Witch-Hunting in Scotland

Law, Politics and Religion

Brian P. Levack

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429603907
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Shortlisted for the 2008 Katharine Briggs Award

Witch-Hunting in Scotland presents a fresh perspective on the trial and execution of the hundreds of women and men prosecuted for the crime of witchcraft, an offence that involved the alleged practice of maleficent magic and the worship of the devil, for inflicting harm on their neighbours and making pacts with the devil.

Brian P. Levack draws on law, politics and religion to explain the intensity of Scottish witch-hunting. Topics discussed include:

• the distinctive features of the Scottish criminal justice system
• the use of torture to extract confessions
• the intersection of witch-hunting with local and national politics
• the relationship between state-building and witch-hunting and the role of James VI
• Scottish Calvinism and the determination of zealous Scottish clergy and magistrates to achieve a godly society.

This original survey combines broad interpretations of the rise and fall of Scottish witchcraft prosecutions with detailed case studies of specific witch-hunts. Witch-Hunting in Scotland makes fascinating reading for anyone with an interest in witchcraft or in the political, legal and religious history of the early modern period.

1 Witch-hunting in Scotland and England

During the early modern period of European history, Scottish courts prosecuted hundreds of women and men for the crime of witchcraft. These people were accused of causing harm to other human beings or their domestic animals by means of some sort of mysterious, magical, or occult power. In many cases they were also accused of making pacts with the devil – the supernatural entity that was believed to be the source of their power – and worshipping him with other witches. We will never know how many Scots were prosecuted for this crime, but we do know that at least 3,800 of them were accused by their neighbours or named as accomplices by other witches.¹ The number of witches who were executed is even more difficult to determine; estimates range from about 1,000 to as many as 2,000 individuals.² Even if we use the lower figure, it represents a sizeable group, especially if we take into account the size of the Scottish population, which probably never reached 1 million people during the years when witches were being prosecuted. No wonder that in 1650 an English newspaper reported that Scotland was a ‘country very fruitful of witches’.³

The intensity of Scottish witch-hunting, measured by the number of executions in proportion to the population, can be appreciated if we compare it to the intensity of witch-hunting in other lands. The most striking and instructive comparison lies with England, the southern British kingdom. The histories of Scotland and England were inextricably interlinked during this entire period, and not simply for reasons of geographical proximity. After indulging in centuries of mortal rivalry during the Middle Ages, the two countries became Protestant allies during the reign of Elizabeth I of England (r. 1558–1603). When James VI of Scotland (r. 1567–1625) inherited the crown of England upon the death of his childless cousin Elizabeth in 1603, the two kingdoms were joined in a regal or personal union. This union did not, however, bring about a union of the governments, churches or laws of the two kingdoms, and therefore each kingdom followed different policies in dealing with witches. English policy resulted in relatively few witchcraft executions. Once again, we don’t know how many English witches were killed, since the records of the county assizes – where almost all English witchcraft trials were held – have not all survived. But it appears that England, with a population of about four million people in the middle of the seventeenth century, executed 500 witches between the passage of the Elizabethan witchcraft statute in 1563 and the last execution in 1685. This would mean that if we use the figure of 1,500 Scottish executions, witch-hunting in Scotland was twelve times more intense than in England. Expressed in personal terms, a Scottish woman in the seventeenth century was twelve times more likely than her English counterpart to be executed for witchcraft.

The intensity of Scottish witch-hunting can also be compared with that of other European countries.⁴ It was not as intense as the brutal persecutions in the German ecclesiastical territories, such as Bamberg, Würzburg, and Ellwangen, or in the French-speaking duchy of Lorraine, where some 1,400 executions took place in a territory with a population half the size of Scotland’s. But Scottish witch-hunting, when compared to that of most other kingdoms and states, did take a very high toll in human life. It was, as Christina Larner argued in her foundational work on Scottish witch-hunting, a major European witch-hunt.⁵

Law

How then do we explain this intensity of Scottish witch-hunting, especially when compared to that of England, which had only one brief period of intense witch-hunting in its history, between 1645 and 1647?⁶ This book argues that there were three main explanations. The first and most fundamental lies in the differences between English and Scots law. There were, to be sure, many similarities between the two systems, which had grown up side by side in the Middle Ages. Much of medieval Scots law had been influenced by English law, so much so that when the regal union occurred in 1603 Thomas Craig of Riccarton thought they were entirely compatible. Nevertheless, significant differences had arisen between English law and Scots law, especially in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Some of these changes took place in private law, that is, the law that regulated relations between individuals engaged in disputes over property and like matters. These differences owed a great deal to the incorporation of certain elements of Roman and canon law into the body of Scots law – a reception achieved mainly by means of judicial decisions. The most significant changes, however, occurred in the area of criminal law, and in particular criminal procedure. These changes, which will be discussed in detail in Chapter 2, changed the ways in which criminal charges could be brought against a person and the way in which trials were conducted. These changes made it much easier for an accused witch to be brought to justice, even if the verdict was still entrusted, as in England, to a jury of lay people rather than professional judges.

