Credulity has existed in every age of the world; and thus chiromancy, astrology, physiognomy, and the wildest theories of abstruse science, have risen and flourished on the ignorance and folly of the human mind; but there were none that equalled the witch-mania, which, strange to say, grew in Scotland, and flourished side by side with religious freedom and reform.
It is a curious fact, that before the epoch of Knox sorcery was almost unknown among us. In our earliest record of criminal trials, that comprehending the years 1493-1504, there is not one prosecution for sorcery. In the days of James V. it began to be much spoken of, and rapidly became a source of terror. Lady Jane's was nearly the first indictment; but the earliest statute against it was passed in 1563, by the first reformed parliament, and that portion of the law which refers to consultations "with sorcerers and witches" was not enacted until 1594—fully thirty years after the Reformation had been established by the law of Scotland.
Then, indeed, from that period, kirk sessions and presbyteries, ministers, elders, sheriffs, and justiciars, went with heart and hand into the matter; for in the witch-mania, that atrocious madness which spread over Europe, though Scotland was the last to catch the contagion, she was in no way behind neighbouring countries in the cruelty of her prosecutions.
According to Barrington, thirty thousand witches were burned in England, five hundred perished in three months at Geneva, and a thousand at Como in one year. The number committed to the flames in Scotland is incalculable, but no less than six hundred witches were indicted during the sitting of one parliament at Edinburgh. Suspicion, abhorrence, accusation, trial, and death followed each other with appalling rapidity.
Thus we find in history, that the savage spirit of ignorance and credulity which impelled the great Cardinal Beaton to burn six men at the stake, on the charge of heresy, was out-Heroded by the still greater ignorance and credulity of his successors, who, for each of these six, sacrificed more than thousands for the imaginary crime of witchcraft.
CHAPTER XXXV.
THE COLLEGE OF JUSTICE.
"No! in an accursed spot—our magic tree,
Where devils from of yore their sabbath keep—
Has all this been contrived; there did she sell
Her soul to the eternal fiend, to be
With brief vain-glory honoured in this world.
Bid her stretch forth her arm, and ye will see
The puncture, by which hell hath marked its own."
SCHILLER'S Maid of Orleans
The summer solstice was passed.
Heavily and louringly the 15th of July dawned over Edinburgh; and one hour after the portes were unclosed, the Right Honourable Knight, Sir Simon Preston of Craigmillar, the new Lord Provost of the city and Admiral of the Forth, entered by the Kirk-of-field Wynd, sheathed in full armour, with a party of horse; when, conformably to the orders of his eminence the cardinal, John Muckleheid, senior bailie, joined him with three hundred archers—the same burgher-archers who had lined the streets exactly two months before, on the entrance of Queen Magdalene.