Witch Hunt: A Century of Murder (2015–…): Season 1, Episode 1 - Episode #1.1 - full transcript
This is the British Isles 400 years ago.
You will be hanged by the neck
until you are dead.
Mass trials and executions erupted
across the country.
And the reason for this chaos
and violence...
was witches.
Devil's whore!
People were convinced they sank ships,
brought famine and disease,
murdered and maimed.
Because witches worked for Satan.
Hundreds of innocent people
were persecuted...
Art thou a witch?
...tortured and put to death
in a hysterical effort
to stamp out the scourge of witchcraft.
Imagine living in that world.
You could be accused,
tortured and executed
on the basis of nothing more than gossip
and superstition.
[screaming]
How could such a deadly and violent idea
have got so out of control in Britain?
What drove the persecutors
to such awful lengths?
And what was it like for the victims
who were tortured and executed
for crimes they couldn't possibly
have committed?
Unhand me!
This is the extraordinary story
of how the terror of satanic witchcraft...
Curse on you!
...infected the British Isles
and plunged it into chaos.
[raven croaking]
Queen Anne's ships had been battered
by a violent storm.
One ship sank. Anne's almost capsized.
The badly damaged convoy
had limped back to Scandinavia.
King James decided he would have to go
and fetch his new wife himself.
But James would bring back far more
than a just new queen from Denmark.
James arrived here at Kronborg Castle,
near Copenhagen, in January 1590.
His crossing had been equally violent.
The world James walked into was
very different to his native Scotland.
Witch hysteria
was infecting mainland Europe.
Hundreds had already been executed as
witches, tens of thousands would follow.
The violence, fear and hysteria
spreading across Europe
were largely the result
of one incendiary book.
Here at the Royal Danish Library
is one of the very few original copies.
This is the Malleus Maleficarum,
or The Hammer of the Witches.
It was principally written by one German
Dominican monk called Heinrich Kramer.
And he wrote it to argue
that witches existed
and that they worked for the devil.
It was a legal manual for
the hunting and executing of witches.
The Malleus Maleficarum pushed
Kramer's terrifying belief
that witches were obsessed
with poisoning, maiming and killing.
And they were doing it for Satan.
Their aim was to harm,
to murder and to destroy.
And if witches were the problem,
the Malleus was the answer.
It was a hugely influential book
and one of the reasons it was
so influential is printed at the front.
This is a papal bull, the pope's
equivalent of a royal proclamation.
It was issued in 1484, just before
the Malleus was published,
and it stated that witches were heretics
who had made an alliance with the devil.
Kramer reprinted the bull to prove
that the Church stood behind his book.
Because it appeared
to have the Church's backing,
the Malleus Maleficarum led
to the wholesale torture and murder
of thousands of people suspected
of being in league with the devil.
[cheering]
This idea that witches were
the devil's handmaidens,
hellbent on death and chaos,
hadn't yet reached James's kingdom.
But in Denmark, he came face to face
with the reality of Satan's witches.
In April 1590, while James
was still at Kronborg Castle,
two witches were arrested in Copenhagen.
And what was truly shocking
was that they confessed
to conjuring up the violent storms
that had hit James and Anne's ships.
They had attempted
to murder the Scottish king and queen,
because Satan wanted them dead.
At least five more witches were
later convicted of the same crime.
All were burned at the stake.
But if James thought he'd left
the scourge of witchcraft behind him
when he returned to Scotland,
he was wrong.
With the Danish witches dead,
the whole thing might have become
nothing more than a historical footnote
and James might have lived out
his reign untroubled by the devil,
if it were not for one man.
His name was David Seaton
and he was the deputy bailiff
here in the small town of Trenant,
nine miles east of Edinburgh.
[thunder, owl calling]
[door clanks]
What Seaton did in November 1590
proved to James
that the devil and his witches
were alive and well in Scotland.
He claimed his young housemaid,
Geillis Duncan,
had suddenly acquired healing powers...
and he'd seen her slipping out at night.
According to a contemporary source,
Seaton believed only one thing could
explain her furtive behavior.
Witchcraft.
And he was going to prove it.
Where've you been?
I was tending to the garden, sir.
Don't lie to me!
- Art thou a witch?
- No, sir, please, sir, no!
The story of Seaton and Geillis
is recorded in this pamphlet
first published in 1591.
It's called Newes From Scotland and it
tells us exactly what Seaton did next.
"Her master did,
with the help of others,
torment her
with the torture of the pilliwinks."
No, no!
Pilliwinks are thumbscrews.
No! [screams]
They crush the flesh and bones
of the fingers.
Victims were often left
permanently crippled.
Are you a witch?
[sobbing]
No, sir. No, sir.
Where did you get the power to heal?
It's not magic, sir.
[screams]
Geillis must have endured
unbearable pain.
But she would not confess
to something she had not done.
Seaton didn't stop at thumbscrews.
Where do you go at night?
Tell me the truth, I won't stand
any more of your lies.
[screams]
He turned instead to wrenching.
As the rope was pulled tight,
it crushed the head.
It could fracture
the skull and facial bones.
[weeping]
Geillis would not yield.
But the more she resisted confessing,
the harder Seaton tried to break her.
Confess, damn you!
I don't think Seaton's actions
had much to do with witchhunting.
I think his motives were sexual.
Perhaps he'd lusted after her for
a long time and felt that, as master,
he had a right to have her.
It doesn't take a huge leap to imagine
that a young woman
sneaking out at night
might have been having a sexual liaison
with someone other than Seaton.
Whatever was driving him,
I don't think that Seaton
could possibly have appreciated
the death and suffering
that would result from his obsession.
