 Tonight, the scene I want to set for you is that of Waverley Station in Edinburgh, and the adjacent Princes Street Gardens. The railway station is immense, as it ought to be as a major international thoroughfare in Scotland’s capital city. Right now…from the vantage point of the North Bridge, right along the side of the luxurious 16th century Scotsman Hotel, you can peer down at the very lovely collection of train tracks… however, back when the Scotsman was new, you would have seen the Nor’ Loch – that is, the North Lake. The Nor’ Loch was originally marshland, but in 1460, Scotland’s King James III ordered that it be flooded with the waters of a nearby creek as part of the defensive structure for Edinburgh Castle and the original Old Town. Et viola, the North Lake of Edinburgh. In less than 150 years, the waters were stinking and filthy – full of refuse, human waste and discarded animal carcasses. Though the loch was not used as a source of drinking water, it was very close to two city wells. The completely unrelated typhus epidemic of that era aside, our story takes place during the reign of King James VI. This was the same King James who inherited the throne of England from his aunt, Queen Elizabeth the First, and therefore, he was both James VI in Scotland and James I in England. Surely overjoyed at his inheritance of the twin kingdoms of the largest of the British Isles, one would assume this particular James would endeavour to create a stronger relationship between the historically feuding countries. Indeed, maybe he thought that’s what he WAS doing.  You see, this was THE King James of the King James Bible. Though he did not translate and author this, the third English version of the bible, he established multiple committees of people in whose hands he put the task. It was of extreme importance that this work support his personal view of the role of Kings, the roles of religious leaders, and the hierarchy of the two under the ultimate power of the traditional Christian – not Catholic- God. James was born and baptised as a Catholic, he grew up in post-Reformation Scotland, which was largely Protestant. Scottish Protestantism did not exactly match that of England, whose movement away from Catholicism had begun during the reign of Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth I’s father. Despite differences in the two nations’ expression of religion, they were both largely set in the same direction. King James was, however, quite the fanatic, and had strong ties to Puritan sects such as those who sailed to the United States to establish their own “redeemer nation”. It will probably not surprise you that a man of such convictions was one of the 17th century’s most ferocious and outspoken witch hunters. It perhaps began in 1589, the year in which King James married his Danish Queen (by proxy as was the style at the time), and she was subsequently waylaid during the voyage to Scotland. Unusually windy conditions took down several of her majesty’s accompanying ships, and her own was forced to turn back to Norway, where she stayed many months with her entourage. She wrote earnestly to the king in French – their one shared language – to explain that after four or five failed attempts to cross over to Scotland, she would not try again. James eventually went to collect his wife, and, following a second marriage ceremony, in person!, deposited her at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh in May of 1590. An ill-fated attempt by Scottish retinue to meet the royal couple there was also squashed by great storms and the loss of multiple lives on a ferry boat. The untimely storms and loss of life surrounding his marriage upset James greatly, and his intense paranoia coupled with the rumours flying around him of ill wishes towards his bride, and witchcraft being performed to prevent the marriage – may have changed the course of early modern history. Danish authorities had already prosecuted several witches for allegedly raising the storms. Inspired by these events, King James initiated similar investigations in Scotland, convinced witches had plotted his assassination via supernatural means. The North Berwick witch trials were Scotland’s first major witch hunt, occurring between 1590 and 1592. Dozens of people—men and women—were accused of sorcery, diabolical pacts, and a conspiracy to murder King James VI. Thanks to some coincidental public demonstrations against the marriage of Scotland’s ruler to a Danish woman – James naturally assumed that the very witches and sorcerers being questioned in North Berwick had used their connections to powerful demons to control the weather and try to kill both he and the Queen. So, James ordered the suspects to be brought to him for personal questioning. One particular suspect, a nobleman by the name of Francis Stewart, managed to inadvertently convince the king that we was indeed a sorcerer. In escaping his captors and running for his life, Stewart was charged with treason and banned from the kingdom. Side note – Stewart was “that” sort of Stewart – which is to say, a royal cousin, whose conspiracies against King James are well-documented. His sorcery, however, probably lived only in the mind of his royal cousin. The ill-fated Francis Stewart reportedly died, impoverished, in Italy.  The Main Charges of the North Bewick Witch Trails were as follows:
