History

The King’s Curse: Scotland's Notorious Witch Trials

Maddy Pelling and Anthony Delaney investigate one of Europe’s bloodiest witch hunts: Scotland’s North Berwick Witch trials of 1591. In this extraordinary case, fears escalated all the way up the social hierarchy to the King himself, James VI. A wild storm in the North Sea had nearly killed James and his new wife Anne of Denmark, fuelling his fascination with the intellectual study of demonology. A maelstrom of terror brought together the King’s paranoia of a conspiracy against him with local rivalries and misfortune, twisting together the fates of individuals from maidservants to magistrates, in the hunt for scapegoats.