Giacomo I of England (also known as Giacomo VI of Scotland, 1566-1625) is remembered not only as the first sovereign of England, Ireland and Scotland (however England and Scotland constituted the United Kingdom of Great Britain only in 1707), but also as a fierce persecutor of witches. Scholars call it a very intelligent and cultured man. Despite the vast wisdom, however, the king was not immune from the superstitions of his time: obsessed with fear against magic and witchcraft James he carried on what he believed a real mission to eradicate evil from his kingdom. He even wrote a text that urged the hunt for witches, a unique case in history. His actions certainly did not result in the triumph of the good, but only the spread of terror and suspicions.
Cousin and successor of Elisabetta i
Giacomo I was born in Scotland in a rather turbulent historical period: parents, Maria I of Scotland (Maria Stuart) and the second husband Enrico Stuart, Catholics, had to defend their life and power from the aristocrats Calvinists. James was the cousin of Elisabetta I: the maternal great -grandmother of the king, in fact, was Margherita Tudor, sister of Henry VIII, or the father of Elizabeth.
In 1558, after the death of Maria Tudor, half -sister of the “Virgin Queen”, Maria Stuart claimed the throne of England, taking advantage of two apparently favorable circumstances: a part of the people considered an illegitimate Elisabetta, given that Henry VIII had canceled the wedding with The mother, that is Anna Bolena. In addition, Enrico Stuart was an English subject, descendant of the Stuart and Tudor and this did a perfect candidate for the Crown of England.
The attempts of Maria Stuart to overturn Elisabetta i They did not go well, also complicated by Enrico’s mysterious death. The latter, patient of smallpox, retired to Edinburgh. On February 10, 1567, however, he was killed in the explosion of his home. According to many, it would have been an attack, of which Mary was perhaps aware, to eliminate a consort king judged a failure both from a political point of view, as a sovereign (although not reigning) and from the private one, as a husband and father.
The Scottish nobles rose again against their queen, forcing her to abdicate in favor of Giacomo I on July 24, 1567. Mary did not give up: at the head of her army she tried to recover the throne with the force, in vain: after the defeat in the battle of Langside (13 May 1568), he fled to Englandconvinced that Elisabetta would offer her her help.
Things went differently: the English sovereign made Mary imprisoned and on February 1, 1587 he signed his death sentence for beheading, performed on February 8 following. The accusation was of conspiracy and betrayalsince during his detention the Scottish monarch would have plotted several times to kill Elizabeth.
Shortly before he died, the “Virgin Queen”, who had no direct heirs, appointed the son of Maria Stuart, Giacomo I, for some time his ally and already as his successor King of Scotland From 1567 (he had been crowned on 29 July 1567 with the name of Giacomo VI). Giacomo went up to the throne of England and Ireland on March 24, 1603 and was crowned on July 25 of the same year.
The obsession of the king
To turn on the fuse of Giacomo’s harmful interest against the magic It would have been the tragic end of the mother. In this regard, on the Historyextra website, the historic Tracy Borman reported a disturbing, albeit imaginative anecdote: Giacomo I would have revealed to the inventor and writer Sir John Harington who “Death” of Maria Stuart would have been “Visible in Scotland even before it really happened”. Of the visionaries, in fact, would have “Seen an bloody head that danced in the air.”
Harington would have told this story completely unreal many years after Mary’s beheading. Furthermore, we do not know exactly who would report to Giacomo of the “vision” and when, but it is really very likely that he reached his ears after the news of the execution had been communicated to Scotland. There would also be another event that would unleash the fear and anger of the king against those who practiced the magic and, in particular, the witch.
In 1589 the sovereign, raised in the community of the Church of Scotland, of Presbyterian faith, married the daughter of King Lutheran Federico II of Denmark by King Lutheran, Anna. Impossible not to see in this union a strategy to weaken Scotland Catholics and strengthen ties with the nobles Protestants.
In September of that year, he explained the famous writer Philippa Gregory on his site, Anna of Denmark he took the journey by sea that would take it to his new country. He never came. A storm surprised his boat, damaging it. For a short time the queen did not be killed. He had to repair in Norway, waiting for time to improve. Shortly afterwards a second departure was attempted, which did not go better: a fault in the boat forced Anna to return to Norway again. Winter was now upon us, so it was decided to postpone the journey to the following spring.