Seaton began to search her body,
because people believed
the devil always left a mark
on the bodies of his disciples.
It could be anything,
a mole, a birthmark.
Seaton found what he was
looking for on Geillis's neck.
And for some reason,
this is what broke her.
All I've done is by witchcraft...
and with the enticements
of the devil himself.
I rode to the town where a witch
was received in service of the devil.
I danced in the rank with the others.
We'll never know
why Geillis confessed now,
after she'd resisted
thumbscrews and wrenching.
Perhaps the mark was
from a sexual liaison
and in this highly religious time,
she felt too much shame and guilt.
Geillis's confession
had a seismic impact.
It was the first recorded incident
of a Scottish witch
admitting to working for the devil.
It set in train a sequence of events
that would kill hundreds of people.
[jeering]
The repercussions
would last a hundred years.
In November 1590,
Geillis Duncan was brought here
to the Old Tolbooth Prison,
one of Edinburgh's most notorious jails.
The old prison no longer stands,
but what does remain
is the stone "Heart of Midlothian"
that was at the doorway.
Geillis would have walked
over this heart
as she entered
her period of incarceration.
Geillis admitted
to being part of a coven.
She gave up
the names of eight other witches.
They in turn named more.
In total, over a hundred people were
hunted down and tortured.
This raised the stakes enormously.
It was no longer
an isolated case of witchcraft,
it was now a conspiracy of witches.
[coughs]
Under torture,
Geillis said that her coven
had been in league with witches
from Copenhagen,
the ones who'd been executed
for attempting to murder
King James and his queen.
This was dynamite.
It changed everything.
It got the King's full attention.
And he did something almost unheard of.
He became directly involved in the case.
The person who had
the most profound effect on King James
was one of those named
by Geillis Duncan,
a woman called Agnes Sampson.
Agnes was a midwife from Edinburgh.
She was accused of being
the most senior witch in the coven.
And under torture, she too confessed
to the attempted murder of King James.
Agnes Sampson was taken down there
to Holyrood House,
James VI's official residence,
not once but twice,
to be directly interrogated
by the King himself.
Agnes repeated the confession
that had been beaten out of her in jail,
that her coven had met with the devil.
We met in the kirk at North Berwick.
The plan was to raise a storm for
staying of the queen's coming home.
He told me of the Michaelmas storm
and that it would do great damage
at sea and land.
He said that it should be hard
for the King to come home
and the queen should never come.
James saw himself
as a highly intellectual king.
He read widely and was fascinated
by both natural philosophy
and the new ideas
of rational investigation.
Agnes's confession did not convince him.
She is naught but a liar.
I'm nae lying, sire.
[whispering]
According to James,
Agnes repeated pillow talk
between the King and his new bride
on their wedding night,
when they were alone.
This was enough to convince him
that Agnes must be a witch.
It certainly sounded like magic.
But whatever James may have believed,
in reality, there was little privacy
for a 16th-century king, even in bed.
Possibly a juicy piece of gossip
escaped the palace.
Or maybe the experienced midwife
simply made an educated guess.
But that leaves one big question.
Why did Agnes go to such great lengths
in order to seal her own fate?
Possibly, this lowly woman
enjoyed her moment in the limelight,
she had a chance to meet the King
and maybe even scare him.
But I think there may be a simpler
explanation: it ended her torture.
Agnes had been in prison
in one of the worst jails in Scotland.
She had been tortured
and she probably knew
that this marked effectively
the end of her life.
So the best that she could hope
for was to ease her suffering.
And in that at least she was successful.
James ordered that her torture
should cease.
In James's mind,
there was now clear evidence
that an international satanic conspiracy
was out to kill him.
And there was only one way to stop them:
kill them first.
On the 28th of January 1591,
Agnes Sampson was brought here to
Castle Hill in Edinburgh to be executed.
We don't know how many other convicted
witches were with her that day,
but we do know that she wasn't alone.
These were innocent,
confused and terrified people.
People who had been imprisoned
and tortured.
People who had been prepared
to say anything to stop the pain.
All the victims were probably garroted
before the fires were lit.
It was considered a mercy, and compared
to burning to death, it probably was.
[coughing]
As the convicted witches burned,
the air would have been thick
with the stench of burning human fat.
It would have seeped
into the crowd's hair, their clothes,
even the porous walls
of the surrounding buildings.
Of the 200 people who had been accused,
around 70 had been found guilty
of witchcraft and sentenced to death.
Geillis Duncan, the young housemaid
who started it all,
rotted in prison for a further year
before she too was burnt at the stake.
These events became known
as the North Berwick Witch Trials.
They convinced James
that satanic witchcraft
threatened his land and his life.
And the King's personal involvement
in the trials
gave witchhunting
the stamp of Royal approval.
Over the next few years,
the infection spread across Scotland.
In East Lothian, 62 people were accused,
33 in Fife, 86 in Aberdeen,
and 11 in Ross.
Few doubted that the devil
and his handmaidens stalked the Earth.
At least, in Scotland.
Until now, England had largely escaped
the curse of mass witchcraft trials.
But on the 24th of March 1603,
Queen Elizabeth I died and her cousin,
James, claimed the throne.
James carried the witchcraft infection
south to England.
But how it happened
was totally unexpected.
The English had high hopes
for their new king.
He was young, male and already had
a couple of sons as heirs.
After 45 years
of childless Queen Elizabeth I,
it seemed too good to be true.
But James was an unknown quantity.
A foreign king in an alien land.
His new subjects wanted to know
what their new ruler was like.
What were his interests?
What were his beliefs?
Which way was the wind blowing
in this new regime?
Well, they had one big clue.
A book published in London,
written by James himself.
It was called Daemonologie.
