80 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2019
encouraged them to plot the king’s destruction.
After hearing these confessions, even though
they had been extorted by torture, King James
and his advisers came to believe a witchcraft
conspiracy threatened his reign. It must have
been alarming, but also gratifying, to have the
devil allegedly say that the king was his greatest
enemy on earth.
Geillis Duncan and Agnes Sampson were two
of many put to death during the first great panic.
Although it cannot be said with certainty how
many suspected witches were executed
during the North Berwick trials, more
than a hundred people were implicated.
Six years later another panic broke out.
Once again, witches were reported to be
conspiring against King James person-
ally. A woman named Margaret Aitken,
the so-called great witch of Balwearie,
claimed a special power to detect oth-
er witches, many of whom were put to
death on her word alone. This panic halt-
ed abruptly when Aitken was exposed
as a fraud. This incident embarrassed
witch-hunters greatly, and that same year, partly
to justify the recent trials, King James published
his treatise, Daemonologie. Witchcraft attracted
scholarly interest in the 16th century, and the
king’s book reflects how James saw himself as
an intellectual.
Daemonologie explains the way the dev-
il operated in the world. He was the leader of
fallen angels, who had become demons. These
demons made pacts with people and granted
them powers to work harmful magic. Accord-
ing to James’s book, therefore, witchcraft
was a secret conspiracy between humans
and demons, who were out to do all the
harm they could. Against this conspiracy,
the faithful’s only hope was to appeal to
God—and especially to the God-given
powers of kings like James.
Later political events shifted witch-
hunting away from the central place in
James’s worldview of his role as a di-
vinely ordained king. After James suc-
ceeded Queen Elizabeth I as sovereign of
England in 1603, he faced a new religiousRIDING WITH
THE DEVIL
The woodcut below,
from the 1493
Nuremberg Chronicle,
shows the devil and
a witch. The idea of
demonic witchcraft
arose in the 15th
century.
AKG/ALBUM