1
Michael Wasser
The pioneering modern scholar of Scottish witch-hunting, Christina Larner, clarified the pattern of Scottish witch-hunting and showed that much of it occurred in brief bursts.1 Larner listed five major peak periods which she called national witch-hunts: 1590–1591, 1597, 1628–1630, 1649 and 1661–1662.2 The recent Survey of Scottish Witchcraft confirms this pattern, even as it increases the numbers based on further research.
However, the 1590–1591 witch-hunt was not the first of its kind. A previously unnoticed Scottish witch-hunt occurred in the years 1568–1569 in the eastern sheriffdoms of Scotland, from Fife to Elgin. Its size corresponds to Larner’s second category of witch-hunts, a large-scale local hunt, existing just below the scale of a national hunt.3 How was it possible for such a large witch-hunt to be previously undetected? Large witch-hunts were usually spectacular occurrences, accompanied by a moral panic and such wide publicity that it could not be hidden.
The explanation lies in the failure of the hunt. As I will argue below, two important characteristics of a witch-hunt were present. There was a determination on the part of the legal and political authorities to pursue witches as a public menace and there were large-scale accusations against suspected witches. However, the element of moral panic was not exclusive to witches, but was diffused among other offenders against God’s law such as adulterers. This was part of a campaign of godly reform under the regime of the ‘good regent’, the earl of Moray. Also, the witch-hunters did not systematically organise the trials and evidence in advance, so they were often unable to secure convictions. Finally, Moray’s regime was unstable and ended with his assassination. The instability detracted from a campaign of law and order; the assassination brought it to an end. The result was a failed witch-hunt: many people were accused as witches, efforts were made to bring them to justice, but few were actually executed. The witch-hunt was lost from sight among these wider issues.
I
The evidence for a witch-hunt in the years 1568–1569 consists of a number of distinct sets of records. At the December 1567 parliament, a commission drafting legislative proposals discussed ‘how witchecraft salbe puneist and Inquisitioun takin thairof’.4 There was probably no formal response, but it was followed in the next two years by a succession of prosecutions or attempted prosecutions of witches. In April 1568, there was a commission to try many people in Forfarshire, and at least one other person was subsequently investigated in May.5 On 2 August 1568 Sir William Stewart, the Lord Lyon, was arrested on charges of treason and using witchcraft against Regent Moray. He was later tried and executed.6 In the late spring of 1569, Moray conducted a justice ayre (a travelling criminal court) up the east coast of Scotland, during which large numbers of witches were accused, and ten were executed.7 Finally, there was another isolated case on 12 August 1569.8 The political context for these events was Moray’s regency, which lasted from August 1567 until his assassination in January 1570.
The two main incidents of witch-hunting were the commission of 1568 and the justice ayre of 1569. The April 1568 commission was issued to try thirty-eight individual witches in Angus. It was to last for six months and allowed for the investigation and trial of any other suspected witches as well.9 The commission is an example of how research expands our knowledge. It lay in the archives of the earls of Airlie until it was discovered by Arthur Williamson and mentioned in his book, Scottish National Consciousness in the Age of James VI, published in 1979. This late discovery meant that Larner was not aware of it. Since Williamson was not primarily interested in witchcraft, the commission occupied only part of a paragraph in his book and was not explored further.10 The discovery slowly percolated into the wider scholarly community. It formed a major part of the 1998 conference paper on which this chapter is based and was addressed in Peter Maxwell-Stuart’s 2001 book, Satan’s Conspiracy.
A little over a year after the commission was issued, in May and June of 1569, Moray personally conducted a justice ayre up the east coast of Scotland, from Fife to Elgin, putting down political opposition and prosecuting criminals. This circuit included the Forfarshire territory where the 1568 commission had been based. According to Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie, Moray executed two witches in St Andrews, two in Dundee and various others in other places – ten witches in total.11 The names of four witches who were accused but whose fate is unknown appear in the treasurer’s accounts via payments made to messengers to summon an assize.12 One witch, named ‘Niknevin’, is known from a number of sources and is the only one of the ten executed witches whose name we know.13 In a letter written to the General Assembly after the justice ayre, Moray complained that he had been unable to convict most of the accused witches presented to him for lack of evidence.14 This means that the ten executed witches were drawn from a much larger number of accused witches, of which we have no record. I have therefore added an estimate of thirty witches, accused but not executed, to accompany the ten witches mentioned by Pitscottie, a three to one ratio. This extrapolation is based on other examples of the imperfections of Scottish record-keeping. For example, in 1607 and 1628, approxi-mately 75 per cent of the original bills for trials before the privy council did not appear in the subsequent trial records – also a three to one ratio.15