King Giacomo, who learned of the inconvenience, went to everyone and decided to go to Norway. He arrived healthy and Salvo and, in 1590, a second marriage was celebrated in the presence of both spouses. The return journey, however, was not quiet at all: the King and the Queen He had to face other storms and, according to the report of the Borman, one of the real boats would be sunk.
Giacomo I did not give us much to convince himself that the bad weather had to have been the work of the witches, decided to prevent his wedding and perhaps even to kill him and his wife. The sovereign believed in the occult forces, in this he was a “son of his time”, as they say. The thought that the misfortune of those travels was due to a coincidence and, above all, upon arrival of the cold season, would never have touched it. The guilt of the evil and the need to inflict them an exemplary punishment became a fixed nail for him, starting a dramatic persecution.
North Berwick’s witches
In 1590, after the departure of Giacomo I and Anna, in Copenhagen a trial began against some women accused of being witches and of having unleashed the storms that had surprised the sovereigns at sea with the intent to kill them. The news of the execution of the defendants reached the court, strengthening the idea of the sovereign to be the victim of a spell. So Giacomo decided that the time had come to fight evil with the maximum penalty, appealing to the Scottish law of 1563 (repealed only in 1736) who, as National Geographic historic recalled, punished the crime of witchcraft with the capital penalty.
In this persecution they were involved between 60 and 70 people, according to the National Library of Scotland and History Extra website, perhaps even more than 100, it has still hypothesized historical National Geographic. One of the accused, Agnes Sampsonhe would even reveal to the king the exact phrases that he and his wife had said the first wedding night, giving him the irrefutable test of being a witch. He also told, as the Guardian reported, that the night of All Saints of 1590 in the church of North Berwick, not far from Edinburgh, the devil had made an appointment to about 200 witches, Scottish and Danish, to plot against King Giacomo and his bride .
Let’s not forget that Sampson and the others were subjected to torture: One of the most used methods at the time in Scotland, Historic National Geographic has clarified, it was sleep deprivation. We know well that after such tortures almost everyone would confirms anything, even the most absurd stories such as those mentioned and would admit the most abject acts, perhaps suggested by the inquisitors. In addition, these latter listened only to what confirmed their opinion, or they walked the statements to conform them to their thoughts.
Sampson and the others were not certain witches, but victims who would have said and done anything to save themselves, not entirely aware of the fact that their destiny was already written. We do not know how many people were sentenced in this juncture, nor the methods of execution of the sentence, but the sources suggested the hypothesis of death on the stake. The process wanted by Giacomo I did not remain an isolated episode. There Scotland He suffered cyclical waves of violent repression between 1590 and 1662
The victims were not forgotten. The Sunday Times explained that after a two -year campaign the group “Witches of Scotland”engaged in the conservation of the memory of those tragic facts, he obtained from the Scottish parliament the promise of official excuses for the victims of the witch hunt between the 16th and 17th centuries and the support of the former politics Nicola Sturgeon, prime minister of Scotland from 2014 to 2023.
“Daemonologies”
Giacomo I exploited not only his power, but also his intellectual resources to fight witches. In 1597 he published the Treaty “Daemonologies”in which he explained the concept of witchcraft in detail, defining it “High betrayal towards God”as the National Library of Scotland specified and encouraging the people to pursue the evil with constancy and vigor. “Daemonologie” has remained a unicum, since no sovereign beyond Giacomo I has ever written a treatise of this type.
Giacomo I wanted to convince the skeptics of the existence of the witches, boiled as “Odious Slave of the Devil” who infested the Scotland of the time. It was also certain that the stickers were for the most part women because of the weakness of the female sex, which for this was easy to prey to the devil, inclined to its enticements. A prejudice Widespread at the time, through which the inquisitors justified the worst wives and which remained firm in the minds of men for centuries.
In the treatise His Majesty He also indicated the methods to identify a witch, the punishments to be inflicted and listed the various divination methods, combining them with black magic. He also tried to build a philosophical-religious dissertation on these issues. To support his theories, then, he inserted several quotes taken from the Bible and, as Philippa Gregory highlighted, included in the definition of “witch” also the women who exercised the trades of healers and midwives.
For humanity, according to the sovereign, the only hopes of salvation from evil were prayer and
Obedience to authority (or the king). With the processes and publication of “Daemonologie” Giacomo I made the latent hatred and fear exploded in the people, transforming Scotland into a kingdom of terror.