Even more important than the conduct of criminal procedure was the way in which the entire system of Scottish criminal justice operated. For reasons that had a great deal to do with the small size of the Scottish judicial establishment in Edinburgh, the majority of witchcraft trials were conducted by local authorities who had no judicial training or experience. This situation contrasted markedly with that which prevailed in England, where judges from the central common law courts at Westminster presided at the county assizes, the venue for the overwhelming majority of witchcraft cases. This difference, perhaps more than any other, explains the higher rate of convictions and executions in Scotland than in England. When Scottish judges did go on circuit, most notably in the latter half of the seventeenth century, the percentage of Scottish witchcraft prosecutions that resulted in convictions and executions began to approximate the corresponding percentages in England.

Two other legal considerations had a bearing on the high intensity of Scottish witch-hunting. The first is that torture and other forms of judicial coercion were much more frequently employed in Scotland than in England. Torture was strictly prohibited in both countries unless approved by a special warrant from the privy council, but this prohibition was more easily evaded in the northern kingdom, especially in witchcraft cases, for reasons that will be discussed in Chapter 2. Torture does not explain why all witches confessed to crimes they had not committed, but there is a close correlation throughout Europe between the freedom courts had to torture people accused of a capital crime and the number of convictions in witchcraft cases.⁷ There is no doubt that the strict prohibition of torture in England, where confessions were not needed for conviction in capital cases, explains why the conviction rate in witchcraft cases was lower than in almost all European countries. In Scotland, where local authorities usually needed a confession just to get permission to hold a trial, they used a variety of procedures, including torture, to extract admissions of guilt.

The second consideration is that the Scottish witchcraft act of 1563, which resembled the English witchcraft statute of the same year in some respects, did not allow for non-capital sentences. Convicted Scottish witches were supposed to be executed, even though some did in fact have their sentences commuted to banishment or other forms of non-capital punishment.⁸ By the terms of the English statute of 1563 and that of 1604 that replaced it, certain charges of witchcraft merited only imprisonment for a period of years. In practice, moreover, English witches were usually executed only when their alleged misdeeds had resulted in the death of another human being.⁹

Politics

One of the most striking features of Scottish witchcraft, which set it apart from witchcraft in England and from all other European countries, was its close connection with national and local politics. The word politics covers a multitude of meanings, and I am using it here to identify all those considerations of governance that may have impelled central or local authorities to inaugurate or encourage witch-hunts, sustain them once they had begun or at least allow them to continue. James VI of Scotland was in large measure responsible for the politicization of Scottish witch-hunting. As will be discussed in Chapter 3, James came to believe in 1590 that a group of witches in league with his aristocratic rival, the fifth earl of Bothwell, was conspiring to kill him by means of magic and witchcraft. In his mind witchcraft was therefore associated with treason – not just treason against God, as many demonologists had argued, but treason against the king himself. James participated in the prosecution of these witches, helping to secure their conviction and execution. In 1597 he became involved in a major witch-hunt after he became convinced, once again, that witches wished to kill him. The king’s traumatic experience with witchcraft in the 1590s also inspired him to write a witchcraft treatise, Daemonologie (1597), the only such work produced by a European monarch. This was in a certain sense a political treatise, in that it described an inversion of ideal kingship that was present in many of the king’s other political works.¹⁰

Although James’s treatise became well known in England, where he succeeded to the throne as James I in 1603, his work never had the longstanding influence that it retained in Scotland. Like his absolutist political ideas, Daemonologie did not fit in comfortably with the mainstream of English thinking. By 1653 its ideas regarding witchcraft had been rejected even by an English political philosopher who was sympathetic to James’s brand of royal absolutism.¹¹ Nor was the king instrumental in politicizing English witch-hunting. The hexes and imprecations of witches never became a personal threat to James in England, and he took no part in the prosecution of English witches. Moreover, by 1605, two years into his English reign, he had become much more sceptical regarding the guilt of witches and had even begun to question whether they were capable of some of the powers attributed to them.

The structure of English criminal justice also worked against the politicization of English witch-hunting. The trial of English witches before common law judges from Westminster, travelling on circuit as part of their semi-annual visitations of the counties, meant that the decision to prosecute was relatively immune from national political considerations. The charges against the accused originated in the fears and tensions of village communities, and the decision to put them on trial was made by the grand jury assembled in the county. In Scotland, however, only a minority of cases were handled by the counterparts of these English central court justices, the justice general and his deputes sitting in Edinburgh. Occasionally one or more of the justice deputes was assigned to an area where witchcraft accusations were multiplying rapidly, and towards the end of this period these judges from Edinburgh occasionally handled cases on circuit. Most cases, however, were adjudicated by local authorities who petitioned the privy council or parliament for permission to hold the trials themselves. These local commissioners then assembled an assize (a jury) to determine innocence or guilt, which in most cases turned out to be the latter. This arrangement for authorizing witchcraft trials meant that central political institutions determined whether or not witches would be prosecuted. The decision whether to grant a commission to prosecute and, even more important, whom to name as members of these ad hoc bodies thus became part of the constant but ever shifting relationship between the centre and the periphery, which was one of the main dynamics of Scottish political life in the early modern period.