When we add these numbers together, we have a total of eighty-one accused witches, of whom eleven (including Sir William Stewart) are known to have been executed. This estimate for the accused witches should be seen as conservative; the actual number might have been considerably higher. For example, the justice ayre of 1569 passed through five sheriffdoms: Fife, Forfar, Aberdeen, Banff and Elgin. In one of those sheriffdoms, Forfar, there had been thirty-eight witches judicially accused the year before. Regent Moray complained that what he had during the ayre was merely ‘a generall delation of names’16 – which is what had also been provided in the 1568 commission. What if this ‘generall delation of names’ in 1569 had averaged thirty-eight witches for each sheriffdom? This would give us a total of 190 accused witches! Consider also that our knowledge of the 1568 commission is due solely to its accidental survival. Were there others? We cannot know. Moreover, Moray conducted six other justice ayres during his regency.17 There are no mentions of witchcraft prosecutions concerning any of them, but perhaps there were attempts on a smaller scale. Finally, the 1568 witchcraft commission was issued by the earl of Argyll, who was justice general of Scotland, while he was holding a justice ayre in the west of Scotland. If he issued a commission to try witches in the east, might he have been holding his own trials in the west? There are no surviving records to tell us.18 Yet if he was doing so, this would have been a national witch-hunt, not a regional one. The purpose of this speculation is not to encourage an expansion of the numbers beyond the conservative estimate of eighty-one accused witches, but to demonstrate that this figure is indeed conservative and that 1568–1569 constituted a period of large-scale witch-hunting. On the available evidence, it is just short of one of Christina Larner’s ‘national hunts’. Her examples of the category just below the national hunt were the Inverkeithing hunt of 1623 when twenty-two people were accused and the Paiston, East Lothian hunt in 1678 when eighteen people were accused.19 Both the 1568 commission and the 1569 justice ayre were larger than these witchhunts. In fact, the figure of eighty-one accused witches approaches that of 1590–1591 when the Witchcraft Survey lists 119 entries for accused witches.20
II
The existence of a large but relatively invisible witch-hunt in the years 1568–1569 raises a number of questions. Why was the effort made to prosecute large numbers of witches? Is it justified to treat the 1568 commission and the 1569 justice ayre as part of a single concerted effort to hunt witches? And why did the witch-hunt fail?
The answer to the first two questions begins with two of the men responsible for the prosecutions. Regent Moray personally led the 1569 justice ayre. John Erskine of Dun was one of the seven commissioners in 1568, and one of the two who had to be of the quorum.21 Both men were prominent and powerful supporters of the Protestant kirk and of its agenda, which included a rigorous enforcement of the law. The argument is that Moray’s regency saw a new spirit of co-operation between the royal government and the kirk, and that one specific instance of this co-operation was the attempt by two ‘godly magistrates’, Moray and Erskine of Dun, to prosecute witches.22 This is why there was a witchhunt in 1568–1569, and why the two distinct episodes in 1568 and 1569 deserve to be treated together.
In the eyes of the reformers, crimes were sins and sins were crimes.23 Men like Moray, Erskine of Dun, and John Knox were oriented in the direction of the Old Testament and wanted to see its judicial laws enforced in society. In the kirk’s fourth general assembly, on 29 June 1562, the second item of the assembly’s supplication to the queen and her council called for ‘punishment of horrible vices’ which ‘for laike of punishment, doe even now so abound, that sinne is reputed to be no sinne’. It continued:
If anie object that punishment cannot be commanded to be executed without a parliament, we answere, that the Eternall God, in his parliament, hath pronounced death to be the punishment of adulterie and of blasphemie; whose acts, if yee putt not in execution, (seing that kings are but his lieutenants, having no power to give life where he commandeth death,) as that he will repute you and all others who foster vice patrons of impietie, so will he not faile to punishe you for neglecting of his judgements.24
Three things need to be stressed concerning this pronouncement. The first is the presence of the death penalty. The kirk was not concerned only with questions of worship and belief, which were held to be exclusive to itself, nor was it concerned only with moral offences that could be handled exclusively through the godly discipline of church courts. If the kirk wanted the death penalty enforced, then it needed the active co-operation of the civil magistrates who wielded the sword.25 The second is the clear link that is made between the execution of sinners and the good of the kingdom and its rulers – God will punish those who fail to enforce his judgments. The third is that witchcraft is nowhere mentioned.
This neglect of witchcraft may have been no more than an oversight; it was no doubt implicitly included under the rubric of ‘horrible vices’. At any rate, this relative neglect of witchcraft was about to end. Beginning at the next general assembly in December 1562 and culminating in the parliament of May and June 1563, witchcraft rose to a position of importance among the moral offences that the kirk wanted punished by death. Julian Goodare has shown that the witchcraft act of 1563 was probably a fragment of a wider programme of legislation prepared initially by the December 1562 general assembly and introduced to the parliament in May. Most of this programme was not enacted, especially those aspects dealing with ‘a full Protestant legislative settlement’ in which the acts of the 1560 Reformation Parliament would finally have been confirmed.26 However, the witchcraft act was passed, witchcraft did become a statutory capital crime, and the way was now clear for the prosecution of witches in the secular courts of the realm.
