stabler, John Shaw. James wrote an touching epitaph for his stabler: