In the 16th and 17th centuries, Scotland executed more than 3,000 innocent people, mainly women, for the crime of witchcraft. In England, at the same time, it’s estimated that the scaffold claimed about 500.

The Scots were ferocious witch-hunters. We believed we had to be. For us, not only was every single soul in Scotland in danger, the witch threatened our great religious project. No one was safe. Not even the king. Finding and destroying witches was once the responsibility of every soul in Scotland.

There had always been supposed witches, and trials. Local matters, mainly. Down in Ayr in 1576, Bessie Dunlop confessed that she had a ghost who told her how to make a potion of ginger, cloves and liquorice as requested by the laird’s wife for a sickly girl. A chamberlain asked if she could find some stolen barley. Respectable people consulted with Bessie, but at some point she fell foul of the authorities. She was charged with witchcraft and condemned.

As the century wore on, John Knox’s Reformation made hunting witches a matter of national security, because the Devil threatened the Kirk's great ambition for Scotland. This tiny country was to be the most spiritually pure nation under God. Every soul would stand in the ranks of the godly, and together create a kind of paradise on Earth. No backsliding would be tolerated.

The Kirk demanded that everyone watched everyone else, not that difficult in an overwhelmingly rural society, but maintaining that high spiritual standard is hard. People get nervy when crops fail, cows stop giving milk and, tragically, babies die. There could be only one explanation. Someone in the community had let the Devil in. Someone was a witch.

Then, in 1589/90, Satan appeared to up his game. He threatened the king. James VI married Anne of Denmark in 1589, and both newlyweds were battered by terrifying storms at sea as they sailed between Scandinivia and Scotland. At one point the king even went to rescue Anne. Pretty romantic for James. Anne eventually made it safely to Scotland’s shores, but there was general concern about that unseasonable weather. The Danes thought it looked like witchcraft. They’d already executed several women who had confessed to conjuring up storms.

James was alarmed and started looking closer to home. He found witches on his doorstep, in North Berwick. A young woman called Gellis Duncan had taken to going out at night. This was enough to make her master, David Seton, suspicious. He tortured her in his own home, and she confessed to being a witch. Not only that, she named others, including a woman called Agnes Sampson, who she described as the “elder witch”.

This coven, as Gellis described it, had met with the Devil and agreed to drown the king himself. That got James's attention. Gellis, Agnes and several other women were brought to Holyroodhouse into the presence of the king himself, and he began his own interrogation of the witches of North Berwick.

The king himself getting involved in such a trial was a boss move. Kings had a duty to protect their nation. Usually that meant riding into battle against an earthly enemy, but Satan was threatening the spiritual good of the Scots. Here was James leading the charge to defend his people, and their souls.

Agnes Sampson’s testimony to James was sensational. She claimed they had sailed in sieves to whip up the storms that bedevilled the fleets. They had caused another gale in the Forth, and been responsible for the wrecking of a boat out of Burntisland. They had danced in the kirkyard in St Andrew's Auld Kirk, led by Gellis Duncan playing a small mouth harp, known as a little Trump.

They had pledged allegiance to the Devil, sealing the deal by kissing his buttocks. He then commanded them to plot the king's death. Even the witches seem to have been a bit bemused by Satan’s beef against James. Agnes says they asked him what the grudge match was about, and the answer propelled King James VI into superhero status.

The devil told his coven that “the King is the greatest enemy he hath in the world”. Strong stuff. His Dark Satanic Majesty was scared of The King of Scots. James appears to have come over a bit modest and called them all “extreme liars”. Agnes proved her credentials. She took him aside and said she had been in their bridal chamber in Norway, and told him exactly what was said between James and Ann on their wedding night.

The case was written up in a bestselling book called “Newes from Scotland”. Even today it’s a terrifying read, not for the machinations of the Devil, but because it details the horrific torture the accused women and men underwent before their final executions. King James now saw himself as the greatest protection Scotland had against the Devil. Hadn’t Satan said so himself?

This nation had pledged itself willingly to be the most godly on Earth. Satan had to be rooted out. The great pillars of church, state and crown now all aligned in a perfect storm to wage war on the witch. The Kirk politely took the lead. After all, the king was busy scaring the living daylights out of the Devil and writing a handy ‘how to spot Satan’ book, called the Daemonologie.

The witch-hunts and the executions ramped up. Anyone could be seduced by the Devil. A nation intensified its state-sanctioned surveillance, looking for the tell-tale signs of sin, spells and sorcery. To the Scots, witch-hunting was not a matter of superstition. Scotland’s soul was at stake. The Devil was a real and present danger.

That fear would see innocent women executed for the next 137 years.

How a supposed plot by the devil to kill King James VI led to thousands of innocent women executed

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