Or was it? To pass a law is one thing, to see it enforced is another. Law enforcement was not a strong point of early modern Scottish administration, and there were particular problems in enforcing a kirk-supported agenda during the reign of Mary Queen of Scots. For one thing, it was difficult for a Protestant church to co-operate with a Catholic queen. The kirk’s dissatisfaction with Mary’s enforcement of the law can be seen on 25 June 1565, when the tenth general assembly made the following appeal to Mary:
That suche horrible crimes as now abound in this realme without correctioun, to the great contempt of God and his holie word, as idolatrie, blaspheming of God’s name, manifest breache of the Sabboth-day, witchecraft, sorcerie, and inchantment, adulterie, incest, whooredom, maintenance of brothells, murther, slaughter, reafe, spoilzie, with manie other detestable crimes, may be severlie punished; and judges appointed in everie province or diocie, with power to execute, and that by Act of Parliament.27
Witchcraft had now made it into the list by name. Complaints about serious crimes were repeated later in 1565 and again in 1566.28 On 24 July 1567 Queen Mary abdicated following her defeat at the battle of Carberry, and on 22 August the earl of Moray was appointed regent for the infant James VI.
Moray’s regency, like his sister’s reign, was marked by political difficulties, rebellions and threatened rebellions. These finally resulted in his assassination in January 1570 and the outbreak of a more widespread civil war. But so long as he was in power, Moray vigorously pursued the material and moral interests of the kirk. The contrast with what came before and what came after, together with the glow of martyrdom that assassination brings, resulted in his reputation as ‘the good regent’ in Protestant hagiography.29 On the issue of justice, one anonymous poet wrote that ‘Baith murtheraris, theifis, and Witches he did dant’.30
Moray did actively pursue criminals. In October 1567 he made a raid in the West March. In March 1568 he held a justice ayre in Glasgow, in July an expedition was made to Fife, in September there was another border raid, and yet another in April 1569. In May and June 1569, there was the justice ayre from Fife to Elgin that this essay addresses and in September 1569 there was another border expedition.31 Many of these endeavours were linked to establishing his authority as regent. Both the 1568 witchcraft commission and the witch-hunting of the May–June 1569 justice ayre occurred during peak periods of Moray’s authority. A parliament in December 1567 began a process of acceptance of Moray’s rule and the April 1568 commission came at the height of this process. Queen Mary’s escape on 2 May interrupted it and, despite her defeat and flight to England, it was not until the spring of 1569 that he re-established his authority in much of Scotland. The primary purpose of the May–June justice ayre in 1569 was to receive the submission of nobles who had continued to support Mary.32 There is a strong correlation, therefore, between Moray’s political authority and the 1568–1569 witch-hunt.
This is not to say that Moray was a paragon of consistency in all he did. As a politician, he knew when to compromise, which infuriated his less realistic colleagues such as John Knox.33 Nonetheless, his enforcement of criminal justice during his regency was indubitable. One minor theme noticed by Amy Blakeway is that justice was more strongly affected by Moray’s death than was religion. On his tomb, the figure of Justice was visibly more upset than the figure of Religion.34
But however important Moray was, no single man can ever be wholly responsible for implementing a policy of law enforcement. Other people are needed to provide help and aid. It is thus significant that Moray was not directly involved in the 1568 commission in Forfarshire. Instead, it was handled by people who were his allies and who shared his views. As seen above, the earl of Argyll issued the commission. Argyll had been a colleague of Moray in the Lords of the Congregation, and his brother-in-law and political supporter after this. Moray and Argyll did have a personal falling out in the summer of 1567 over Mary’s deposition and Moray’s opposition to Argyll’s desire to divorce his wife. Nonetheless they were still formally co-operating in April 1568, prior to Mary’s escape from Lochleven, as seen by Argyll conducting a justice ayre under Moray’s regime.35 Although Campbell power was greatest in the southwestern highlands, Argyll also played a local role in Forfarshire, both through direct landholding, and ties to kinsmen who were resident there.36
The commission was granted to seven men, including James, Lord Ogilvy, John Erskine of Dun and Sir John Ogilvy of Inverquharity.37 All seven were committed Protestants,38 but Peter Maxwell-Stuart and I have independently concluded that John Erskine of Dun was probably the man most responsible for the commission.39 Erskine was a leading reformer, uniquely combining a theological and ministerial role with that of a secular baron.40 Erskine’s lands and power base were in the Mearns in northern Forfarshire. He was also superintendent of Angus and the Mearns, exercising spiritual jurisdiction over all of Forfarshire. Maxwell-Stuart concludes that the commission might have been due to ‘Erskine’s wish to exert a renewed discipline and control over certain areas within his jurisdiction’.41
Additional arguments can be found in Erskine’s secular role as a magistrate accustomed to meting out justice. In 1556, he acted as a justice depute for the fourth earl of Argyll, father of the man who granted the 1568 commission. Beginning on 16 August, he held a justice ayre in the north of Scotland, starting in Elgin and ending two months later on 19 October in Aberdeen. It heard well over a hundred cases (none involving witchcraft).42 In 1579 and 1581, he was employed to raise an army and enforce the king’s law against people laying siege to Redcastle in Forfarshire.43 Erskine’s judicial role, when tied to his position as superintendent of Angus and the Mearns, and his close relationship with the earl of Moray, suggests that he was the key man in the commission.