This is the only book ever written
by a reigning monarch
on the subject of witchcraft
and the devil.
James sets out his reason
for writing in the preface.
He says:
"The fearefull aboundinge
at this time in this countrie,
of these detestable slaves of the Devil,
the Witches or enchaunters,
hath moved me, beloved reader,
to dispatch in post
this following treatise of mine."
And the purpose of it, he says, is
"to resolve the doubting hearts of many."
This is pretty unequivocal stuff.
What he is saying is that there are
witches everywhere in Scotland,
that they are Satan's minions.
And that everyone better believe it.
James sets the book out in the form
of a dialogue between two characters,
so we have Philomathes and Epistemon.
Epistemon is
the thoroughly knowledgeable one,
the rational man
who knows all about witchcraft.
He's undoubtedly James himself.
And over the course of the book,
Epistemon convinces Philomathes
that actually witches are real,
that they should be prosecuted
by the correct authorities
and that anyone who doubts
their existence
is at best fooling himself
and at worst in league with the devil.
The book was very popular
with the English.
It was republished in London
at least twice.
Daemonologie gave English people
an insight into their new king.
And what they saw was a man hellbent
on hunting down Satan's witches.
And in 1605, James once again
became involved in a case of witchcraft,
but this time in England.
Here at Exeter College, Oxford,
the country finally saw
their new witchhunting king
taking on the satanic scourge.
In August, a wealthy and well-connected
man gained an audience with King James.
His name was Brian Gunter.
Gunter had a problem,
a problem with a witch.
Now, I think it's quite likely that Gunter
had read James's book Daemonologie.
And this was enough to convince him
that the King would share
his hatred of witches.
Gunter presented his daughter Anne
to the King
and claimed that she had been cursed
by three witches.
The afflictions first beset her
around midsummer.
Her fits are violent and her body
contorts, and when she is in the throes,
she vomits pins
or pulls them from her nose.
My daughter is bewitched, sire.
Anne has seen her tormentors
in her fits.
The first is Goodwife Gregory,
the second is Mary People
and the third is Mother Pepwell.
Is this true?
Yes, sire.
Gunter wanted the King
to bring the witches to justice.
But James did something
completely unexpected.
James ordered that Anne be examined
by the Archbishop of Canterbury,
a noted sceptic.
It didn't take the Archbishop's team
of investigators long
to figure out
that Anne was faking the symptoms.
On the 10th of October, King James wrote
to his chief minister about the case.
"For your better satisfaction
touching Anne Gunter,
we find by her confession
that she was never possessed
with any devil,
that the practice of the pins
grew at first from a pin
that she put in her mouth,
affirmed by her father."
Brian Gunter was the brains
behind the deception.
He was seeking revenge
against one of the accused.
And he'd tried using James to get it.
He was fined for wasting
the King's time
and thrown into jail for three years.
He'd got off comparatively lightly.
If he'd succeeded,
the women would have been executed.
Gunter had entirely misread
the new King.
King James's actions in the Gunter case
seem completely at odds with
his reputation as a rabid witchhunter.
So what was really going on?
I think the answer lies in his book
Daemonologie.
If you read it,
you're left in no doubt at all
that James wholeheartedly believed
in Satan and witches.
But Daemonologie
is no Malleus Maleficarum.
It's not trying to use fear to whip
people up into a frenzy of witch-hatred.
It's an opportunity to make a case
by rational argument
rather than by mere superstition.
It's designed as much to make sure
that the wrong people aren't
convicted as the right people are.
James was a philosopher,
or at least that's how he saw himself.
But the subtleties of his bookish ideas
were almost certainly lost
on most of his subjects.
Like Brian Gunter, they probably took
Daemonologie at face value.
A license from the King
to hunt witches and kill them.
This misunderstanding of James' ideas
would light a touchpaper
that, over the next 100 years,
would lead to the worst excesses
of witchhunting in English history.
Seven years after the Gunter incident,
the era of mass witch trials exploded
in the English courts.
It began here, in Pendle, Lancashire.
On the 18th of March 1612,
a girl called Alison Device
was near the town of Colne in Pendle,
when she spied an elderly peddler
called John Law.
Sir, kind sir.
Alison didn't like being ignored.
[whispering]
She cursed the peddler.
[gasping]
From the description
of John Law's condition,
paralysis down the left side,
loss of speech, it seems
likely that he'd suffered a stroke.
But from Alison's
terrified point of view,
it was her curse
that had struck him down.
Alison came
from a family of cunning folk,
local healers who used herbs
and sometimes magic to cure people.
So it would have been natural for her
to believe in the power of her curse.
Horrified by what she'd done,
Alison Device confessed.
She was hauled up in front of
local magistrate Roger Nowell.
Alison admitted to cursing the peddler.
But according to a report made
at the time, she went much further.
I demanded that the peddler
let me buy some pins from him,
and the peddler refused
to open his pack.
As I parted from him,
there appeared a black dog.
The black dog said unto me,
"What wouldst thou have me do
unto yonder man?"
I said, "What canst thou do unto him?
And the black dog said,
"I can lame him."
And I said...
"Lame him."
[dog snarls]
[weeping]
Alison accused her grandmother and two
neighbors of being witches as well.
Nowell began arresting the suspects
named by Alison.
On the 2nd of April,
Alison Device;
her grandmother, Old Demdike;
their neighbor Old Chattocks;
and her daughter Anne Redfearn;
were brought here
to Lancaster Castle prison
and they were kept
in the bottom of this tower.
It's still known as The Witches' Tower
to this day.
All the accused were interrogated.
Eight further suspects,
including all of Alison's family,
joined them in the tower.
This is the very cell
where they were kept.
