In the winter of 1590, James VI of Scotland sat in a room at Holyrood Palace and watched an old midwife named Agnes Sampson being questioned about the storm that nearly drowned his wife. He was the supposed victim of the plot. He was also the interrogator, near enough the judge, and seven years later the author of Daemonologie, the book that taught the rest of Europe how to do this properly.
In the autumn of 1589 Anne of Denmark, fourteen years old and married to James by proxy, sets out across the North Sea and the gales drive her ships into Norway. James sails out into the same winter to fetch her himself. They marry at Oslo in November and again at Kronborg in January, and in Denmark the Copenhagen trials are already burning women for raising the weather. James carries that idea home to Leith on the first of May 1590, and the theory has set hard: someone raised that weather to kill him.
The Scottish end opens small. A deputy bailiff in Tranent named David Seaton tortures his own servant, Geillis Duncan, with thumbscrews and a rope around the skull, without waiting for anyone's permission. She names Agnes Sampson, the wise wife of Keith, and John Fian, a schoolmaster at Prestonpans. Sampson is brought to Holyrood, shaved, kept awake, the rope thrawed around her head, then searched for the Devil's mark. She confesses to fifty-three articles. The hinge of the case is quieter than any storm: she tells James, word for word, what he said to Anne on their wedding night in Oslo. Historians read it as court gossip. James read it as hell. They garroted her at Castlehill on 28 January 1591 and the burgh wrote down the bill: six pounds, eight shillings and tenpence.
Fian confessed, recanted, stole his gaoler's key and walked out. When they caught him they pulled his fingernails with pincers, drove pins into the beds, and crushed his feet in the boot. He gave them nothing. Barbara Napier's jury acquitted her of murder, so James put the jury itself on trial and told the jurors that whatsoever had been gotten out of the witches had been gotten by him, himself. Napier lived. Euphame MacCalzean burned on 25 June 1591.
The man the affair may really have been about was Francis Stewart, Earl of Bothwell, the king's own cousin, named as the Devil at North Berwick by a convicted witch, charged with treason, and pardoned in 1593 because his power was soldiers, not spells. The panic handed a nervous young king a cosmic argument for his own throne, and he wrote it into Daemonologie in 1597. The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft counts 3,837 people accused in Scotland between 1563 and 1736, roughly two thirds of them executed. In 2022 the Scottish government apologised.
📍 TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 - James VI, the king who wore four hats
0:38 - The man who was certain
1:06 - Anne of Denmark and the North Sea gale
2:02 - Copenhagen: the blame slides downhill
3:16 - Tranent: it opens small
3:58 - Geillis Duncan names Agnes Sampson and John Fian
4:41 - Holyrood: Agnes Sampson kept awake
6:05 - The wedding-night words
7:27 - The bill for burning Agnes Sampson
7:46 - Doctor Fian, the boot and the pincers
10:02 - North Berwick: the Devil in the pulpit
11:55 - Sieves across the Forth
12:24 - Barbara Napier and the assize of error
15:55 - The Earl of Bothwell, the real target
18:04 - Why the panic was useful
18:55 - Daemonologie, 1597
20:22 - The prickers unmasked
21:15 - 3,837 accused
22:07 - The kirk, Macbeth and the 2022 apology
📚 SOURCES & FURTHER READING:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Berwick_witch_trialshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newes_from_Scotlandhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnes_Sampsonhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemonologiehttps://witches.hca.ed.ac.uk/📋 ABOUT THIS VIDEO:
This video is about the North Berwick witch trials of 1590 and 1591 and the personal role of King James VI of Scotland, later James I of England, in interrogating the accused at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh. It covers Anne of Denmark's North Sea crossing in autumn 1589, the marriages at Oslo on 23 November 1589 and at Kronborg in January 1590, the Copenhagen witch trials, the landing at Leith on 1 May 1590, the Witchcraft Act of 1563, the torture of Geillis Duncan at Tranent by David Seaton, the burning of Agnes Sampson at Castlehill on 28 January 1591, the torture of John Fian with the turcas and the boot, the alleged sabbat at St Andrew's Auld Kirk in North Berwick, Barbara Napier and Euphame MacCalzean, the assize of error of 7 June 1591, the treason charge against Francis Stewart, fifth Earl of Bothwell, Daemonologie in 1597, the witch pricker Margaret Aitken, the 3,837 accused in Scotland between 1563 and 1736, the sieve in Shakespeare's Macbeth, and the Scottish government apology of 2022. Sixteenth century Scottish history.
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