He did not, however, act alone. In order for courts to be held, a quorum of three men was necessary, and both Erskine and Lord Ogilvy had to be of the quorum. As Maxwell-Stuart has noted, the courts were to be held in Arbroath in the southern part of Angus, and as he has shown, most of the accused witches came from southern Angus, but Erskine’s power base was further north in the Mearns. The point is the same as has been made concerning Moray: no one man can be wholly responsible for a large-scale operation like a witch-hunt, but you do need a small number of men to take the lead and provide the motive force which others can then follow. This seems to have been the role of Moray in particular, but also of Erskine of Dun.
Moray’s regency, therefore, can be seen as a period of fruitful co-operation between the secular authorities and the kirk in pursuit of the godly commonwealth. Moray himself, with his personal piety, commitment to Protestantism and vigorous enforcement of the laws, set the tone. Other magistrates such as Erskine of Dun, who shared his qualities and goals, followed suit. The policies pursued included the suppression of crime, and the new conflation of sin and crime insisted upon by the kirk meant that some moral offences, such as adultery and witchcraft, had been redefined as capital crimes and were to be as vigorously pursued as theft and murder. Thus, we have parliament’s concern over witchcraft, the granting of a commission to try dozens of witches in Forfarshire, Moray’s pursuit of witches during at least one of his justice ayres, and at least two scattered witchcraft trials, one of a high-ranking official, the other of an ordinary woman in Dunkeld. But it must be stressed that the pursuit of witches was merely one part of a greater whole.44 It was not emphasised and could easily be lost sight of among all the other demands of state at the time. This returns us to the final question: Why did the witch-hunt fail?
III
One characteristic of the European witch-hunt was the way in which witchcraft was often viewed as a crimen exceptum, that is ‘a category of criminal offenses that were so serious and often so difficult to prove that they justify both irregular legal procedure – often summary – and also deserve neither Christian charity nor imperial clementia (clemency) in the matter of sentencing’.45 These two elements – a serious crime that was difficult to prove – could certainly apply to witchcraft. The witches’ dealings were in secret, and the supposed harm that they caused was by invisible magic working at a distance, much harder to prove than a theft or a murder, which proceeds by physical means and can be seen by witnesses. Rules of evidence and procedure were loosened in several ways. Torture was used in a more extreme and otherwise illegal manner. Circumstantial evidence was given more credence than usual. Witnesses whose testimony would not normally be allowed, such as criminal accomplices (other accused witches), women and children were admitted. This allowed the conviction and execution of hundreds and thousands of women and men who otherwise would have gone free.46 In the eyes of zealous believers, this was a good and godly thing.
Eventually this attitude towards witchcraft was adopted in Scotland. Brian Levack has shown how the use of torture to extract confessions and other evidence in Scottish witch trials was technically illegal but nonetheless tolerated and accepted.47 At times the crimen exceptum model was rejected. This is what occurred between 1597 and 1628 in a reaction against the excesses of the 1597 witch-hunt.48 This temporary rejection of witchcraft as a crimen exceptum can be seen in detail in the case of Geillis Johnstone in 1614, when a panel of high-ranking judges led by the earl of Dunfermline systematically barred the jury from hearing evidence that they considered to be tainted. Johnstone was consequently acquitted.49 In 1568–1569, however, witchcraft had not yet come to be seen as a crimen exceptum. This can be seen from a letter written by Regent Moray to the general assembly in July 1569 outlining his difficulties in achieving convictions during his recent justice ayre:
Before our coming from Fife, and sensyne, we have been verie willing to do justice on all persons suspected of witchecraft; as also upon adulterers, incestuous persons, and abusers of the sacraments; wherin we could not have suche expedition as we would have wished, because we had no other probabilitie to trie and convict them, but a generall delation of names, the persons suspected not being for the most part tried and convicted by order of the kirk of before. This hindered manie things that otherwise might have beene done. And, therefore, we pray you appoint and prescrive how the judgement of the kirk may proceed and be executed against all suche trespassers, before complaint be made to us, that when we come to the countrie we may caus execute the law, and be releeved of the triell and inquisitioun heeranant.50
Witchcraft, although it was mentioned first, was not the sole focus of Moray’s concern. He also mentioned adultery, incest and abuse of the sacraments as crimes that concerned the kirk. This is consistent with previous pronouncements of the general assembly, as we have seen. However, a witch-hunt, to be successful, needed to focus on witches. This is what happened in the national witch-hunts and even the regional witch-hunts beginning in 1590–1591. It did not happen in the 1569 justice ayre.
