Meanwhile, a few miles east of Edinburgh in the town of Tranent, a young serving girl named Gellie Duncan had aroused the suspicions of her employer, David Seton, who was bailie – or sheriff – for the area. Gellie was known locally as a healer. Seton decided her powers must emanate from the dark side, and interrogated her. Unhappy with her responses, he had her tortured with thumbscrews and other devices.
When she still denied being a witch, her body was examined and a ‘mark of satan’ was found on her. This was a nipple-like patch of skin which, when pricked, neither bled nor caused pain. It was supposed to be used to suckle demons. Gellie now made a full confession. She said her healing powers came from the devil.
Then she went further – and implicated thirty other people as witches. Most of them were women, including seemingly respectable wives of the Edinburgh middle classes. They included a midwife named Agnes Sampson and a high-born woman named Barbara Napier, lady-in-waiting to the Countess of Angus. All were arrested and held in prison. Scottish society was rocked to its foundations but there was more to come. All the accused were tortured and their bodies searched for the mark of the devil. King James attended some of these torture sessions and personally interrogated the accused.
Agnes Sampson now confessed that there were more than two hundred witches in the coven – and she said they had conspired with the devil to kill King James and his bride by sinking their ship on its voyage home to Scotland. Their plan was devised at a meeting with the devil in the church at North Berwick, a coastal port not far from both Tranent and Edinburgh. Among the two hundred witches present were a schoolteacher known as Dr John Fian or Feane and an old man named Graymeale.
Satan ordered them to take a cat, pass it nine times across a fire, then put to sea in sieves. They were to cast the cat into the sea, a sort of demonic baptism. This would raise a storm to sink the King’s ship. Their plan did not, of course, succeed.
On their return to land, they marched back to the church, led by Gellie Duncan, who played a reel on her Jew’s harp – a small, lyre-shaped instrument played against the teeth. They walked three times around the church, against the passage of the sun, then Dr Fian blew into the locked keyhole of the church and the door burst open. The church was in darkness, so he blew on the candles and they immediately lit.
The devil was waiting for them. He conducted a satanic service, then put his tail over the pulpit and made the witches kiss his buttocks. His followers then went outside where they feasted on dead bodies from the graveyard, before having a last dance, accompanied again by Gellie, who sang ‘Kimmer, go you before, kimmer go you. If you will not go before, kimmer let me.’
At their trials, the alleged witches were accused of a number of crimes, including plotting against the King, burning his wax effigy, foretelling deaths, casting revenge spells against neighbours, being transported by the devil to foreign lands, keeping moles’ feet as charms, and dismembering the corpses of unbaptised children.
King James was particularly interested in the fates of Gellie Duncan, Agnes Sampson and Barbara Napier. He had Gellie brought to his palace of Holyrood House and made her play the tune which she had performed for the witches. He also had Agnes brought to him and questioned her at length.
At first he did not believe her tale, but then she asked to be allowed to approach him. She whispered in his ear words which had passed between him and his new queen on their wedding night in Oslo, when they were alone. The King was convinced by what he heard, ‘and swore by the living God that he believed all the devils in hell could not have discovered the same’.
He was in no mood for forgiveness. Over the winter and spring of 1590–1, Gellie and Dr Fian and many others were taken to Castle Hill in Edinburgh and burned at the stake. Then in April 1591, another highly political element entered the reckoning. Agnes Sampson accused the King’s heir – his cousin, the Earl of Bothwell – of sanctioning the assassination plot and of being linked to the accused witch Barbara Napier. Bothwell was arrested, but escaped and continued to cause James problems for many years to come before going into exile. Barbara Napier’s fate is less certain. She claimed to be pregnant to avoid the death penalty. James was incensed. He ordered his Lord Chancellor, John Maitland, to have her examined by physicians to see whether she was telling the truth or not. ‘Take no delaying answer,’ he demanded. ‘If you find she be not [pregnant], to the fire with her presently.’ He also insisted she be publicly disembowelled.
The jury had other ideas – and refused to have her sentenced to death. It was a small act of humanity, but the terror was far from over. Witchcraft trials and burnings in Scotland would last for many more years.
A modern audience can sometimes find it difficult to relate to a world where ordinary women – and they were mostly women – should be tortured and then killed in the most horrible way for what seems to be an imaginary crime. But to most Elizabethans (though not all, for plenty of people were sceptical), the crime was all too real.
In The Book of English Magic (2009), authors Philip Carr-Gomm and Richard Heygate estimate that up to 2,500 witches were burnt at the stake in Scotland between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Up to five hundred were hanged in England during the same period.
The most high profile case in England during Elizabeth’s reign was the Witches of Warboys saga (Warboys is a fenland village in Huntingdonshire). An old woman named Alice Samuel, her husband John and their daughter Agnes were convicted of killing Lady Susan Cromwell (grandmother of Oliver Cromwell of Civil War fame) by enchantment and casting a spell to harm the children of local Huntingdonshire landowner Robert Throckmorton. All three members of the Samuel family were hanged in April 1593. They had been condemned to death under the Witchraft Act of 1562, which made sorcery a capital felony.
