t the commencement of his reign in Scotland, King James was a unyielding adherent in the
belief of witchcraft, but by the conclusion of his time in power in England in 1628, James
had developed into just as unyielding a disbeliever. The King's gullibility was reinforced
by the trial of the North Berwick Witches, who were forced to declare they had gone to sea
in secret and had endeavored to raise a storm to destroy the King's craft while traveling to
Norway for his bride. James - he was only twenty-four at the time - believed this eccentric
report for the most part, given that Agnes Sampson, one of the accused:
"declared unto him the very words which had passed between the King's majesty and his Queen at Oslo in Norway the first night of their marriage, with their answer each to other. Whereat the King's majesty wondered greatly, and swore by the living God that he believed that 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 which is before declared." (News from Scotland, 1591)
When the jury found one of the accused not guilty, a woman of noble birth, James was so furious
that he charged the jury with "an assize [judgment] of error." Consequently, on June 7, 1591, they
consented to "yield themselves to the King's will." James, who had personally oversaw the torture
of a number of the charged, gave explanation that he interceded only "for an example in time
coming, to make men to be more wary how they give false verdicts," and for the reason that
"witchcraft, which is a thing grown very common among us . . . [is] a most abominable sin."
The original document, published the day following, June 8, is reproduced here:
King James's Tolbooth Speech
[King James charged the Edinburgh jury with "an assize [judgment] of error" for dismissing the indictment of witchcraft against Barbara Napier, one of the North Berwick witches, on June 7, 1591.]
For witchcraft, which is a thing grown very common amongst us, I know it to be a most abominable sin, and I have been occupied these three quarters of this year for the sifting out of them that are guilty herein. We are taught by the laws both of God and men that this sin is most odious. And by God's law punishable by death. By man's law it is called maleftcium or veneficium, an ill deed or a poisonable deed, and punishable likewise by death.
The thing that moved [the men of the assize] to find as they did, was because they had no testimony but of witches; which they thought not sufficient. By the civil law I know that such infamous persons are not received for witnesses, but in matters of heresy and lesae majestatis. For in other matters it is not thought meet, yet in these matters of witchcraft good reason that such be admitted. First none honest can know these matters. Second, because they will not accuse themselves. Thirdly, because no act which is done by them can be seen.
Further, I call them witches which do renounce God and yield themselves wholly to the Devil; but when they have recanted and repented, as these have done, then I account them not as witches, and so their testimony sufficient.
His focus of the North Berwick Witches without a doubt guided James to start on his Demonology
(published in Edinburgh, 1597), a discourse in three parts, written in the established
practice of European demonologists; the King's Tolbooth Speech is, in fact, like a thumbnail
sketch of the book. The Demonology was, of course, written to rebut the Discovery of Witchcraft
(1584) of Reginald Scot, and De Praestigiis Daemonum (1563) of Johan Weyer, and to confirm that
"such assaults of Satan are most certainly practiced and that the instruments thereof merit
most severely to be punished." In 1603, the King endeavored to have existing copies of Scot's
Discovery destroyed. James's skepticism of lycanthropy provided and gave Scot's work an air of
impartial Judgment that it did not deserve; he stressed both swimming and devil's marks as
proof for rooting out "so odious a treason against God." A similar point of view permeates the
Basilikon Doron, written for his son Prince Henry (who died in 1612) ; the young prince was
counseled that witchcraft was surrounded by the "horrible crimes that [he was] bound in
conscience never to forgive." At the same time, James also criticized "how wary Judges should
be in trusting accusations without an exact trial."
When James VI of Scotland became James I of the united kingdoms of Scotland and England in
1603, he produced a new edition of his Demonology (at London); a Dutch translation appeared in
1604, and two Latin editions in 1604 and 1607 (printed at Hanover). Inside one year of his
accession, he had persuaded Parliament to pass a new witch act. The 1604 statute changed the
importance from maleficia to the pact with the Devil, in line with Continental opinion, and
unquestionably heightened the assault against witches.
Without a doubt Demonology was given special attention because of its royal author; it was
alluded to in contemporaneous trials. A court in Dorset in 1602 found a charged woman had
carried out "things worthy to be . . . punished for that the King's most excellent Majesty in
his book against witches intituled [entitled] the Demonology hath set forth that the things
practiced by Joan [the accused] are the very qualities and marks whereby to know a witch or a
sorcerer." Again in 1613, Potts's Lancashire Witches found validation for the deductions of the
court in the pages of the Demonology. "What hath the King's Majesty written and published in
his Demonology by way of premonition and prevention, what hath not here by the first or last
been executed, put in practice, or discovered."
The King's partiality had a profound impact upom the translation of the Bible; each time
the Septuagint stated "one that consulteth pythonic spirits," the Authorized Version (1603)
used James's definition of a witch in his Demonology, "a consulter with familiar spirits." The
Bible was thus slanted to rationalize concepts previously unknown to it.
Perhaps the first breach in James's gullibility came in 1605 with the trial of the
Abingdon women accused by a fourteen-year-old girl, Anne Gunter. The King learned of the case,
and had Rev. Samuel Harsnett talk to the girl, giving £300 with regard to the costs of the
court case. Anne confessed that she had pretended hysteria and had misleadingly blamed three
witches. The next case of deception was John Smith, the Leicester Boy, cross-examined by the
King himself after the boy's allegations concluded with the hanging of nine witches in 1618;
the King procured the trial away from Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke and blocked the putting to
death of the remaining women incriminated by Smith. In 1620 the Stafford judges discharged
comparable accusations by the Bilson Boy.
In 1621, another young fraud examined by King James, Katherine Malpas of Westham, Essex,
fabricated diabolical possession, so visitors would come to see her and, out of sympathy, make
a monetary contribution. She accused two women of bewitching her. Ultimately, a woman admited
she had trained Kate in a variety of tricks, such as heaving up her stomach, wringing her hands,
leaping, and skipping. In particular "she would have a rising-up in her stomach to the bigness
of a halfpenny loaf, and would shrug up her shoulders and would make her bones to crackle
within her skin, and sometimes her mouth would be drawn to one side." (Ewen, Witchcraft in the
Star Chamber, 1938)
These occurrences of young people' falsely accusing people as witches were primarily
accountable for the alteration of the King's beliefs about Witches. Dr. Thomas Fuller, in his
Church History of Britain, observed: "The frequency of forged possessions wrought such an
alteration upon the judgment of King James that . . . he grew first diffident of, and then flatly
to deny, the workings of witches and devils as but falsehoods and delusions." In the midst of
other influences on the King were his own wider reading to take account of the moderates (such
as Cornelius Agrippa), and the skeptical outlook of such courtiers as Francis Bacon, Florio
(the translator of Montaigne), and of his personal physician, Dr. Harvey. In addition, the
religious climate was changing and a reaction against Calvinism was setting in.
The most striking clue of the alteration in the political state of affairs, however, is
the fact that in the last nine years of the King's reign, only five persons were executed for
witchcraft. Yet even with the King's change of heart, the witchcraft law of 1604 lingered on
the statute books. After passing almost into obscurity and insignificance under Charles I, it
became the foundation for the Cromwellian persecutions.
References and Notes:
- James I, Demonology. (Edinburgh, 1597; London, 1603, ed. G. B. Harrison, 1924)
- Kittredge, George Lyman, "English Witchcraft and James I," Studies in History of Religions Presented to Crawford Howell Toy (New York, 1912)
- Paul, Henry N., The Royal Play of Macbeth (New York, 1951)