Even more important than a lack of focus was a lack of evidence. Moray was clear that he had been unable to ‘have such expedition as we would have wished’ because the lists of names which he received were unaccompanied by any evidence. He thus had to engage in a lengthy process of ‘triell and inquisitioun’ in order to achieve convictions. This was the case not just with accused witches, but with the perpetrators of the other three crimes as well. The lists of names of witches, adulterers, incestuous persons and abusers of the sacraments presented to Moray had probably been gathered by the individual congregations of the kirk; this had been proposed for adulterers and incestuous persons a year and a half earlier.51
The result so far as witches were concerned can be seen in a letter from Sir John Muir of Caldwell to the earl of Eglinton. It was written on 10 May 1569 from St Andrews, where Moray was holding the first stage of his justice ayre. Muir reported Moray’s interrogation of a witch known as ‘Niknevin’, mentioning that both ‘the Lord Regent’ and ‘the ministeris’ were questioning her. We see here the reality of Moray’s complaints: Niknevin had not been adequately interrogated before she reached the justice ayre. We also see the intimate co-operation between Moray and the ministers. Niknevin was resistant on two points. First, she refused to make a confession concerning any ‘wytchcreftis nor gilt’. Second, she refused to name any other people as witches. This suggests that the lists of witches given to Moray did not contain names provided by other accused witches and reinforces the likelihood that they were given by members of congregations (or the minister, exhorter or reader). Muir reported that Niknevin was due to be tried ‘this Tysday’ and that public opinion was divided on whether she would be convicted and executed.52 We know from another source that Niknevin was indeed executed.53 Therefore, far from going to extraordinary lengths to gather evidence, the 1569 justice ayre suffered from a dearth of evidence due to a lack of effort by local authorities. This is the opposite of treating witchcraft as a crimen exceptum, and it is no wonder that there were not a larger number of executions.
A third issue that needs to be highlighted is Moray’s vision of the proper role of the kirk in enforcing the law. He complained that the accused had not been ‘tried and convicted by order of the kirk of before’ (emphasis mine). He then requested the general assembly to ‘appoint and prescrive how the judgement of the kirk may proceed and be executed against all suche trespassers, before complaint be made to us’. Moray did not just want the kirk to gather evidence for him, he wanted it actually to try and convict the accused criminals before handing them over to the secular authorities.54 This is a procedure akin to that of the Catholic Inquisition, and it is not what eventually pertained in Scotland. The kirk was eventually barred from trying people accused of capital crimes.55
While Moray’s letter to the kirk shows that his witch-hunt was a relative failure, the same is not as obvious for the thirty-eight witches named in the 1568 witchcraft commission. Since the commissioners were directed to try witches only, there was no problem with a lack of focus. Moreover, the commission’s call for further investigation of witches seems to have been heeded by the burgh authorities of Arbroath. In May 1568 they imprisoned Agnes Fergusson, who was not named in the commission, as a suspected witch.56 However, circumstantial evidence suggests that very few if any of the accused were ever executed. First is the argument from silence. Chroniclers did mention the ten people executed by Moray; wouldn’t they have done as much for a larger number from a small geographical area and associated with Erskine of Dun, one of the most respected of the reformers? There is also an analogy to be drawn from Moray’s letter to the general assembly. If his lists were unaccompanied by the necessary evidence for a conviction, isn’t it likely that the same was true for the commission, which was issued a year earlier? The strongest evidence, however, is derived from chronology. The commission was granted in April 1568 (the exact day was left out) and was to endure for six months, but on 2 May Queen Mary escaped from her imprisonment in Lochleven. She rallied her supporters and fought the regent’s forces at Langside on 13 May. Although she was defeated and fled, the political crisis continued.57 Forfarshire for the most part supported the queen until February of 1569. The members of the commission took different approaches. Lord Ogilvy was a leader of the queen’s party while his kinsman John Ogilvy of Inverquharity supported the king. John Erskine of Dun remained neutral. Another commissioner, Sir David Graham of Fintry, also supported the queen. The difficulty of enforcing justice under these circumstances can be seen by what happened when Graham was to be tried for wrongful imprisonment on 27 July 1568: the court was attacked by an army under the leadership of the earl of Huntly.58 Given this upheaval and the divisions among the commissioners, it is likely that the commission fell by the wayside, and in October 1568 it expired.
IV
It is instructive to compare the relative futility of the 1568–1569 witch-hunt with the success achieved by James VI at the North Berwick witch-trials in 1590–1591. James’s bride, Princess Anne, had been prevented by storms from reaching him, so he sailed to Norway to reach her. After he returned to Scotland, he convinced himself that the storms that had threatened him and Anne had been raised by a conspiracy of witches in order to kill him.59 Thus began the North Berwick witch trials, which resulted in the execution of dozens of people and which tried but failed to include the earl of Bothwell among them.60 During the witch-hunt and in its wake, James addressed some of the problems that had hampered the earlier witch-hunt. In particular, he altered the law by pressing the court of session to issue an opinion saying that in cases of lèse-majesté and heresy ‘infamous persons, weomen, bairns, et conscii criminis’ could be admitted as witnesses against the accused. This ruling was applied to witches as well.61 It was a direct application of the crimem exceptum theory. As has been argued above, without treating witchcraft as a crimen exceptum, it would have been impossible to achieve large numbers of convictions and executions. Certainly the testimony of women and ‘conscii criminis’ (criminal associates, or other witches) was important in furthering the witch-hunt. James also used and authorised the use of torture at this time, although the legal use of torture did not continue.62
The contrast with Regent Moray’s efforts is striking. Whereas Moray had grouped witchcraft with other crimes, preventing an exclusive focus on it, James singled out witchcraft as the great crime to be fought, and gave it his undivided attention. Moray had also allowed witches to go free for lack of evidence, while James made sure that evidence was forthcoming, one way or another. Intertwined with what was probably a genuine belief went a political purpose. James set himself up as the great enemy of the witches in part to establish himself as a ‘godly magistrate’, God’s instrument against Satan.63 Moray had been known as the ‘good regent’; James wanted this type of moral authority for himself and combating witches provided him with one means of achieving it. The kirk’s programme of eradicating sin by prosecuting crime was continuing, but now witchcraft had been elevated to the status of the great crimen exceptum.