Of the five main defendants at the North Bewick trails, three were charged, tortured into confession, and executed. These were Agnes Sampson, a healer and midwife, Euphame MacCalzean, a noblewoman, and John Fian, schoolmaster, who were strangled and burned at the stake on Edinburgh’s Castlehill the next year. King James personally interrogated Agnes Sampson at Holyroodhouse. Here is an excerpt from Newes of Scotland, concerning Agnes’ confession: “All that she had done was at the instance and request of the Devil, who appeared unto her in the likeness of a dog, and spoke with her in a voice both hollow and unnatural. And she confessed that, taking a cat and christening it, she bound to the cat the parts of a dead man, and cast the same into the sea, thereby raising a great and terrible storm, intending the destruction of the King.” Having rid Scotland of that particular scourge, King James subsequently set his sights on ridding his kingdom of all remaining practitioners of witchcraft. He became obsessed. James created royal commissions to hunt down witches, going so far as to recommend specific kinds of torture to be used in questioning such criminals. In 1597, he wrote a great big book about it. Dæmonologie, In Forme of a Dialogue, Divided into three Books: By the High and Mightie Prince, James &c.. The book was republished in 1603, after he inherited the crown of England. It was a glorious work that goth kids of the 1990s and early 2000s would have fawned over – if ironically. Spanning subjects such as contemporary methods of bringing the dead back to life, and ancient black magic, one of the most devastating effects the book had on Britons during the Early Modern Era was the belief in – and denunciation of – witchcraft.  Written in the Platonic style of a discussion between two characters, Daemonologie was divided into three main chapters in which the characteristics of necromancers, demons and witches are laid out comparatively. The King believed that there are four main types of demons – interestingly, all under the ultimate control of the Christian God, who uses them to test the faith of humanity:
The King’s book was popular. It led to a fanaticism against witches that was every bit as violent and depraved as the culturally ubiquitous torture and murder of other so-called heretics – such as Catholics, in the Elizabethan era, and Protestants in that of her sister, Mary. This brings us back to the North Loch, pooling innocently under the shadow of Edinburgh Castle, where James himself was born. The loch was filthy, after centuries of abuse from its city folk, and in the late 18th century, it was drained to make way for the North Bridge. Under the placid, scummy surface of that fetid swamp lay direct evidence of the witch hunting fever that swept through Scotland and Britain during the previous century – and by association, New England, too. In the words of historian and author Hugo Arnot, in his 1788 volume entitled, The History of Edinburgh: “Several skeletons were uncovered from the mud, confirming the loch’s long use as a place of public execution and burial by water.” Those bodies were only the start. The loch would require more draining, both for the repair of the first bridge, whose construction upon a slew of mud was a very big mistake, and then for the construction of the railway. Again, in 1884, Grant’s book Old and New Edinburgh, Vol. II., the author wrote: “When the North Loch was drained for the construction of the railway in the mid-19th century, numerous bones were unearthed, some said to be from suicides, others from those drowned as punishment or thrown in during times of plague.”  What nobody can say is, who exactly were the people at the bottom of North Loch? After hundreds of years, the degradation of the skeletons and the sheer number of recorded deaths in the area makes it extremely difficult to match identities to remains.
Local histories and physical documentation from the era suggest a bizarre number of legal drownings. For example, in 1530, Grissel Mathews was drowned in the Nor Loch for stealing a strongbox from her master’s house. That same year, quarantine laws were in place to limit the spread of plague, and records show that two women “flouting” those laws were also drowned in the loch, while a man who attended a church service while his wife lay dying of plague at home – was drowned, too. A woman by the name Katryne Heriot was convicted of smuggling forbidden goods into the city, thereby bringing plague into Edinburgh; she was drowned in the loch. Are some of the bodies recovered from the drained cesspool of a loch those of Grissel, Katryne, Agnes or John? Are they from unnamed, undocumented victims of witch hunts? Vigilante justice? Plague? If I had access to those bodies, you can bet I’d be examining those bones for Yersinia pestis DNA and classic heat cracking from the so-called witch burnings. No punishment is too great for the witches: as they are the instruments of Satan, so must they be rooted out of the world like weeds from a garden.” — James VI, Daemonologie (1597) Comments are closed.
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