8 - Skeptics Versus Believers

It is difficult to estimate the number of witch trials held in England during the forty years following the Elizabethan Act instituted in 1453, but some calculations run as high as two thousand. This is based on the assumption that the two hundred cases officially recorded represented only about ten percent of the grand total, as English trials were not only regional, but local, conducted under almost any auspices.

This contrasted with the more uniform procedures in the European countries where witch trials were flourishing in their well-established fashion. However, English witch hunters were prompt to borrow anything that was helpful. Many went by the rules laid down in Malleus Maleficarum and those of later authors who insisted that witches be harshly judged. Among these was Jean Bodin, a French monk who later became a professor of law and whose most famous work, Demonomania of Witches, appeared in 1480, and eventually became a classic in the field. Bodin visited England a year later and his book was well received there because of its scholarly style; hence it did much to speed the continuing campaign against witchcraft.

The result was a surprising counter-attack by an English writer named Reginald Scot, who was also disturbed by the mass trial of falsely accused witches that took place in 1482. Scot's book, The Discovery of Witchcraft, appeared two years later and proved to be a veritable thunderbolt of common sense. In a matter of some 250 chapters, Scot questioned the sources cited by Bodin and others, belittling many things attributed to witchcraft as the "old wives' tales" that they most probably were.

This sample from Scot's opening blast shows the skeptical style of the entire volume, in which he heaped well-chosen ridicule upon witchmongers, as he termed them:

The fables of witchcraft have taken so fast hold and deep root in the heart of man that few or none can nowadays with patience endure the hand and correction of God. For if any adversity, grief, sickness, loss of children, com, cattle, or liberty happen unto them, by and by, they exclaim upon witches. ...

Such faithless people are also persuaded that neither hail nor snow, thunder nor lightning, rain nor tempestuous winds come from the heavens at the commandment of God; but are raised by the cunning and power of witches and conjurors; insomuch as a clap of thunder or a gale of wind is no sooner heard, but either they run to ring bells, or cry out to burn witches; or else bum consecrated things, hoping by the smoke thereof, to drive the Devil out of the air, as though spirits could be frightened away with such external toys. ...

Scot's reference to bells was highly appropriate, for it was solemnly supposed that the sure way to ground a witch flying to the sabbat was by ringing church bells. By that token, witches should have been dropping all over town on certain nights. The fact that they weren't was easy to explain: When a witch saw a church-bell swinging, she flew faster than the sound in order to escape it. Evidently witches had jet-propelled broomsticks, even away back then; otherwise, they couldn't have broken the sound barrier. Anyway, at least the church bells scared them.

Scot cited a case of alleged witchcraft that he personally investigated. His account is interesting indeed, representing a welcome relief from the small-minded gullibility then so prevalent:

At the assizes held at Rochester in 1581, one Margaret Simons was arraigned for witchcraft at the instigation of foolish and malicious persons and specially by the means of one John Ferrall, vicar of that parish, with whom I talked about the matter and found him both foolishly infatuated in the cause, and enviously bent toward her; and, which is worse, as unable to make a good account of himself as she whom he accused. That which he, for his part, laid to the poor woman's charge was this:

His son, being an ungracious boy and an apprentice to a clothier, passed one day by her house; when by chance, her little dog barked at him. Which thing, the boy taking in evil part, drew his knife and pursued him therewith even to her door; whom she rebuked with some such words as the boy disdained and yet nevertheless would not be persuaded lo depart in a long time.

At last he returned to his master's house and within five or six days fell sick. Then was called to mind the fray betwixt the dog and the boy: insomuch as the vicar (who thought himself so privileged, as he little mistrusted thai God would visit his children with sickness) did so calculate; as he found, partly through his own judgment and partly (as he himself told me) by the relation of other witches, that his son was by her bewitched. He also told me that his son (being as it were, past all cure) received perfect health at the hands of another witch.

He proceeded yet further against her, affirming that always in his parish church, when he desired to read most plainly, his voice so failed him, as he could scant be heard at all. Which he could impute, he said, to nothing else but to her enchantment. When I advertised the poor woman hereof, as being desirous to hear what she could say for herself, she told me that in very deed his voice did much fail him, specially when he strained himself to speak loudest. Howbeit, she said that at all times his voice was hoarse and low; which thing I perceived to be true.