One witchcraft case, in between the two hunts of 1568–1569 and 1590–1591, can further illustrate these points and shed light on both witch-hunts. On 24 October 1577, Violet Mar was tried and convicted for using witchcraft to try to kill Regent Morton.64 The record of the trial is sketchy, but a letter discussing the planning of the trial throws light on how the conviction was obtained. The letter was from Annabell, countess of Mar, to her sister’s husband, Robert Murray of Abercairny, and is dated a month and a half before the trial. Annabell told Murray that the regent was delayed by dealings with England, and that therefore he was to keep Violet Mar with him for the time being. She then went on to tell him what to do with her while he was waiting:
Praying you in the meintyme to caus try [sic] put the personis that suld accuse hir quhom scho hes abusit, as I wrett to you afoir, to be in reddiness to cum hier with thair accusatiounes in write agane the tyme ye appointit, as alsua to caus hir renew the speiking scho deponit afoir, befoir the ministeris was present of befoir, and that tua notaris be present to pen thir depositioune under ther forme of instrument, as my sister and I ressonit with you at being hier. Gif James my brother be thair, ye will mak him participant heirof, as alsua to mak my hartlie commendatiounes to him.65
Here was the beginning of a solution to Regent Moray’s problem. It did not involve trial and conviction by the kirk, but it did involve participation by ministers. Annabell wanted to make sure that the case against Violet was secure. The witnesses were to be primed in their testimony, Violet’s own testimony was to be repeated, the ministers who had been present at her original testimony were to be present again, and the whole was to be recorded in writing by two notaries. Convicting a witch was hard work, but unfortunately it was work that many Scots were happy to do throughout the period of the witch-hunts.
Annabell was the widow of Regent Mar and the foster mother of King James VI. At the time that she was co-ordinating the case against Violet Mar, James was a ten-year-old boy in her care. Is it possible that she gave James his early attitudes towards witches, which then provided a foundation for his later beliefs and actions? Certainly his actions in the North Berwick witch-hunt were in line with (but on a much larger scale than) what his foster mother had helped arrange thirteen years earlier.
V
The discovery of a witch-hunt prior to the North Berwick episode in 1590–1591 adds depth to our understanding of the witch-hunt as a whole but also emphasises the continuing lacunae in our knowledge. The lack of success in 1568–1569 points to the importance of hard work, co-operation between church and state, and viewing witchcraft as a crimen exceptum in order to achieve convictions in the courts. There are two periods, the 1590s and 1640s, which were periods of extensive witch-hunting for which the records are particularly incomplete.66 Perhaps there were more accusations, prosecutions and executions in these two periods than our current extrapolations suggest. Estimated numbers of executed witches have fallen over the years as scholars gained more of a mastery of the sources. However, perhaps this process has gone too far. I would suggest that the next series of estimates for Europe as a whole might increase, as they have done for Scotland.67
Notes
1. An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the Scottish Studies Fall Colloquium, ‘Witchcraft, Punishment and Popular Culture in Scotland’, at the University of Guelph in 1998. I would like to thank the organisers and the participants, including Peter Maxwell-Stuart and Stuart Macdonald.
2. Christina Larner, Enemies of God: The Witch-Hunt in Scotland (London, 1981), 60–2.
3. Ibid., 61.
4. APS, ii, 44 (RPS, 1567/12/97).
5. NRS, Airlie Muniments, GD16/25/4; Arbroath burgh court book, 1563–1575 (Arbroath Library), fo. 40r. I would like to thank Julian Goodare for the Arbroath reference.
6. Sir James Balfour, Historical Works, 4 vols., ed. J. Haig (Edinburgh, 1824–5), i, 345; Pitcairn (ed.), Trials, i, 510*, n. 2; P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, Satan’s Conspiracy: Magic and Witchcraft in Sixteenth-Century Scotland (East Linton, 2001), 57–60.
7. Robert Lindesay of Pitscottie, The Historie and Cronicles of Scotland, 3 vols., ed. Æ. J. G. Mackay (STS, 1899), ii, 217–18.
