When most picture royalty, they see a warrior. But King James VI of Scotland (later James I of England) was different. Born sickly and intellectually driven, James found a way to prove his divine authority not on the battlefield, but by declaring a personal war against the ultimate foe: Satan. His chosen weapon? Ink.
This need to demonstrate strength through scholarship became his life’s greatest mission, one that tragically justified the state-sanctioned violence against thousands across Britain and beyond. James cultivated a strict theological position: any power or charm not derived from God must come from the Devil. This meant that any use of magic—whether a folk healing charm or a political curse—was not merely superstition, but high treason.
🌪️ The Storm That Proved the Plot
James’s abstract fears became brutally concrete in 1589 during his marriage to Anne of Denmark. When severe, unseasonable storms battered the royal fleet, forcing Anne to land in Norway, James saw not bad luck, but a deliberate satanic assault. This voyage, which required the King himself to brave the North Sea to retrieve his bride, became the literal proof of treason that underpinned the ensuing terror.
Rumours spread that a coven of witches was responsible for the tempests, with talk even emerging of one witch sailing into the Firth of Forth on a sieve. This panic quickly became international; trials in Copenhagen resulted in the execution of at least twelve women accused of sending demons in barrels to wreck the royal fleet. This shared, cross-cultural terror set the stage for the ensuing bloody events in Scotland.
🔥 North Berwick and the Cost of Confession
The ensuing North Berwick Witch Trials were entirely driven by the King’s terror. Thanks to the 1563 Scottish Witchcraft Act, simply consulting with folk healers was a capital offence. The confessions began when healer Geillis Duncan, tortured with thumbscrews, implicated Agnes Sampson, another respected healer.
Agnes’s subsequent interrogation was catastrophic for her and pivotal for James. Subjected to extreme duress, including pilliwinks (finger-crushing devices) and the scold's bridle, Agnes finally broke. Her confession confirmed James’s deepest anxieties: she admitted collaborating with the Copenhagen coven to sabotage the Queen's arrival. Even more terrifying for the King, she recited the precise, private words he had exchanged with his Queen on their wedding night. This was the moment James became utterly convinced. Agnes likely told him the Devil himself claimed the King was his greatest enemy, providing James with the narrative he craved.
The trials also offered a perfect political opportunity. Geillis implicated Francis Stewart, the Earl of Bothwell, a powerful cousin with a claim to the throne, framing him as the Devil’s chosen agent. While Stewart eventually escaped, the literate schoolmaster, Dr. John Fian, alleged to be the coven’s clerk, was tortured so severely—nails ripped out, legs crushed in the 'boot'—that he eventually confessed before being strangled and burned.
✍️ Daemonologie: The Royal Mandate Against Doubt
Driven to solidify his position as both scholar and Devil’s champion, James authored Daemonologie (1597). This was not a balanced text; it was a fierce, royal assertion of power structured as a dialogue to systematically silence sceptics like Reginald Scot.
James laid down the law on why witches exist and what they do:
Existence: Because God’s law prohibits them from living.
Temptation: The Devil lures people through three internal passions: curiosity, revenge, or greed.
Maleficium: The greatest crime was maleficium—the actual physical harm caused by magic, such as raising storms, an act that became synonymous with high treason against the King.
The text revealed a deeply rooted misogyny, echoing the earlier Malleus Maleficarum: women were weaker and thus far easier for the Devil to deceive. This created a clear class division. Literate men engaging in occult study, like the court astrologer John Dee, were generally deemed merely "curious" and often left unharmed, despite their dealings with spirits. Conversely, poor 'cunning women' using folk charms for healing or divination were guilty of plotting treason and consorting with the Devil, often forced to confess to the highly sexualised, degrading ritual of the Kiss of Shame(Osculum Infame).
🧚 The Battle for Belief: Fairies vs. Devils
James was adamant that local folk beliefs in beings like the Fairy Queen (or 'our good neighbours') were just more of the Devil’s smoke and mirrors. When accused healers confessed to receiving knowledge from these spirits, James dismissed it as delusion. For him, there was no nuance; any unapproved spiritual interaction was the Devil transforming himself to deceive the witch.
Concluding Daemonologie, James stated that all practitioners, and even those who only consulted them, were equally guilty. His ultimate guardrail was that God would never allow an innocent person to be killed in a trial, thus validating every execution as righteous.
💀 The Lingering Echoes of Persecution
The legal machinery James established took on a horrific life of its own. It fuelled the Great Scottish Witch Hunt of 1661–1662 and profoundly influenced England. During the English Civil War, opportunists like Matthew Hopkins, the 'Witchfinder General', successfully exploited James’s legal framework, leading to an estimated 230 to 300 executions in just two years using barbaric techniques like the Swimming Test and Pricking Test.
The shadow of James’s obsession reached even into the theatre; Shakespeare’s Macbeth, written for James’s court in 1606, opens with the 'weird sisters' summoning storms, a direct nod to the North Berwick trials.
Though Parliament repealed the harshest laws in 1736 (making fraud, rather than Devil worship, the crime), the final vestiges of James’s legacy lasted until 1951. The last person jailed under the Witchcraft Act was Scottish medium Helen Duncan in 1944, convicted for revealing sensitive wartime naval information during a séance.
Today, campaigners honour the thousands lost with the Witches of Scotland Tartan, using its colours—black and grey for ashes, red and pink for legal tape—to push for an official pardon. The Wyrd was never fully extinguished, surviving not as satanic conspiracy, but as deeply rooted folk belief, constantly battling the iron logic of the crown.