Political considerations in Scotland influenced witch-hunting at the local level as well as at the centre. Not only did members of burgh councils expend considerable energy to secure the commissions they needed from the privy council to prosecute witches by themselves,¹² but they also had to negotiate jurisdictional differences between themselves and the local clergy. Ministers and elders of parishes often summoned suspected witches to appear at the weekly meetings of the parish courts, known as the kirk sessions, and respond to reports that they had engaged in behaviour that was considered demonic. The presbyteries, which consisted of ministers from several parishes and occupied the next level of clerical jurisdiction, often conducted preliminary examinations of witches and then referred the cases to the secular magistrates. In most cases the local clergy cooperated with burgh elites in a joint enterprise, but at times the burghs had to rein in ministers who had exceeded the boundaries of their jurisdiction.¹³ In the prosecution of Geillis Johnstone in 1614, the privy council found it necessary to reprimand the presbytery of Dalkeith for trying to adjudicate a case that fell within the jurisdiction of the regality of Dunfermline.¹⁴

Local politics also played a role in the identification of Scottish witches. Most Scottish witchcraft prosecutions originated at the local level rather than in Edinburgh. Even the women tried for attempting treason against James VI in 1590 and 1591 were apprehended and charged first by local municipal authorities; the king’s suspicion arose only after they were accused of involvement in a political conspiracy. Explicit political motives did not figure in most Scottish witchcraft prosecutions, which were usually directed against poorer members of society. There was a sizeable group of Scottish witches, however, who were fairly well off, and political motives often figured in their identification and accusation.¹⁵ In some of these cases the women accused were involved in factional disputes within their burgh councils, either directly or through their husbands. In 1649 accusations of witchcraft against the wives of the burgh magistrates of Inverkeithing led the minister and the presbytery of Dunfermline to ask parliament to launch an investigation after the magistrates themselves (understandably) refused to apprehend their spouses.¹⁶ Cases of this sort were far less common in England, where the overwhelming majority of witches came from the lower levels of society.¹⁷

Witch-hunts throughout Europe tended to occur at times of political uncertainty or acute crisis.¹⁸ Without minimizing the uncertainty of English political life throughout the early modern period, it would be safe to argue that Scotland experienced far more political instability than England during the decades of witch-hunting. The first large witch-hunt in Scotland’s history in 1590–1 coincided with James’s efforts to fend off a series of rebellions, while the unstable political and ecclesiastical situation in Scotland in 1597 set the stage for the large-scale panic of that year. In 1643–4 severe witch-hunting took place after those presbyterians known as covenanters assumed political and ecclesiastical power. In 1649–50 a much larger witch-hunt coincided with the efforts of those covenanters who had resisted accommodation with England in 1648 to consolidate their position within their communities. After a period in which English military forces had occupied the country and had greatly reduced the intensity of witch-hunting, local elites, eager to reassert their influence in church and state, returned to the mission of hunting witches. The restoration of Charles II and the displacement of the covenanters by royalists eager to establish their credentials as religious reformers in 1660 provided the backdrop to the large-scale prosecutions of 1661–2.

England had only one period of profound instability during the 1640s, when it too experienced a revolution in church and state. Episcopacy was abolished in England in 1646, just as it had been in Scotland eight years earlier. Not coincidentally, England’s largest witch-hunt took place during those years, and the men responsible for it included religious radicals who had recently seized political and ecclesiastical power in the localities. During the 1640s, therefore, Scottish and English witch-hunting resembled each other more closely than at any other time in the seventeenth century. After 1650, however, English witch-hunting entered a period of decline while in Scotland it experienced a vigorous revival in the later years of the decade. Legal developments provide the main explanation why England gradually abandoned witch-hunting at this time, but the return to political stability during the protectorate and the restoration rendered it unnecessary for local elites to establish their credentials as defenders of public morality.

Once again, therefore, politics had a greater impact on Scottish witch-hunting than it did in the southern kingdom. In England the restoration did signal a surprising and vigorous revival of witchcraft theory, indicating a desire to establish the parameters of a genuinely Christian community. This demonological theory became part of English political discourse for the next fifty years.¹⁹ This discourse, however, which emphasized the connection between witchcraft and rebellion, was conducted in the pages of political pamphlets. Only in that sense did English witchcraft become politicized. The theory of witchcraft that emerged during those years, which included elements of diabolism that had become prominent during the 1640s, made hardly any impact on the actual prosecution of witches. The few individual pros...