8. TA, xii, 167.
9. NRS, GD16/25/4. In a few instances part of the name is left out or is supplied by a description rather than a name.
10. Arthur H. Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness in the Age of James VI (Edinburgh, 1979), 56.
11. Lindesay, Historie, ii, 217–18.
12. TA, xii, 161, 163.
13. Sir John Muir of Caldwell to Hugh, third earl of Eglinton, 10 May 1569, HMC, Reports on the Manuscripts of the Earl of Eglinton (London, 1885), 42–3; Chambers, Domestic Annals, i, 60. She would have been one of the two witches whom Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie says were executed at St Andrews: Lindesay, Historie, ii, 217–18. For more on the name as a witches’ soubriquet, see Alison Hanham, ‘ “The Scottish Hecate”: a wild witch chase’, Scottish Studies, 13 (1969), 59–65, and Julian Goodare, ‘Nicneven’, in Elizabeth Ewan et al. (eds.), The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women (Edinburgh, 2006), 284.
14. David Calderwood, The History of the Kirk of Scotland, 8 vols., ed. Thomas Thomson (Wodrow Society, 1842–1849), ii, 501–2.
15. Michael Wasser, ‘Violence and the Central Criminal Courts in Scotland, 1603–1638’ (Columbia University PhD dissertation, 1995), 223.
16. Calderwood, History, ii, 501–2.
17. Chambers, Domestic Annals, i, 45, 52–3, 60.
18. The commission was issued from Glasgow in April 1568. From 8 March to 1 May 1568 the earl of Argyll was engaged in the justice ayre mentioned above. See Jane E. A. Dawson, The Politics of Religion in the Age of Mary, Queen of Scots: The Earl of Argyll and the Struggle for Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2002), 58, n. 54. Her source was the Treasurer’s Accounts. While these accounts record payments made to people who helped to run the justice ayre, they contain no information on the crimes that were prosecuted. TA, xii, 113, 118, 121–2.
19. Larner, Enemies of God, 61.
20. SSW. This figure includes people from before the North Berwick witch-hunt began in November 1590.
21. The other, Lord Ogilvy, will be discussed below.
22. Cf. Keith Brown, ‘In search of the godly magistrate in Reformation Scotland’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 40 (1989), 553–81. Brown acknowledges Moray as the archetypal godly magistrate and also mentions Erskine of Dun: pp. 556, 559.
23. For the wider programme of ‘godly discipline’ in the church courts, see Michael R. Graham, The Uses of Reform: ‘Godly Discipline’ and Popular Behavior in Scotland and Beyond, 1560–1610 (Leiden, 1996), and Margo Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven, Conn., 2002). Moray’s policy of enforcing the law in a spirit of co-operation with the kirk has never been systematically studied, but has been frequently commented on: e.g. Maurice Lee, James Stewart, Earl of Moray: A Political Study of the Reformation in Scotland (New York, 1953), 219.
24. Calderwood, History, ii, 189.
25. Graham, Uses of Reform, 46–8. See also James Kirk, ‘Minister and magistrate’, in Patterns of Reform: Continuity and Change in the Reformation Kirk (Edinburgh, 1989), 232–79, especially pp. 270–9, for a discussion of ecclesiastical and civil jurisdictions.
26. Julian Goodare, ‘The Scottish witchcraft act’, Church History, 74 (2005), 39–67, at p. 42.
27. Calderwood, History, ii, 289.
28. Ibid., 301–2, 330.
29. Lee, James Stewart, is still the only full biography of Moray, but he features in most of the works dealing with the 1560s. Amy Blakeway, ‘The response to the Regent Moray’s assassination’, SHR, 88 (2009), 9–33, shows how he was perceived as forwarding the interests of the kirk, which included a vigorous enforcement of the law.
30. ‘Ane Tragedie in forme of ane Diallog betwix honour, Gude fame, and the Authour heirof in a Trance’, in James Cranstoun (ed.), Satirical Poems of the Time of the Reformation, 2 vols. (STS, 1891–1893), i, 93.
31. Chambers, Domestic Annals, i, 45, 52–3, 60.
32. Gordon Donaldson, Scotland: James V – James VII (Edinburgh, 1965), 158–61.
33. Both Julian Goodare and Amy Blakeway remind us of the conflicts between Moray and Knox, which were most contentious over Moray’s acquiescence to Mary’s wishes in the 1563 parliament. Goodare, ‘Scottish witchcraft act’, 43; Blakeway, ‘Regent Moray’s assassination’, 23–4.
34. Blakeway, ‘Regent Moray’s assassination’, 26.
35. Dawson, Politics of Religion, 36, 87–96, 112–26, 153–4.
36. Frank D. Bardgett, Scotland Reformed: The Reformation in Angus and the Mearns (Edinburgh, 1989), 53, 72–3, 77, 119, 122, 124, 126, 131. See also Edward J. Cowan, ‘The Angus Campbells and the origin of the Campbell-Ogilvie feud’, Scottish Studies, 25 (1981), 25–38.
37. NRS, GD16/25/4.
38. Lord Ogilvy, Erskine of Dun and Ogilvy of Inverquharity are all listed as members of the ‘Party of Revolution, 1559–1560’ in Gordon Donaldson, All the Queen’s Men: Power and Politics in Mary Stewart’s Scotland (London, 1983), 161.
