The Scottish government is moving to pardon up to 2,000 people who were executed as witches during the 16th and 17th centuries. The move comes after a long campaign by campaigners who argue that the witch trials in Scotland are evidence of mass hysteria.
Scotland has announced that it will pardon thousands of people who were executed as witches 400 years ago. The move follows a long campaign by campaigners to clear the names of those killed for witchcraft in Scotland.
NORTH BERWICK, SCOTTISH REPUBLIC— In 1589, a strong wind blew here on an autumn night. So much so that King James VI came to the conclusion that witches had assembled in this fishing hamlet to conjure up the storm that delayed the arrival of his new wife, the Danish king’s sister.
Just over a hundred years before a similar craze swept through Salem, Massachusetts, most of Europe had fallen to a witchcraft hysteria.
Many of those arrested and accused of calling the storm at a late-night service with the devil at the town’s Auld Kirk were personally examined by King James, afterwards King James I of England and Ireland. He went on to write a best-selling book on how to detect a witch. In his play “Macbeth,” William Shakespeare borrowed some of the elements from the trials.
Joseph Anton Koch’s ‘Macbeth And The Witches’
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Many of the 19 persons hanged in Salem were exonerated in the years after the witch trials, and another group was exonerated 20 years ago.
But it is only now that legislation to pardon hundreds of women who were caught up in Scotland’s great purge, including those who were tortured to death in the North Berwick witch trials, is making its way through the Scottish parliament.
In all, until the Witchcraft Act was abolished in 1735, 3,837 persons were accused of witchcraft—the vast majority of them were women—and two-thirds were hanged, the highest number per capita in Europe.
It is a crucial reckoning with Scotland’s history as it debates its future inside the United Kingdom for the activists seeking to cleanse their reputations.
“It’s not different to how Scotland has to confront its part in the trans-Atlantic slave trade,” says Claire Mitchell, a lawyer who has been advocating for a blanket pardon with Zoe Venditozzi, a schoolteacher and novelist, since starting their #MeToo-inspired “Witches of Scotland” podcast.
During the Reformation, the purges in Edinburgh and other Scottish towns were part of a larger power struggle.
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According to a recent research by history professors Iain MacKinnon and Andrew Mackillop, more than a third of the land in the West Highlands and Islands was merged into enormous estates using money gained from the slave trade. In recent years, the subject has gotten a lot of attention, with the University of Glasgow, which benefitted from the trade, leading the way in providing restitution by donating to research initiatives at the University of the West Indies.
In some corners, the call for a pardon for women slain during the witch trials has become political. Some opponents argue that by backing the proposal, Scotland’s pro-independence leader Nicola Sturgeon’s party is making it part of a larger assessment of the country’s history and, perhaps, future.
However, its relevance has been recognized elsewhere.
Professor Leo Igwe of the University of Cape Town, who has spent years defending women and children accused of witchcraft in his native country of Nigeria, believes it might give a new incentive to eradicate the crime of witchcraft in a number of nations.
From the upheavals of urbanization to the religious zeal that underpins the witch hunts in modern-day Africa and 16th-century Scotland, he and the Scottish activists see connections. The purges were part of a larger power battle between the Catholic Church and Protestant reformers influenced by Martin Luther and John Calvin in Edinburgh and other Scottish towns, with innocent women being targeted as a manner of showing the sanctity of their cause.
Ms. Venditozzi explains, “There was an utter fervor over who was closest to God.”
Similarly, Mr. Igwe has clashed with evangelical pastors in Nigeria who he claims have stoked accusations of witchcraft in order to increase their numbers, crashing his meetings and threatening purges or threatening legal action to silence him.
“Many different organizations compete for validity and significance,” he continues, “and they do this by labeling individuals as witches.”
Witch trials continue in various areas of the globe, from Nigeria and Tanzania to India and Papua New Guinea, despite a resolution passed by the United Nations last year calling for a stop to them. Last Monday, Malawi’s Law Commission suggested that witchcraft be included in the country’s criminal code, alarming human rights activists. It said, “Inability to do so is failure to understand what is occurring in society.”
The witch hunts in Scotland took decades to finish.
A portrayal of Satan enticing John Fian to the stake, where he would subsequently be burnt alive.
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People have accused their neighbors of committing the crime in order to settle old grudges. According to researchers who investigated the issue, much of the Scottish nobility backed the purges in the hopes of hastening the Catholic Church’s demise and gaining access to its landholdings.
Others, such as King James, believed in witches and devised what they thought were scientific techniques of detecting them, such as pricking them with long needles to see how much blood they flowed. If there was insufficient blood, it was assumed that the accused was a witch.
As was the case with the North Berwick hearings, the first large show trial of the period, they usually obtained the answers they desired.
Geillis Duncan, a young lady who worked as a maid in the house of David Seton, a king’s supporter, was the focus of the inquiry.
Witches were said to have conjured a storm to delay King James VI’s new bride coming from Denmark, according to ruins of the Auld Kirk in North Berwick, Scotland.
JAMES HOOKWAY/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Seton started questioning her after learning that she had been covertly leaving the premises at night. Duncan finally confessed to conjuring the storms that had delayed the king’s ship’s departure from Denmark and to being a part of a conspiracy to assassinate him a few weeks later.
Agnes Sampson and a doctor, John Fian, were among the alleged accomplices who gathered along the port in North Berwick to participate in a satanic ceremony. Their fingernails were crushed and drawn in shards after they were detained and tortured. Sampson’s hair was shaved and she was shackled in an iron cage hanging on the wall of her cell at the Old Tolbooth in Edinburgh’s city.
The interrogation included King James himself. According to reports at the time, Sampson precisely described a secret discussion the king had with his wife on their wedding night, proving that she was a witch.
Agnes Sampson, along with many others, was murdered and burnt near Edinburgh Castle, leaving nothing to bury. Fian was beheaded and burnt at the stake.
At their trial before King James, Agnes Sampson, John Fian, and others are portrayed.
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Before the hysteria subsided, a succession of additional purges swept over the nation over the following 150 years.
Lilias Adie of Torryburn, who was arrested and placed on trial in 1704 following a series of mysterious illnesses near her house, was one of the last to suffer. Adie, who was about 60 at the time, was probed for a month and denied sleep before admitting to sleeping with the devil.
She was never convicted, and it was said that she committed herself in detention before she could be sentenced or give up the identities of any other women.
Lilias Adie was buried behind a huge sandstone block on a beach where the tide washed in and out twice a day, creating a limbo through which no soul could pass.
James Hookway can be reached at [email protected]
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