Burning with belief
AGNES Sampson frolicked with the Devil in a North Berwick church, sailed off to sea in a magic sieve and employed dark powers to summon up a storm to sink the king’s ship. It sounds like a piece of hokum overbaked by some weird alliance of the Brothers Grimm, Stephen King and JK Rowling.
But back in the 16th century people took such stories very seriously, and Sampson was at the centre of a supernatural conspiracy that held a nation in a grip of terror and hysteria. A widow and midwife from East Lothian, Sampson would normally have been expected to live and die without making any mark on either history or contemporary society. Yet she was considered such a danger to the throne that King James VI, who prided himself on his education and intellect, took personal charge of her interrogation and then wrote a book on the subject.
The stories of witchcraft that swept the land in the late 16th century almost certainly inspired Shakespeare’s witches in Macbeth, first performed a scant 15 years after the North Berwick trials, and Burns’s dark comic classic Tam O’Shanter. Now, centuries later, Sampson is the subject of Witchcraze, an hour-long docu-drama on BBC 2 tonight.
Writer and producer Mark Hayhurst was familiar with Matthew Hopkins, who earned a dubious place in history by relentlessly tracking down witches in 17th century England and was immortalised by Vincent Price in the classic 1968 movie Witchfinder General, but had never heard of Sampson, when he first discussed the possibility of a programme on witchcraft with the BBC. When he set to work assessing historical documents, which are still throwing up new evidence of witchcraft, or at least allegations of witchcraft to this day, he uncovered a story that he maintains makes the tale of Hopkins’s reign of terror among the peasants of East Anglia seem dull.
Among those documents was James VI’s own book Demonologie and News from Scotland, an account of the outbreak of witchcraft by James Carmichael, a church minister and perhaps Scotland’s equivalent of Hopkins. "I’m not interested in the broomsticks aspect of witchcraft at all," says Hayhurst, "the covens and the dancing in the night ... It’s the politics of the thing that’s interesting.
"Most witch-hunts at that time were driven from the bottom … my neighbour’s cow is bigger than mine and therefore she must be a witch, or my calf’s not producing milk. But what’s interesting about this story is the way it connects with the Church and State."
Belief in good and evil spirits, witches and magic stems from pagan times. Until fairly recently, most people lived in fear of the supernatural - though no doubt some delighted in the rituals with which it was associated, adding a little spice to humdrum lives.
Many an old widow accepted offerings of oatmeal and milk from neighbours, whose suspicions were fuelled by nothing more than the old dear’s age and preference for feline company. Before the Reformation of 1560 witches were largely accepted in Scotland, as forces of nature or supernature, like floods and storms. Executions were virtually unknown. It would be like a man with a hole in his roof, who gets annoyed at the rain coming through, and sets about punishing hole and rain with a sledgehammer. Far better a bribe - keep them sweet, cross your fingers, touch wood and hope for the best.
However, Continental churchmen exposed these old crones as part of an international conspiracy to undermine the Church. Authorities in Central Europe and Scandinavia initiated huge witch hunts and in 1563 witchcraft became a statutory crime in Scotland. The 16th century was a time of religious and political unrest across Europe, new ideas clashing with old. James VI was an educated young man, who, unlike his tragic mother Mary Queen of Scots, embraced the new Protestant faith, and he was passionately interested in expanding his knowledge.
He was betrothed to Anne of Denmark, a tall, attractive Lutheran, but her attempts to make the short sea crossing to Scotland were repeatedly thwarted by storms. In 1589 James decided enough was enough and went to Denmark to get her, staying there till the following May, happy to escape intrigues at home and discuss progressive new ideas, such as a concerted attempt to stamp out witchcraft.
When they sailed back to Scotland, James and Anne were almost lost in another storm. There were many who wanted James dead, and witchcraft seemed an obvious explanation. Meanwhile David Seaton, a "gentleman" of Tranent, East Lothian, grew suspicious of one of his servants, Gelie Duncan, who seemed to have unusual powers of healing. She confessed to witchcraft, though modern thinking would question the validity of interrogation methods that included thumbscrews and the tightening of a cord around her head.
Her inquisitors had no quibbles over methodology. Imagine their delight when they finally broke her down, and she not only confessed to witchcraft, but named others involved in her devilish plot, including Agnes Sampson, a widow from Nether Keith, near Humbie, East Lothian.
Sampson was known to cure ailments with herbs and old Catholic chants, though they did not always work. Sometimes she could tell someone was going to die before they did. She was "the eldest witch of them all," said Duncan, significantly.
Up until now it was all relatively minor stuff, but, as more suspects were interrogated, the full story came out, with no fewer than 70 individuals named in a plot against the King, ranging from unsophisticated local folk to Satan and the King’s cousin, the Earl of Bothwell, a man with a reputation for recklessness and a continuing threat to the throne.