Working from that, Scot checked with reputable people of the parish and not only found them in accord, but learned that the vicar had earlier been afflicted with a lung ailment that accounted for his hoarseness. Evidently unwilling to admit that his voice was failing, he had imagined witchcraft to be responsible. This was evidently brought up in court by Scot, for poor Margaret Simons was acquitted; but Scot, still the complete skeptic, added this significant comment at the end of the account:

And truly, if one of the jury had not been wiser than the others, she would have been condemned thereupon; and upon other as ridiculous matters as this. For the name of a witch is so odious, and her power so feared among the common people, that if the honeslest body living should chance to be arraigned thereupon, she shall hardly escape condemnation.

Scot's book is filled with literary jabs at the stupid superstitions of his age, but where he dealt the real convincers was in special chapters where he compared the alleged, but unproven marvels attributed to witches with the pretended feats of wizardry performed by mountebanks and jugglers then appearing at fairs in London and other parts of England. He explained how a conjuror could apparently stab himself with a knife, yet suffer no injury, by using a trick knife with a retractable blade that slid back into the handle. He also described knives with fake blades that could apparently be thrust through the performer's arm, which he termed "a pitiful sight, without hurt or injury."

Another knife, with a semicircular cut-out in the center of the blade, was used "to cut half your nose asunder and to heal it again presently, without any salve." From there, Scot went on to bigger and better marvels, the most spectacular was "to cut off a man's head and to lay it on a platter, which the jugglers call the decollation of John Baptist."

If Scot's book had gained the circulation it deserved, it might have spelled an early end to witch hunts, and indeed to witchcraft, so far as belief in witchcraft can ever be dispelled. Both skeptical and satirical, Scot subjected all serious, sanctimonious supporters of the supposedly supernatural to a ridicule that should have squelched them; and perhaps did, temporarily. But he ran head-on into an insurmountable obstacle that nullified the book's potential good.

In 1589, a marriage was arranged between King James of Scotland and Princess Anne of Denmark, whose ship encountered heavy winds and was forced to take shelter in a Norwegian harbor, where it remained stormbound. So James braved the North Sea to claim his bride and they spent some months in Copenhagen before starting for Scotland, only to encounter a still more furious tempest that almost wrecked the royal bark before it reached Leith, on May 1, 1590.

All Scotland talked of the king's miraculous deliverance until witchcraft took the limelight in a town outside of Edinburgh. There, a young and personable serving girl named Gellie Duncan displayed such ability at healing people's ailments that her employer, David Seaton, decided that the Devil had a hand in it. His suspicions were increased because Gellie had a sneaky way of going out nights, which in the light of later developments, could have been quite justified, if only because Gellie wanted to sneak away from Seaton.

Whatever the case, Seaton exerted his authority as a Deputy Bailiff to put Gellie to the torture. Details as to the torture differ, but all were reasonably gruesome. However, the final test was to find a witch's mark on Gellie, which they did, after much frustration. It was found on her throat, which gives an idea as to how frustrated they were until they found it. When they found it, Gellie talked, not just because her tongue was loosened, but also her throat; probably from things like ropes.

Gellie admitted that she had sold her soul to the Devil, but that she had not done it alone. She had worked at the instigation of higher-uppers, whom she named, some forty in all, mostly of a respectable and influential sort. An older woman, Agnes Sampson, wilted under an hour's torture and began talking as fancifully as Gellie had. Both accused a schoolteacher named Cunningham of secretly practicing witchcraft under the name of Dr. John Fian and lining up an assortment of more than two hundred witches, with a sprinkling of warlocks, to do the Devil's bidding. On special occasions, they went to the shore and embarked in large sieves, called riddles, to a haunted church farther up the coast. There Dr. Fian blew upon candles, which instantly lighted, revealing the Devil himself, occupying the old pulpit.