And along with the 12 suspected witches,
there were another eight we know,
prisoners who were unrelated
to the witch trial.
So that's 20 people in this space.
It must be 12' by 17', 18'.
It's quite something to imagine
that the suspected witches,
just ordinary people,
were kept in here for four months,
and some of them were very old.
they were in their eighties.
Others, people like Alison,
was a teenager,
and they were in here in the dark
for all that time.
Awaiting their death.
Nowell probably couldn't believe
his luck.
A rural magistrate lived a humdrum life
with few opportunities.
Now, Nowell found himself heading up
a high-profile witch hunt.
If he secured convictions,
this could make his career.
But that was easier said than done.
Of all the cases that made it to court,
three-quarters failed
due to lack of evidence.
All Nowell had were accusations
and counter-accusations.
What he needed was proof.
Curse on you!
And it was King James
who inadvertently gave it to him.
[screaming]
The courtroom was a hive of activity.
People packed the public gallery
to see the sensational trial.
The judge was Sir Edward Bromley.
Roger Nowell
was the prosecuting magistrate.
A guilty verdict
could be a huge boost to his career.
Thomas Potts was the court clerk.
And we know the detail of this trial
because he later published
his records in this book.
Over the next two days,
19 suspects stood trial,
accused of using witchcraft
to harm or kill.
There should have been 20,
but Alison's grandmother, Old Demdike,
had already died in that cramped
and stinking cell in The Witches' Tower.
I demanded that the peddler
let me buy a pin off him,
but the peddler refused.
Unfortunately, Alison Device felt
such remorse for cursing the peddler
that she didn't even try
to defend herself.
So I said, "Lame him."
She repeated her confession
and was quickly found guilty.
Devil's whore!
The next to take the stand
was Alison's mother, Elizabeth Device.
You are accused that Good Friday past,
you dined at Malkin Tower with persons
that you knew to be witches.
At your meeting together,
you talked about killing the constable
and blowing up Lancaster Castle.
I deny any such meeting or talk.
Your spirit Ball did appear to you
in the form of a black dog.
[jeering]
Aforesaid spirit bid you
to make a picture in clay
after the said John Robinson, which
you then did burn with fire and crumble.
No, that is not true.
[crowd murmuring]
Blasphemy!
The case was deadlocked
between accusation and denial.
But Roger Nowell had a secret weapon.
Elizabeth Device's own daughter,
nine-year-old Jennet.
My mother is a witch.
Curse on you, curse on you!
What are you saying?
Why are you saying this?
You stupid girl,
do you not know what you do?
Shut up, girl! Shut up!
- Silence!
- No!
A demon will come for thou
and ravage thy mind.
I will snuff out thy children
with my own bare hands.
- Silence!
- I cannot speak with my mother here.
Take her out.
A curse on you!
[screaming]
The testimony of a child would not
normally be allowed under English law.
But King James' book Daemonologie
promoted its use in witch trials.
And because of that,
Jennet's confession was accepted.
And the fate of the witches was sealed.
My mother is a witch
and that I know to be true.
I have seen her spirit many times
in the likeness of a brown dog
that she called Ball.
And at one time,
I did see Ball ask Mother
what she would have him to do,
and Mother answered that she would have
Ball to help her kill.
[yelling]
Little Jennet named names.
The wife of Hugh Hargraves;
Christopher Howgate;
Elizabeth, his wife;
Dick Miles, and his wife;
Christopher Iackes of the Thorney Holme,
and his wife.
And...
my brother, James Device,
has been a witch for three years.
We'll never know why Jennet
testified against her own family.
Maybe she thought
they really were witches.
Or maybe she liked
being the centre of attention.
Or maybe given the way
that her mother shouted at her
and threatened her in court,
she was badly treated
and she thought that this was an escape.
But I suspect the nine-year-old didn't
understand the full consequences
of what she said and maybe Nowell
bullied and brainwashed her
into saying what she did,
just as Brian Gunter had done.
At the end of a two-day trial,
ten of the 19 accused
were found guilty of witchcraft.
Jennet's entire family was convicted.
You will be taken to the execution
grounds for this country...
...where you shall be hanged
by the neck until you are dead.
May God have mercy upon your souls.
On the 20th August,
the day after the trial,
the ten convicted witches
were brought here to a place
still known as Gallows Hill
to be hanged.
[yelling]
Perhaps under similarly grim skies,
the crowds would have gathered
to see the spectacle...
...to see the old, unloved,
despised witches meet their fate.
And maybe amongst them,
there would have been the young girl
who had condemned her family,
her own mother, to meet the rough rope
and the short drop.
Yes, hang her.
It was a gruesome form of execution.
The drop wasn't high enough
to break their necks.
Instead they died
by agonizingly slow strangulation.
Jennet disappears from
the historical records after the trial.
But the name Jennet Device is listed
as one of a group of 20 witches
tried in Lancaster 22 years later.
It appears that she was convicted
and probably died in jail.
We can't be sure if it was the same girl
but it would be a cruel form
of poetic justice if it was.
The Pendle trials were a watershed.
They triggered 100 years
of institutionalized murder in England.
And the blame for that must lie,
at least partly, with King James.
His book, Daemonologie, sanctioned forms
of evidence and torture
that drove the worst excesses
of witchhunting.
He would have been mortified.
Pendle was everything
the rational James disliked.
A case based on hearsay,
manipulation and petty jealousies,
rather than based on scripture,
evidence and due process of law.
James knew it was as terrible thing
to condemn the innocent
as to let the guilty go unpunished
and he'd written Daemonologie
as a manual to prevent precisely that.
But James failed to grasp
how other people would see
a book written by the King
on the prosecution of witches.