Witchcraze focuses on four individuals - Sampson (Cathleen McCarron), Carmichael (Ewan Stewart), Bothwell (Cas Harkins) and King James (Jimmy Harrison). It is shot in the style of a documentary, with an unseen interviewer granted access to palace and jail cell. Any temptation to giggle at such a Pythonesque approach to history is dispelled by the discomfiting nature of the subject matter and graphic language and violence.
With famine stalking the land, the persecution had already begun in the King’s absence. In Hayhurst’s programme, Carmichael notes that a quarrel over land could suddenly turn into accusations of witchcraft. It was not that he doubted the existence of witches, far from it, he simply wanted the pursuit of them to be more formally organised. "It’s too serious to be left to the whim of peasants," he says.
Torture was regarded as a fair means of extracting the truth. If a witch still refused to confess, it was seen as evidence, not of innocence, but that the Devil was in too deep. Sampson proved stubborn, until James took charge of the interrogation.
"It’s an incredible encounter because kings don’t meet peasants normally," says Hayhurst. He believes Agnes would have been flattered and relieved, trusting in the wisdom of her King, yet at the same time eager to please him and spinning out the tale.
"It starts off with leading questions and it ends with you inventing a whole scenario because you are pleasing your captors … There’s a kind of sexual energy going on there, because it ends with her whispering to him what happened on his wedding night. She says she flew over. She was there on his wedding night when he was deflowering his bride."
Eventually the whole story came out. It transpired 200 witches met the Devil at the Auld Kirk in North Berwick, where he bared his backside in the pulpit and everyone kissed it, and he confirmed James VI was his greatest enemy - confirmation no doubt to the self-important King of the threat he represented to the forces of darkness.
The Devil explained how to throw a cat into the sea to summon up a storm and sink James’s ship, and off they went to sea in their sieves to do his bidding.
Agnes Sampson is significant among the "North Berwick witches" as the one who persuaded James the plot was real, according to Julian Goodare, lecturer in Scottish history at Edinburgh University, editor of the recently published The Scottish Witch-hunt in Context and director of the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft 1563-1736, a two-year project that will produce an electronic database of witches.
"We’re finding lots of new information," he says. "We go and look at manuscripts that nobody has looked at for this purpose before, in particular records of presbyteries … We certainly know of more witches than the latest research had previously thought."
But was Sampson part of a coven that met in North Berwick or a conspiracy to overthrow the King? "The evidence seems to have consisted of confessions extracted under torture," says Goodare. "And the way in which the confessions of the various witches got elaborated actually would in itself make one sceptical."
Louise Yeoman, historian and co-director of the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, says Sampson’s confession was the result of torture, probably sleep deprivation and a series of leading questions.
"Agnes is one of the common-or-garden traditional healers," she says. "She just gets very, very unlucky in that she’s pulled into this scandal that’s going to engulf very, very prominent people … There were lots of people who went round Scotland using charms to heal and they were never tried as witches."
Another of those implicated in the plot was John Fian, a schoolmaster who supposedly acted as clerk to Sampson’s ungodly assembly. He had reputedly tried to cast a love spell on a local gentlewoman. He needed some of her hair, but she substituted animal hair, and the luckless suitor was thereafter trailed by a lovesick cow. Apparently.
It would be funny if it were not so tragic. Sampson, Fian and many of the other conspirators were executed. Some were strangled, but they were the lucky ones. Some were burned alive at the stake, which was sometimes soaked in water, so it would not burn too quickly. Witchcraze suggests as many as 1,500 "witches" were executed in Scotland between 1590 and 1597.
Some escaped to England, which, despite Hopkins’s fearsome reputation, never saw anything like the level of persecution in Scotland. Bothwell later returned and demanded to be tried for witchcraft. By that time most of the witnesses were dead and the hysteria had died down, though the story of the North Berwick witches spread far and wide.
There were further witch-hunts throughout the 17th century in Scotland, and the last legal execution of a witch took place in Sutherland in the early 18th century, though a Perthshire woman was convicted and imprisoned under witchcraft legislation during the Second World War.
Agnes Sampson has attracted increasing attention in recent times. And now she is brought back to life on television - a medium James VI would have regarded as much less plausible than witches sailing up the Forth in magic sieves.
James VI long ago earned the sobriquet "the wisest fool in Christendom", while today you will find Anges Sampson listed not only in Chambers Scottish Biographical Dictionary, but also on an internet site dedicated to Great Scots Women. "When she eventually and inevitably caved in, she didn’t just confess, she took the supreme piss out of her accusers," says the site admiringly. "Magic sieves! Love it!"
But to suggest Sampson was a prototype feminist comedian playing some sort of dark joke on the King is to miss the point about the continuing dangers of intolerance and the sort of mass hysteria that can end with the persecution and deaths of innocent people.
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