Even if witch-finding fervour never reached the same heights in England as in Scotland, the public was still fascinated – and terrified – by the subject, a fact not lost on Will Shakespeare. He would have heard lurid tales of the Scottish trials and would have known of King James’s keen interest in witchcraft. In Macbeth, which was performed before James (by then, King James I of England) the first witch says, ‘in a sieve I’ll thither sail’ – a line clearly inspired by Agnes Sampson’s confession of putting to sea in sieves to sink the King’s ship.
A Who’s Who of Elizabethan Theatre
PLAYHOUSES IN THE late sixteenth century boasted a wealth of talent apart from Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. Some of the other big names have minor roles in this book.
The Actor Manager: Edward Alleyn (1566–1626)
Alleyn started as an actor at seventeen and went on to make a fortune from his theatre and bear-baiting enterprises. His lucky break was to marry Joan, the stepdaughter of Philip Henslowe. The two men went into partnership, successfully running the Rose Theatre. Known for his powerful voice and commanding stage presence, Alleyn’s starring roles included Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and Dr Faustus. His greatest legacy is perhaps Dulwich College, which he founded, and which would bring forth many renowned writers including Raymond Chandler and P. G. Wodehouse.
The Star Player: Richard Burbage (1568–1619)
A much-loved actor, he was a good friend of William Shakespeare and was one of only three theatre colleagues named in the bard’s will (he was left money to buy a ‘mourning ring’, a common practice of the day). Burbage, son of the theatre impresario James Burbage (builder of The Theatre, the first permanent playhouse), starred in many of Shakespeare’s plays, including Hamlet, Othello and King Lear. A famous anecdote by John Manningham implies that Burbage and Shakespeare were both womanisers who, on one occasion, competed for the favours of the same lady. Shakespeare won, and boasted that ‘William the Conqueror was before Richard the Third’.
The Impresario: Philip Henslowe (1555–1616)
A courtier to both Queen Elizabeth and James I, Henslowe had immense influence and wealth. He was the moneyman behind many plays and playhouses, including the Rose and
the Fortune. When his stepdaughter married Edward Alleyn, the two men forged the most formidable partnership of the age, with Henslowe seeing himself as a father as well as a friend to the younger man. Henslowe was a hard-nosed businessman who made sure he wrung every last farthing out of the players and their productions. He owned much rental property around Southwark (where he lived) and had a reputation as a tough landlord. His other main source of income was as an owner of Southwark stews – brothels.
The Clown: Will Kempe (birth date unknown–1602)
The most celebrated comedy actor of the late Elizabethan age, Kempe was a tousle-haired, immensely fit performer who could hold an audience rapt with wonderment and laughter at his acrobatics and clowning. He had parts in plays by Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd and, later, William Shakespeare, playing most of his famous comic parts, including Falstaff and Bottom. Always a free spirit, he quit the stage in 1600 to morris dance from London to Norwich, a journey of more than a hundred miles, which he called his ‘Nine Days Wonder’. The Mayor of Norwich was so impressed he gave him a pension of £2. It has been suggested that Kempe’s athleticism was not confined to tumbling, but extended to bedroom antics too.
The Popular Playmaker: Thomas Kyd (1558–94)
Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy was probably the most popular stage play of the 1590s, being performed over many years both at the Rose Theatre in Southwark and, in translation, on the Continent. The play is a so-called revenge tragedy in which much blood is shed. But Kyd’s success did not save him from a tragic clash with authority. In 1593 he was arrested on suspicion of being involved in the writing of virulent anti-foreigner tracts found outside the Dutch and French churches in London. Tortured, he claimed that heretical papers found in his room belonged to Christopher Marlowe, with whom he had lodged. Kyd was released from prison but his body had been broken by the ill-treatment meted out, and he died a year later. Like Shakespeare, he had been scorned by the university wits for being a mere grammar-school boy.
The Censor: Edmund Tilney (1536–1610)
Tilney, Master of the Revels to Queen Elizabeth, was born into trouble. His mother, Malyn, was a confidante of Catherine Howard, the second of Henry VIII’s wives to be executed. Implicated in the events surrounding Catherine’s fall from grace, Malyn was sentenced to life in prison, though she was soon freed. Her son Edmund spent much of the rest of his life avoiding trouble and currying favour with the highest in the land. He was Master of the Revels from 1578 until his death, his main duty being to organise entertainment for the court – bringing William Shakespeare and the top players of the day before his sovereign. He would watch rehearsals, lending props and costumes from the royal wardrobes when necessary and overseeing the building of elaborate stage sets. While he censored any work that might offend those in power, he also did much to protect and promote the London playhouses and acting companies.
The Patron: Sir Thomas Walsingham (1560–1630)
Thomas Walsingham was a cousin of Elizabeth’s spymaster and chief minister Sir Francis Walsingham, for whom he worked in his younger days as an intelligencer, hunting Catholic priests. He was a patron of the theatre and of Marlowe in particular. Marlowe was a guest at Thomas’s house in Chislehurst, Kent, in the days before his death. Curiously, Thomas was also linked to his killer, Ingram Frizer, and the other men known to have been in the room when he died, Robert Poley and Nicholas Skeres. Though some have wondered whether he had a role in the killing, Thomas was a mourner at Marlowe’s funeral and seems to have been a true friend and benefactor. The American writer Calvin Hoffman suggested that Thomas and Marlowe were homosexual lovers. Hoffman left all his money to fund an annual prize for contributions to the debate.
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