39. For Maxwell-Stuart’s analysis, see Satan’s Conspiracy, 52–7.
40. There is no modern biography of Erskine, but see D. F. Wright, ‘John Erskine of Dun’, in H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds.), ODNB, 60 vols. (Oxford, 2004), xviii, 540–2, and Frank D. Bardgett, ‘John Erskine of Dun: a theological reassessment’, Scottish Journal of Theology, 43 (1990), 59–85. Erskine also features prominently in Bardgett, Scotland Reformed.
41. Maxwell-Stuart, Satan’s Conspiracy, 57.
42. NLS, Adv. MS 34.2.16, fos. 112r.–28v.
43. HMC, Appendix to the Fifth Report (London, 1877), 636, 641.
44. The way in which witchcraft was subsumed within a larger agenda before 1590 is also explored by Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness, 53–62.
45. Edward Peters, ‘Crimen exceptum’, in Richard M. Golden (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition, 4 vols. (Santa Barbara, Calif., 2006), i, 232. See also Christina Larner, ‘Crimen exceptum? The crime of witchcraft in Europe’, in Witchcraft and Religion: The Politics of Popular Belief (Oxford, 1984), 34–67.
46. Peters, ‘Crimen exceptum’, 233; Brian P. Levack, The Witch-hunt in Early Modern Europe (3rd edn., Harlow, 2006), 80–8.
47. Brian P. Levack, Witch-Hunting in Scotland: Law, Politics and Religion (London, 2008), 21–4.
48. Michael Wasser, ‘The privy council and the witches: the curtailment of witchcraft prosecutions in Scotland, 1597–1628’, SHR, 82 (2003), 20–46.
49. Michael Wasser and Louise A. Yeoman (eds.), ‘The trial of Geillis Johnstone for witchcraft, 1614’, SHS Miscellany, xiii (2004), 83–145.
50. Calderwood, History, ii, 501–2.
51. John Row, The History of the Kirk of Scotland, 1558–1637, ed. David Laing (Edinburgh: Wodrow Society, 1842), 35.
52. Sir John Muir of Caldwell to Hugh, third earl of Eglinton, 10 May 1569, HMC, Reports on the Manuscripts, 42–3.
53. Chambers, Domestic Annals, i, 60.
54. The bailies of the Canongate, when criticised by the superintendent for not punishing whores and harlots, responded that it was the responsibility of the kirk session to first call these people before it and convict them, then hand them over to the secular authorities for punishment: Kirk, ‘Minister and magistrate’, 274.
55. Julian Goodare, State and Society in Early Modern Scotland (Oxford, 1999), 186–92. It should not be thought, however, that Moray was insisting on prior church conviction as necessary for a secular trial. After all, he did execute ten witches in 1569 and the point of making witchcraft a statutory crime was to allow the state to proceed without the need for prior church conviction.
56. NRS, GD16/25/4. For Fergusson, see Arbroath burgh court book, 1563–1575 (Arbroath Library), fo. 40r.
57. Lee, James Stewart, 222–34; Donaldson, James V – James VII, 159–60.
58. Bardgett, Scotland Reformed, 127–33.
59. Jenny Wormald has shown that there was more to the 1590–1591 witchhunt than North Berwick and King James’s participation in it, but James’s involvement is nonetheless what gave the hunt its publicity and its success. Jenny Wormald, ‘The witches, the Devil and the king’, in Terry Brotherstone and David Ditchburn (eds.), Freedom and Authority: Scotland, c.1050–c.1650 (East Linton, 2000), 165–180.
60. For a recent study concerning the North Berwick trials, see Victoria Carr, ‘The countess of Angus’s escape from the North Berwick witch-hunt’, Chapter 2 in this volume.
61. Sir Thomas Hope, Major Practicks, 1608–1633, 2 vols., ed. J. A. Clyde (Stair Society, 1938), ii, 268; CSP Scot., x, 522. This issue deserves further study from a legal history point of view.
62. Julian Goodare, ‘The framework for Scottish witch-hunting in the 1590s’, SHR, 81 (2002), 240–50.
63. Stuart Clark, ‘King James’s Daemonologie: witchcraft and kingship’, in Sydney Anglo (ed.), The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft (London, 1977), 156–81; Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness, 53–62.
64. Pitcairn (ed.), Trials, i, 76–7.
65. Annabell, Countess of Mar to Robert Murray of Abercairny, HMC, Appendix to the Third Report (London, 1872), 419. It is interesting to see how two women, Annabell and her sister, were responsible for the trial of another as a witch. There is no mistaking the tone of command that Annabell adopts towards her brother-in-law. This is the type of action that official records and chronicles would never show, since all formal power was in the hands of men. ‘James my brother’ was James Murray of Pardewis, younger brother of Sir William Murray of Tullibardine.
66. For the later 1640s, see Paula Hughes, ‘Witch-hunting in Scotland, 1649–1650’, Chapter 5 in this volume.
67. Cf. Wolfgang Behringer, Witches and Witch-Hunts: A Global History (London, 2004), 157.