And over the next 50 years or so,
this misjudgment would lead
to hundreds of innocent people
being sentenced to death.
You will be hanged by the neck
until you are dead.
Mass trials and executions erupted
across the country.
And the reason for this chaos
and violence...
was witches.
Devil's whore!
People were convinced they sank ships,
brought famine and disease,
murdered and maimed.
Because witches worked for Satan.
Hundreds of innocent people
were persecuted...
Art thou a witch?
...tortured and put to death
in a hysterical effort
to stamp out the scourge of witchcraft.
Imagine living in that world.
You could be accused,
tortured and executed
on the basis of nothing more than gossip
and superstition.
[screaming]
How could such a deadly and violent idea
have got so out of control in Britain?
What drove the persecutors
to such awful lengths?
And what was it like for the victims
who were tortured and executed
for crimes they couldn't possibly
have committed?
Unhand me!
This is the extraordinary story
of how the terror of satanic witchcraft...
Curse on you!
...infected the British Isles
and plunged it into chaos.
[raven croaking]
Queen Anne's ships had been battered
by a violent storm.
One ship sank. Anne's almost capsized.
The badly damaged convoy
had limped back to Scandinavia.
King James decided he would have to go
and fetch his new wife himself.
But James would bring back far more
than a just new queen from Denmark.
James arrived here at Kronborg Castle,
near Copenhagen, in January 1590.
His crossing had been equally violent.
The world James walked into was
very different to his native Scotland.
Witch hysteria
was infecting mainland Europe.
Hundreds had already been executed as
witches, tens of thousands would follow.
The violence, fear and hysteria
spreading across Europe
were largely the result
of one incendiary book.
Here at the Royal Danish Library
is one of the very few original copies.
This is the Malleus Maleficarum,
or The Hammer of the Witches.
It was principally written by one German
Dominican monk called Heinrich Kramer.
And he wrote it to argue
that witches existed
and that they worked for the devil.
It was a legal manual for
the hunting and executing of witches.
The Malleus Maleficarum pushed
Kramer's terrifying belief
that witches were obsessed
with poisoning, maiming and killing.
And they were doing it for Satan.
Their aim was to harm,
to murder and to destroy.
And if witches were the problem,
the Malleus was the answer.
It was a hugely influential book
and one of the reasons it was
so influential is printed at the front.
This is a papal bull, the pope's
equivalent of a royal proclamation.
It was issued in 1484, just before
the Malleus was published,
and it stated that witches were heretics
who had made an alliance with the devil.
Kramer reprinted the bull to prove
that the Church stood behind his book.
Because it appeared
to have the Church's backing,
the Malleus Maleficarum led
to the wholesale torture and murder
of thousands of people suspected
of being in league with the devil.
[cheering]
This idea that witches were
the devil's handmaidens,
hellbent on death and chaos,
hadn't yet reached James's kingdom.
But in Denmark, he came face to face
with the reality of Satan's witches.
In April 1590, while James
was still at Kronborg Castle,
two witches were arrested in Copenhagen.
And what was truly shocking
was that they confessed
to conjuring up the violent storms
that had hit James and Anne's ships.
They had attempted
to murder the Scottish king and queen,
because Satan wanted them dead.
At least five more witches were
later convicted of the same crime.
All were burned at the stake.
But if James thought he'd left
the scourge of witchcraft behind him
when he returned to Scotland,
he was wrong.
With the Danish witches dead,
the whole thing might have become
nothing more than a historical footnote
and James might have lived out
his reign untroubled by the devil,
if it were not for one man.
His name was David Seaton
and he was the deputy bailiff
here in the small town of Trenant,
nine miles east of Edinburgh.
[thunder, owl calling]
[door clanks]
What Seaton did in November 1590
proved to James
that the devil and his witches
were alive and well in Scotland.
He claimed his young housemaid,
Geillis Duncan,
had suddenly acquired healing powers...
and he'd seen her slipping out at night.
According to a contemporary source,
Seaton believed only one thing could
explain her furtive behavior.
Witchcraft.
And he was going to prove it.
Where've you been?
I was tending to the garden, sir.
Don't lie to me!
- Art thou a witch?
- No, sir, please, sir, no!
The story of Seaton and Geillis
is recorded in this pamphlet
first published in 1591.
It's called Newes From Scotland and it
tells us exactly what Seaton did next.
"Her master did,
with the help of others,
torment her
with the torture of the pilliwinks."
No, no!
Pilliwinks are thumbscrews.
No! [screams]
They crush the flesh and bones
of the fingers.
Victims were often left
permanently crippled.
Are you a witch?
[sobbing]
No, sir. No, sir.
Where did you get the power to heal?
It's not magic, sir.
[screams]
Geillis must have endured
unbearable pain.
But she would not confess
to something she had not done.
Seaton didn't stop at thumbscrews.
Where do you go at night?
Tell me the truth, I won't stand
any more of your lies.
[screams]
He turned instead to wrenching.
As the rope was pulled tight,
it crushed the head.
It could fracture
the skull and facial bones.
[weeping]
Geillis would not yield.
But the more she resisted confessing,
the harder Seaton tried to break her.
Confess, damn you!
I don't think Seaton's actions
had much to do with witchhunting.
I think his motives were sexual.
Perhaps he'd lusted after her for
a long time and felt that, as master,
he had a right to have her.
It doesn't take a huge leap to imagine
that a young woman
sneaking out at night
might have been having a sexual liaison
with someone other than Seaton.
Whatever was driving him,
I don't think that Seaton
could possibly have appreciated
the death and suffering
that would result from his obsession.
Seaton began to search her body,
because people believed
the devil always left a mark
on the bodies of his disciples.
It could be anything,
a mole, a birthmark.