His Satanic Majesty had a terrible face with great, burning eyes, a nose like an eagle's beak, a body like iron and claws for hands and feet. He wore a black cap and gown; and his voice was gruff indeed, as he called the roll of his followers and demanded their homage, which they duly gave. After delivering a vitriolic preachment on the virtues of evil, the Devil had them dig up a newly buried corpse on which they feasted, while imbibing great quantities of fine wine that Satan personally supplied.

Following that, Gellie Duncan provided music and the Devil led off a dance with a sprightly witch named Euphemia Macalzean, the daughter of a Scottish lord, and the rest cavorted merrily until dawn under the watchful eye of a crazy old warlock named Gray Meill, who acted as the Devil's doorkeeper. But malice lay beneath this merriment. These meetings began prior to the marriage of King James and Princess Anne; and the chief reason for each witches' sabbat was to discuss ways and means of preventing that event.

The storm that first delayed Princess Anne was evidently brewed by Danish witches and Satan counted on Scottish sorcery to dispose of King James permanently. The Devil himself furnished a further delaying action by creating a heavy fog that prevented the king's ship from sailing; but the mighty tempest that almost doomed James and his bride was the result of coordinated effort by the entire witch clan. On an appointed night, they cruised about in their bewitched waterproof sieves until they met the Devil, who performed a ritual of throwing a cat into the sea, which immediately raised huge waves. Satan himself put out to sea amid the storm he had created, looming larger and larger like a giant haystack until he disappeared beyond the billowy horizon. The witches, having done their duty, managed to outrace the storm to shore, where they gloatingly took refuge in the haunted church to await the Devil's return.

When King James heard of these confessions, he took a personal interest in the trials and interrogated the key witches himself. When they blamed the Devil for inciting them and quoted him as saying that King James was the greatest enemy he ever had and that there would be no peace on earth for demons until they got rid of such a scourge, the king was highly flattered. As a firm believer in his own divine right to rule, he felt that he had scored a personal triumph by riding out a storm that the Devil himself had raised. But if the accused witches were seeking to save their own hides by their wild fabrications, they overdid it by injecting too much truth.

Agnes Sampson, for one, admitted that she had prepared a hellish potion or powder, hoping to apply it to some garment belonging to the king and thus bewitch him to death. To prove her ability at witchcraft, she told King James the exact words that he had spoken to Princess Anne on their wedding night in Norway. That, to the highly impressionistic young monarch, apparently proved that all the other statements must be true; for when one accused woman was acquitted, King James not only commanded that she be retried and convicted; he also threatened to have the jurors tried for being parties to witchcraft. So they reconsidered their verdict and threw themselves upon the king's mercy, which was granted.

In all, some thirty persons were condemned and executed at these trials and they all tallied in their descriptions of the witch's sabbat in the haunted church. That raised the very plausible possibility that the entire group was duped and dominated by a master plotter who masqueraded as the Devil at the unholy meetings, and hoped to use some of his deluded human tools - most notably Agnes Sampson - to poison or otherwise physically injure the king under the pretended guise of witchery.

Candidate for such a mastermind was the Earl of Bothwell, whose uncle, the previous Earl, had married Mary Queen of Scots after the murder of her husband, Darnley, the father of King James. To have put over such an imposture on the whole wretched crew, Bothwell would have needed a skilled accomplice to hand pick and manage the members of the ever-increasing coven, while Bothwell himself kept tabs of what was happening at court.

Dr. John Fian could readily have served as such a go-between, because it was he who invoked the Devil and managed all the theatricals at the haunted church. Furthermore, he alone of all the accused persons refused utterly to confess anything, even though subjected to tortures far more hideous than any imaginary devil rites. They squeezed everything possible out of him, except words; he knew that if he told them what they wanted to hear, they would still continue to torture him in order to expand their new line of interrogation. Instead, he thwarted his torturers by bearing the ordeals until they rendered him insensible and unable to talk.

Thus Dr. John Fian went to his death and the full truth of Scotland's most famous case of witchcraft was never known. Whatever else lay behind it, King James still believed that the greatest and most dangerous threat was witchcraft, so he took it at face value. A man of some literary ability, he proceeded to write a book, Demonology, which treated the subject very seriously, and helped usher in a new era in which superstition reigned.