To ordinary villagers, labourers, small farmers, shopkeepers, witchcraft was the power to work physical effects by some supernatural means. Witches were divided into good witches, white witches, and bad ones, black witches. The good witches healed people by charms or prayers or some other form of mysterious activity. The black witches were people who did harm through their occult powers, typically by injuring people’s animals, their livestock, or worse by injuring or killing children, men or women. Out of the fear of witchcraft, there grew a huge literature of learned demonology, which described how black witches flew through the air to black masses, where they conducted obscene rituals, had sexual intercourse with the devil and, most important, made a contract with the devil. In other words they were heretics. They had renounced God for the devil. The Reformation was immediately followed by witchcraft prosecution at a fairly intensive level and a concerted drive on the part of everyone, Catholics as well as Protestants, to complete the Christianization of the population at large. In the process, that sharpened the eye for any heresy. So if people turned to charmers and cunning folk, something had to be done about them. This was particularly the case in countries where the clergy were very influential, Scotland being a very good example of that.
Witchcraft became prohibited by statute for the first time in England only in 1542. In 1562, another Act against ‘conjurations and witchcraftes’ made the ‘invocation and conjuration of evil spirits’ felonies. But only the use of witchcraft to kill was punishable by death: injuring persons or cattle, treasure-hunting through magic and provoking unlawful love were punished merely by a combination of prison or the pillory.
Not everyone agreed that it was possible or desirable to punish witches. Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft of 1584 was a forthright and angry attack on the folly and injustice of witchcraft persecutions:
And because it may appeare unto the world what treacherous and faithless dealing, what extreame and intolerable tyranie, what grosse and fond absurdities, what unnaturall and uncivil discourtesie, what cancred and spiteful malice, what outrageous and barbarous crueltie, what lewd and false packing, what cunning and craftie intercepting, what bald and peevish interpretations, what abominable and devilish inventions, and what flat and plain knaveries is practised against these old women; I will set downe the whole order of the inquisition, to the everlasting, inexcusable, and apparent shame of all witchmongers.
Such sceptical and humane voices, always a minority, were even less likely to be heard once James became King of England. His interest in witchcraft was well known on both sides of the border through his book Daemonologie, which was published in 1597 and reprinted in London in 1603, the year he acceded to the English throne. Daemonologie had in part been intended as a rejection of Reginald Scot’s arguments, and one of James’s first acts as King of England was to order all copies of Scot’s work be destroyed. The next English witchcraft law, enacted a year later, stiffened the penalties and made more crimes punishable by death; possession of a ‘familiar’, an animal accomplice in witchcraft, became a felony for the first time, as did grave-robbing to find body parts for spells. James does nonetheless seem to have become gradually more cautious about witchcraft during his reign, and in England he generally refrained from involving himself actively in the trials, unlike his behaviour when he was still in Scotland.
Title page of Daemonologie, in forme of a dialogue, James VI and I, London, 1603. James’s book on witchcraft showed how seriously he took the issue. First published in Edinburgh, it was immediately republished in England on his accession.
Detail of the ship model, with the monogram of King Christian IV of Denmark, brother-in-law of James VI. Ship models were relatively common in Denmark, unlike in Britain.
But then Scottish witches were in one crucial respect different from their English sisters. English witches by and large worked at local level – municipal mischief, you might call it – causing cattle to abort, children to come out in rashes, cream to curdle and so on. Scottish witches on the other hand had a taste for high politics and were more likely to be involved in treason and regime change than mere local malfeasance. Trying to sink the King’s ship is exactly what you would expect a Scottish witch to do. So it is not at all surprising that in Macbeth, a play focused on the high Scottish politics of power, Shakespeare puts witches centre-stage. And in doing so he created what has become the definitive image of the witch across the entire English-speaking world. No Hallowe’en night is now complete without some ‘secret, black and midnight hags’ stirring cauldrons and chanting spells.
Witches are for the most part foul-weather friends. Macbeth’s trio will meet in thunder, lightning and rain, but it rarely seems to occur to them to go out in the sun. When they do go out they raise storms, flatten crops, kill swine. They are ‘posters of the sea and land’, making all ports, Leith among them, dangerously ‘tempest tost’. Only witches could raise winds so violent as to blow an anointed King off course – and almost to his death – just such a storm as led to the creation of this model ship. Such votive ships, offered to churches in thanksgiving, are rare in Britain, and this is one of the few to survive; but they were very common in Denmark, where around 1,300 examples are still known. That gives us a useful clue, because carved into the ship is a large gold letter C enclosing the number Four – the monogram of the sixteenth-century Danish king Christian IV. This model is in fact a Danish warship, bristling with cannon, and the reason it is now in Scotland is that, when the young James sailed home over the stormy North Sea in that spring of 1590, he was with his new bride, Christian IV’s sister Anne, Princess of Denmark.
On 20 August 1589 James and Anne had been married by proxy at the castle of Elsinore, on whose ramparts Hamlet would later encounter his father’s ghost. It was clearly a place where many disturbed spirits were at work. The whole business of the marriage eventually took nearly ten months, from this first ceremony to the pair’s eventual arrival in Scotland. Terrible weather repeatedly buffeted Anne’s ship and escort, driving them to Norway; instead of the expected five-day voyage to Scotland, it took her fifty days to get to Oslo, where it was decided her journey could not be resumed until spring. On hearing this, in perhaps the most reckless act of his life, James himself set sail from Leith on 20 October, despite postponements due to yet more storms. He reached Oslo on 19 November, and the couple were married in person on 23 November. There was now no question of risking a return voyage, and the couple travelled to Denmark for the winter, finally setting sail for Scotland on 21 April 1590. The storms that beset the Scottish royal couple were immediately interpreted by the Danes as the result of witchcraft: six Danish witches were tried and executed.
Back in Scotland, the terrifying storms that nearly sank the royal ship off Leith were also assumed to have the same cause. Investigations – witchhunts – were set in train, and in November 1590 Agnes Sampson from North Berwick near Edinburgh made a shocking confession before the King at Holyrood. A coven of Scottish witches had indeed conspired against him in a contract made with Satan. Under torture, she spelled out just what she had done:
at the time when his Maiestie was in Denmarke, she…tooke a Cat and christened it, and afterward bound to each parte of that Cat, the cheefest partes of a dead man, and seuerall ioints of his bodie, and that in the night following the saide Cat was counveied into the midst of the sea by all these witches sayling in their riddles or sieves…and so left the saide Cat right before the Towne of Leith in Scotland. This done, there did arise such a tempest in the Sea, as a greater hath not beene seene; which tempest was the cause of the perishing of a Boate…It is confessed, that the said christened Cat was the cause that the Kinges Maiesties Ship at his coming forrth of Denmarke, had a contrary winde to the rest of his Ships…
James I and Anne of Denmark, by Renold Elstrack, around 1610. This double portrait print of James and Anne was, as the inscription says, ‘to be sold at the whit horse in popes head Alley by John Sudbury and George Humble’.
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During her trial Agnes Sampson declared that James and Anne were saved from being drowned by their Christian faith, which alone had been able to thwart the witches. ‘His Maiestie had neuer come safelye from the Sea,’ she confessed, ‘if his faith had not prevailed above their ententions.’
And this is the most probable explanation for our model ship: a Danish-style offering made for the Protestant church in Leith, put there to thank God for the safe deliverance from storm and spell of the Scottish king and his new Danish queen. To reinforce the point, the church in which the ship was displayed was not far from where the self-confessed witch Agnes Sampson admitted that she had tossed the christened cat into the sea. An anti-witch ship ornamented with naked mermaids is not your usual Scottish kirk furnishing: but it is intended not to decorate, but to proclaim God’s victory over magic. We can still see how potent its appearance must have been, suspended from the roof of that church in Leith. We can also see that it must have been hung high: the upper details and the rigging are out of proportion to the bottom, showing that it was designed to be viewed from below. Gaudily painted, gilded to catch the eye in the church’s candle-lit interior, it must almost have seemed a magical object in its own right.
After a trial at which James VI was present, Agnes Sampson was convicted, garrotted and then burned on the esplanade in front of Edinburgh Castle on 28 January 1591; her execution cost £6 8s 10d Scots. Julian Goodare of Edinburgh University, who has made a special study of Scottish witchcraft, explains the circumstances of this celebrity execution:
It takes several hours to reduce a body to ashes, and it is a very dramatic event. We know that crowds gathered at these executions. The North Berwick trials weren’t the first Scottish witch trials or even the first panic, but they were the first to be a media event. They involved the King and that attracted attention. A pamphlet was written called Newes from Scotland, published in London in order to impress the English and in order to show the English that the King is serious about witches.
Like many pamphlets of the time, Newes from Scotland (1591) had woodcut illustrations of the sensational events it described, including a scene of the North Berwick witches around a cauldron.
A quick glance at Newes from Scotland shows that sensational tabloid journalism is an old British tradition. Here was news of a doctor in league with the devil, burned at the stake. And the luridly worded cover promised its readers more: it would reveal how certain ladies of North Berwick ‘pretended to bewitch and drowne his Majesty in the sea coming from Denmark, with such other wonderfull matters as the like hath not been heard at any time.’
Inside there are pictures too. On a page with a ship going down in the background, you can see four witches stirring a cauldron. For all its shrillness, James had good reason to arrange for this tabloid account of the witches’ trial to be published in England, as Julian Goodare explains:
One of the things that Newes from Scotland says is that the witches asked the devil why he is conspiring against James of Scotland. And the devil answers because the King is the greatest enemy that I have on earth, which is arguably quite a flattering statement. This is politically important to James in the 1590s because he wants to be seen as a credible successor to Queen Elizabeth and he wants to impress the English.
Ralf Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotlande and Irelande, 1577, was a major source for Shakespeare. The many woodcut illustrations include one of Macbeth’s encounter with ‘three women in strange and wild apparell’, as the text describes them.
Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 3, Princes Theatre, London, 1926: the Three Witches with Macbeth and Banquo. In Macbeth Shakespeare created the definitive image of the witch that still lives in popular culture today.
So when the English welcomed James as their king in 1603, one of the things they knew about him was that he was a man for whom even the devil had a healthy respect. And many watching Macbeth for the first time – it was probably written sometime after 1605 – would have known the contents of Newes from Scotland at first or second hand. When Macbeth’s audience heard of seafaring witches travelling to Aleppo in a sieve or consorting with cats and assembling dead body parts, I think we may be certain that at least some of them would have associated such behaviour with witches from Scotland.
FIRST WITCH: Here I have a pilot’s thumb,
Wracked as homeward he did come.
THIRD WITCH: Liver of blaspheming Jew,
Gall of goat, and slips of yew
Silvered in the moon’s eclipse,
Nose of Turk, and Tartar’s lips,
Finger of birth-strangled babe,
Ditch-delivered by a drab,
Make the gruel thick and slab.
ALL: Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
SECOND WITCH: Cool it with a baboon’s blood;
Then the charm is firm and good.
James survived plotting by witches, but a further threat lay in store, which has, by a strange coincidence, also become part of our national folklore. In the next chapter, James confronts not Satanic drowning, but a plot with gunpowder.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Treason and Plots
A MANUAL FOR MURDER
From the beginning to the end of Shakespeare’s career, the murder of the monarch is both the supreme crime and an abiding political conundrum. Richard II is killed on stage. By stabbing and drowning his own brother Clarence, and then smothering the young king and his brother in the tower, hunchbacked Richard of Gloucester becomes Richard III. And in The Tempest, Prospero, Duke of Milan, ends up on his island because his usurping brother has plotted to drown both him and his daughter Miranda (see Chapter Nine). Royal murder is at once catastrophe and commonplace. Shakespeare’s great lyrical improviser on this theme is Richard II:
KING RICHARD: For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings –
How some have been deposed, some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,
Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed,
All murdered. For within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps death his court; and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be feared, and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life
Were brass impregnable; and humoured thus,
Comes at the last, and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and – farewell, king!
No one can come away from a Shakespeare play thinking life at the top is easy.
Rulers are always at risk. In our democratic age they may simply be ousted by votes. But through much of history and in much of the world, people who want to change rulers kill them. The death of a ruler is never just a personal tragedy: as it is a matter of national security, the whole state is affected. In Shakespeare’s Richard II, the Bishop of Carlisle spells out very clearly what will happen to England if the usurper Bolingbroke succeeds (as he does) in driving God’s chosen monarch, King Richard, off the throne:
BISHOP OF CARLISLE: let me prophesy
The blood of English shall manure the ground,
And future ages groan for this foul act.
Peace shall go sleep with Turks and infidels,
And in this seat of peace tumultuous wars
Shall kin with kin, and kind with kind, confound.
Disorder, horror, fear, and mutiny
Shall here inhabit, and this land be called
The field of Golgotha and dead men’s skulls.
O, if you raise this house against this house
It will the woefullest division prove
That ever fell upon this cursèd earth.
Prevent it; resist
it; let it not be so,
Lest child, child’s children, cry against you woe.
George Carleton, Bishop of Chichester, by Friedrich von Hulsen, 1627.
In the world beyond the theatre, the subjects of Elizabeth I were also eloquently, and frequently, reminded of the dangers of political violence by regular reports of the crown in peril and the state in danger. Throughout Elizabeth’s reign, conspiracy followed conspiracy, with the Ridolfi plot of 1570 (see Chapter 4), the Throckmorton plot of 1583, the Babington plot of 1586 and the Lopez plot of 1594. In an era before modern media, news of these conspiracies was murkier, harder to be sure of, and so all the more potent. It circulated through pamphlets and woodcuts, broadside ballads and sermons, pedlars’ tales and, of course, rumour.
Shakespeare does not mention any of the plots that his audience must sometimes have discussed on their way to the theatre, but a contemporary of his, born a few years before him, wrote an entire book about them. He was another prophesying bishop, keen to remind his readers just how close England was to ‘disorder, horror, fear and mutiny’ and to becoming that field of ‘dead men’s skulls’. His book captures the mindset of the governing class during the decades in which Shakespeare was writing – suspicious to the point of paranoia, and always ready to retaliate with savagery.
The book was compiled by George Carleton, Bishop of Chichester, and was first published in 1624, a few years after Shakespeare’s death. The title page shows an ample female figure holding a large cloth on which is written ‘A Thankfull Remembrance of God’s Mercie by G. C.…’ It goes on: ‘An Historicall Collection of the great and merciful Deliverances of the Church and State of ENGLAND, since the Gospel beganne here to flourish, from the beginning of Queene Elizabeth.’ The title says it all, and Carleton’s best-selling book does indeed deliver exactly what it promises on the cover. In eighteen chapters he frightens and thrills his readers with fifty years of conspiracies, intrigues and assassination attempts.
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