Seaton found what he was
looking for on Geillis's neck.
And for some reason,
this is what broke her.
All I've done is by witchcraft...
and with the enticements
of the devil himself.
I rode to the town where a witch
was received in service of the devil.
I danced in the rank with the others.
We'll never know
why Geillis confessed now,
after she'd resisted
thumbscrews and wrenching.
Perhaps the mark was
from a sexual liaison
and in this highly religious time,
she felt too much shame and guilt.
Geillis's confession
had a seismic impact.
It was the first recorded incident
of a Scottish witch
admitting to working for the devil.
It set in train a sequence of events
that would kill hundreds of people.
[jeering]
The repercussions
would last a hundred years.
In November 1590,
Geillis Duncan was brought here
to the Old Tolbooth Prison,
one of Edinburgh's most notorious jails.
The old prison no longer stands,
but what does remain
is the stone "Heart of Midlothian"
that was at the doorway.
Geillis would have walked
over this heart
as she entered
her period of incarceration.
Geillis admitted
to being part of a coven.
She gave up
the names of eight other witches.
They in turn named more.
In total, over a hundred people were
hunted down and tortured.
This raised the stakes enormously.
It was no longer
an isolated case of witchcraft,
it was now a conspiracy of witches.
[coughs]
Under torture,
Geillis said that her coven
had been in league with witches
from Copenhagen,
the ones who'd been executed
for attempting to murder
King James and his queen.
This was dynamite.
It changed everything.
It got the King's full attention.
And he did something almost unheard of.
He became directly involved in the case.
The person who had
the most profound effect on King James
was one of those named
by Geillis Duncan,
a woman called Agnes Sampson.
Agnes was a midwife from Edinburgh.
She was accused of being
the most senior witch in the coven.
And under torture, she too confessed
to the attempted murder of King James.
Agnes Sampson was taken down there
to Holyrood House,
James VI's official residence,
not once but twice,
to be directly interrogated
by the King himself.
Agnes repeated the confession
that had been beaten out of her in jail,
that her coven had met with the devil.
We met in the kirk at North Berwick.
The plan was to raise a storm for
staying of the queen's coming home.
He told me of the Michaelmas storm
and that it would do great damage
at sea and land.
He said that it should be hard
for the King to come home
and the queen should never come.
James saw himself
as a highly intellectual king.
He read widely and was fascinated
by both natural philosophy
and the new ideas
of rational investigation.
Agnes's confession did not convince him.
She is naught but a liar.
I'm nae lying, sire.
[whispering]
According to James,
Agnes repeated pillow talk
between the King and his new bride
on their wedding night,
when they were alone.
This was enough to convince him
that Agnes must be a witch.
It certainly sounded like magic.
But whatever James may have believed,
in reality, there was little privacy
for a 16th-century king, even in bed.
Possibly a juicy piece of gossip
escaped the palace.
Or maybe the experienced midwife
simply made an educated guess.
But that leaves one big question.
Why did Agnes go to such great lengths
in order to seal her own fate?
Possibly, this lowly woman
enjoyed her moment in the limelight,
she had a chance to meet the King
and maybe even scare him.
But I think there may be a simpler
explanation: it ended her torture.
Agnes had been in prison
in one of the worst jails in Scotland.
She had been tortured
and she probably knew
that this marked effectively
the end of her life.
So the best that she could hope
for was to ease her suffering.
And in that at least she was successful.
James ordered that her torture
should cease.
In James's mind,
there was now clear evidence
that an international satanic conspiracy
was out to kill him.
And there was only one way to stop them:
kill them first.
On the 28th of January 1591,
Agnes Sampson was brought here to
Castle Hill in Edinburgh to be executed.
We don't know how many other convicted
witches were with her that day,
but we do know that she wasn't alone.
These were innocent,
confused and terrified people.
People who had been imprisoned
and tortured.
People who had been prepared
to say anything to stop the pain.
All the victims were probably garroted
before the fires were lit.
It was considered a mercy, and compared
to burning to death, it probably was.
[coughing]
As the convicted witches burned,
the air would have been thick
with the stench of burning human fat.
It would have seeped
into the crowd's hair, their clothes,
even the porous walls
of the surrounding buildings.
Of the 200 people who had been accused,
around 70 had been found guilty
of witchcraft and sentenced to death.
Geillis Duncan, the young housemaid
who started it all,
rotted in prison for a further year
before she too was burnt at the stake.
These events became known
as the North Berwick Witch Trials.
They convinced James
that satanic witchcraft
threatened his land and his life.
And the King's personal involvement
in the trials
gave witchhunting
the stamp of Royal approval.
Over the next few years,
the infection spread across Scotland.
In East Lothian, 62 people were accused,
33 in Fife, 86 in Aberdeen,
and 11 in Ross.
Few doubted that the devil
and his handmaidens stalked the Earth.
At least, in Scotland.
Until now, England had largely escaped
the curse of mass witchcraft trials.
But on the 24th of March 1603,
Queen Elizabeth I died and her cousin,
James, claimed the throne.
James carried the witchcraft infection
south to England.
But how it happened
was totally unexpected.
The English had high hopes
for their new king.
He was young, male and already had
a couple of sons as heirs.
After 45 years
of childless Queen Elizabeth I,
it seemed too good to be true.
But James was an unknown quantity.
A foreign king in an alien land.
His new subjects wanted to know
what their new ruler was like.
What were his interests?
What were his beliefs?
Which way was the wind blowing
in this new regime?
Well, they had one big clue.
A book published in London,
written by James himself.
It was called Daemonologie.
This is the only book ever written
by a reigning monarch
on the subject of witchcraft
and the devil.
James sets out his reason
for writing in the preface.
He says:
"The fearefull aboundinge
at this time in this countrie,
of these detestable slaves of the Devil,
the Witches or enchaunters,
hath moved me, beloved reader,
to dispatch in post
this following treatise of mine."
And the purpose of it, he says, is
"to resolve the doubting hearts of many."
This is pretty unequivocal stuff.
What he is saying is that there are
witches everywhere in Scotland,
that they are Satan's minions.
And that everyone better believe it.
James sets the book out in the form
of a dialogue between two characters,
so we have Philomathes and Epistemon.
Epistemon is
the thoroughly knowledgeable one,
the rational man
who knows all about witchcraft.
He's undoubtedly James himself.
And over the course of the book,
Epistemon convinces Philomathes
that actually witches are real,
that they should be prosecuted
by the correct authorities
and that anyone who doubts
their existence
is at best fooling himself
and at worst in league with the devil.
The book was very popular
with the English.
It was republished in London
at least twice.
Daemonologie gave English people
an insight into their new king.
And what they saw was a man hellbent
on hunting down Satan's witches.
And in 1605, James once again
became involved in a case of witchcraft,
but this time in England.
Here at Exeter College, Oxford,
the country finally saw
their new witchhunting king
taking on the satanic scourge.
In August, a wealthy and well-connected
man gained an audience with King James.
His name was Brian Gunter.
Gunter had a problem,
a problem with a witch.
Now, I think it's quite likely that Gunter
had read James's book Daemonologie.
And this was enough to convince him
that the King would share
his hatred of witches.
Gunter presented his daughter Anne
to the King
and claimed that she had been cursed
by three witches.
The afflictions first beset her
around midsummer.
Her fits are violent and her body
contorts, and when she is in the throes,
she vomits pins
or pulls them from her nose.
My daughter is bewitched, sire.
Anne has seen her tormentors
in her fits.
The first is Goodwife Gregory,
the second is Mary People
and the third is Mother Pepwell.
Is this true?
Yes, sire.
Gunter wanted the King
to bring the witches to justice.
But James did something
completely unexpected.
James ordered that Anne be examined
by the Archbishop of Canterbury,
a noted sceptic.
It didn't take the Archbishop's team
of investigators long
to figure out
that Anne was faking the symptoms.
On the 10th of October, King James wrote
to his chief minister about the case.
"For your better satisfaction
touching Anne Gunter,
we find by her confession
that she was never possessed
with any devil,
that the practice of the pins
grew at first from a pin
that she put in her mouth,
affirmed by her father."
Brian Gunter was the brains
behind the deception.
He was seeking revenge
against one of the accused.
And he'd tried using James to get it.
He was fined for wasting
the King's time
and thrown into jail for three years.
He'd got off comparatively lightly.
If he'd succeeded,
the women would have been executed.
Gunter had entirely misread
the new King.
King James's actions in the Gunter case
seem completely at odds with
his reputation as a rabid witchhunter.
So what was really going on?
I think the answer lies in his book
Daemonologie.
If you read it,
you're left in no doubt at all
that James wholeheartedly believed
in Satan and witches.
But Daemonologie
is no Malleus Maleficarum.
It's not trying to use fear to whip
people up into a frenzy of witch-hatred.
It's an opportunity to make a case
by rational argument
rather than by mere superstition.
It's designed as much to make sure
that the wrong people aren't
convicted as the right people are.
James was a philosopher,
or at least that's how he saw himself.
But the subtleties of his bookish ideas
were almost certainly lost
on most of his subjects.
Like Brian Gunter, they probably took
Daemonologie at face value.
A license from the King
to hunt witches and kill them.
This misunderstanding of James' ideas
would light a touchpaper
that, over the next 100 years,
would lead to the worst excesses
of witchhunting in English history.
Seven years after the Gunter incident,
the era of mass witch trials exploded
in the English courts.
It began here, in Pendle, Lancashire.
On the 18th of March 1612,
a girl called Alison Device
was near the town of Colne in Pendle,
when she spied an elderly peddler
called John Law.
Sir, kind sir.
Alison didn't like being ignored.
[whispering]
She cursed the peddler.
[gasping]
From the description
of John Law's condition,
paralysis down the left side,
loss of speech, it seems
likely that he'd suffered a stroke.
But from Alison's
terrified point of view,
it was her curse
that had struck him down.
Alison came
from a family of cunning folk,
local healers who used herbs
and sometimes magic to cure people.
So it would have been natural for her
to believe in the power of her curse.
Horrified by what she'd done,
Alison Device confessed.
She was hauled up in front of
local magistrate Roger Nowell.
Alison admitted to cursing the peddler.
But according to a report made
at the time, she went much further.
I demanded that the peddler
let me buy some pins from him,
and the peddler refused
to open his pack.
As I parted from him,
there appeared a black dog.
The black dog said unto me,
"What wouldst thou have me do
unto yonder man?"
I said, "What canst thou do unto him?
And the black dog said,
"I can lame him."
And I said...
"Lame him."
[dog snarls]
[weeping]
Alison accused her grandmother and two
neighbors of being witches as well.
Nowell began arresting the suspects
named by Alison.
On the 2nd of April,
Alison Device;
her grandmother, Old Demdike;
their neighbor Old Chattocks;
and her daughter Anne Redfearn;
were brought here
to Lancaster Castle prison
and they were kept
in the bottom of this tower.
It's still known as The Witches' Tower
to this day.
All the accused were interrogated.
Eight further suspects,
including all of Alison's family,
joined them in the tower.
This is the very cell
where they were kept.
And along with the 12 suspected witches,
there were another eight we know,
prisoners who were unrelated
to the witch trial.
So that's 20 people in this space.
It must be 12' by 17', 18'.
It's quite something to imagine
that the suspected witches,
just ordinary people,
were kept in here for four months,
and some of them were very old.
they were in their eighties.
Others, people like Alison,
was a teenager,
and they were in here in the dark
for all that time.
Awaiting their death.
Nowell probably couldn't believe
his luck.
A rural magistrate lived a humdrum life
with few opportunities.
Now, Nowell found himself heading up
a high-profile witch hunt.
If he secured convictions,
this could make his career.
But that was easier said than done.
Of all the cases that made it to court,
three-quarters failed
due to lack of evidence.
All Nowell had were accusations
and counter-accusations.
What he needed was proof.
Curse on you!
And it was King James
who inadvertently gave it to him.
[screaming]
The courtroom was a hive of activity.
People packed the public gallery
to see the sensational trial.
The judge was Sir Edward Bromley.
Roger Nowell
was the prosecuting magistrate.
A guilty verdict
could be a huge boost to his career.
Thomas Potts was the court clerk.
And we know the detail of this trial
because he later published
his records in this book.
Over the next two days,
19 suspects stood trial,
accused of using witchcraft
to harm or kill.
There should have been 20,
but Alison's grandmother, Old Demdike,
had already died in that cramped
and stinking cell in The Witches' Tower.
I demanded that the peddler
let me buy a pin off him,
but the peddler refused.
Unfortunately, Alison Device felt
such remorse for cursing the peddler
that she didn't even try
to defend herself.
So I said, "Lame him."
She repeated her confession
and was quickly found guilty.
Devil's whore!
The next to take the stand
was Alison's mother, Elizabeth Device.
You are accused that Good Friday past,
you dined at Malkin Tower with persons
that you knew to be witches.
At your meeting together,
you talked about killing the constable
and blowing up Lancaster Castle.
I deny any such meeting or talk.
Your spirit Ball did appear to you
in the form of a black dog.
[jeering]
Aforesaid spirit bid you
to make a picture in clay
after the said John Robinson, which
you then did burn with fire and crumble.
No, that is not true.
[crowd murmuring]
Blasphemy!
The case was deadlocked
between accusation and denial.
But Roger Nowell had a secret weapon.
Elizabeth Device's own daughter,
nine-year-old Jennet.
My mother is a witch.
Curse on you, curse on you!
What are you saying?
Why are you saying this?
You stupid girl,
do you not know what you do?
Shut up, girl! Shut up!
- Silence!
- No!
A demon will come for thou
and ravage thy mind.
I will snuff out thy children
with my own bare hands.
- Silence!
- I cannot speak with my mother here.
Take her out.
A curse on you!
[screaming]
The testimony of a child would not
normally be allowed under English law.
But King James' book Daemonologie
promoted its use in witch trials.
And because of that,
Jennet's confession was accepted.
And the fate of the witches was sealed.
My mother is a witch
and that I know to be true.
I have seen her spirit many times
in the likeness of a brown dog
that she called Ball.
And at one time,
I did see Ball ask Mother
what she would have him to do,
and Mother answered that she would have
Ball to help her kill.
[yelling]
Little Jennet named names.
The wife of Hugh Hargraves;
Christopher Howgate;
Elizabeth, his wife;
Dick Miles, and his wife;
Christopher Iackes of the Thorney Holme,
and his wife.
And...
my brother, James Device,
has been a witch for three years.
We'll never know why Jennet
testified against her own family.
Maybe she thought
they really were witches.
Or maybe she liked
being the centre of attention.
Or maybe given the way
that her mother shouted at her
and threatened her in court,
she was badly treated
and she thought that this was an escape.
But I suspect the nine-year-old didn't
understand the full consequences
of what she said and maybe Nowell
bullied and brainwashed her
into saying what she did,
just as Brian Gunter had done.
At the end of a two-day trial,
ten of the 19 accused
were found guilty of witchcraft.
Jennet's entire family was convicted.
You will be taken to the execution
grounds for this country...
...where you shall be hanged
by the neck until you are dead.
May God have mercy upon your souls.
On the 20th August,
the day after the trial,
the ten convicted witches
were brought here to a place
still known as Gallows Hill
to be hanged.
[yelling]
Perhaps under similarly grim skies,
the crowds would have gathered
to see the spectacle...
...to see the old, unloved,
despised witches meet their fate.
And maybe amongst them,
there would have been the young girl
who had condemned her family,
her own mother, to meet the rough rope
and the short drop.
Yes, hang her.
It was a gruesome form of execution.
The drop wasn't high enough
to break their necks.
Instead they died
by agonizingly slow strangulation.
Jennet disappears from
the historical records after the trial.
But the name Jennet Device is listed
as one of a group of 20 witches
tried in Lancaster 22 years later.
It appears that she was convicted
and probably died in jail.
We can't be sure if it was the same girl
but it would be a cruel form
of poetic justice if it was.
The Pendle trials were a watershed.
They triggered 100 years
of institutionalized murder in England.
And the blame for that must lie,
at least partly, with King James.
His book, Daemonologie, sanctioned forms
of evidence and torture
that drove the worst excesses
of witchhunting.
He would have been mortified.
Pendle was everything
the rational James disliked.
A case based on hearsay,
manipulation and petty jealousies,
rather than based on scripture,
evidence and due process of law.
James knew it was as terrible thing
to condemn the innocent
as to let the guilty go unpunished
and he'd written Daemonologie
as a manual to prevent precisely that.
But James failed to grasp
how other people would see
a book written by the King
on the prosecution of witches.
And over the next 50 years or so,
this misjudgment would lead
to hundreds of innocent people
being sentenced to death.