That persons accused of witchcraft suffered death is unquestionably true, as in the cases of the Earl of Mar in 1479, and Lady Janet Douglas in 1537, the executions of whom are foul blots on the pages of history. But it can hardly be said that it was witchcraft as an offence against religion or as mere superstition that was so punished. It was rather witchcraft in its political bearings—generally, in fact, as connected with treason and not with sorcery—that received condemnation.
But with the advent of Calvinism—the natural turn of the Scottish nation for metaphysical discussion induced them to receive the doctrines of the Reformation with general interest and favour—it would seem that the “crime” of witchcraft was looked upon in a somewhat different light. In 1563 the Scottish Parliament by statute, for which John Knox was a chief agitator, formally constituted witchcraft and dealing with witches a capital offence. “That all who used witchcraft, sorcery, necromancy, or pretended skill therein, and all consulters of witches and sorcerers, should be punished capitally” (Erskine’s “Institutes,” p. 706). And henceforth the irreligion of witchcraft caused it to be regarded as an offence against the law of the country, and the Kirk and its connections played an important part in the stern measures adopted for its suppression, doing their work with resolute determination and fanatical zeal. The authority of the ministry was great; its influence preponderated. Its friends were the allies, its opponents the enemies, of heaven. The theocracy which the clergy asserted on behalf of the Kirk was not so distinctly understood, or so prudently regulated, but that its administrators too often interfered with the civil rule. Old Mellvin’s words were suggestive of much when, grasping King James the Sixth’s sleeve, he told him that in Scotland there were two kingdoms—that in which he was acknowledged monarch, and that in which kings and nobles were but God’s silly vassals; and the clergy were but too apt to assert the superiority of the latter, which was visibly governed by the assembly of the Kirk in the name of their unseen and omnipotent Head. To disobey the king might be high treason, but to disobey the kirk, acting in the name of the Deity, was a yet deeper crime, and was to be feared as incurring the wrath which is fatal both to body and soul. With severity the Presbyterian teachers inflicted church penances, and with rigour they assumed dominion over the laity in all cases in which religion could be possibly alleged as a motive or pretext, that is to say, in almost all cases whatever.
Led by their clergy, and believing fully as they did in the literal interpretation of all Biblical imagery and the personal appearances of the devil, the people of Scotland waged a fierce unresting war against a great number of ill-fated individuals, whose only ground for being attacked was some physical or mental peculiarity, or who suffered simply because of the malice or ignorance of their accusers. At one time, stupid justices, instigated by foolish clergymen, consigned to torture and the stake almost every old woman dragged before them, even though brought only by the spite of malicious neighbours. In his preface to the Bibliotheque de Carabas edition of Robert Kirk’s “Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies,” Mr Andrew Lang says: “Some of the witches who suffered at Presbyterian hands were merely narrators of popular tales about the state of the dead. That she trafficked with the dead, and from a ghost won a medical recipe for the cure of Archbishop Adamson of St. Andrews, was the charge against Alison Pearson.... ‘She was execut in Edinbruche for a witch.’” On several occasions, commissions were issued by King James for the purpose of “haulding Justice Courtis on Witches and Sorceraris.” The commissioners gave warrants in their turn to the minister and elders of each parish in the shire to examine suspected parties and to frame an indictment against them. And as a rule the accused were overwhelmed by a huge heap of rumoured or concocted evidence, composed of exaggeration, prejudice, and credulity, wellnigh incredible. Even Sir George Mackenzie, Lord Advocate of Scotland during the time of the greatest fury, admitted the indiscretion of ministerial zeal, and recommended that the wisest ministers should be chosen, and that those selected should proceed with caution. “I own,” says the Rev. John Bell, Minister of the Gospel at Gladsmuir, in his MS., “Discourse of Witchcraft,” 1705, “there has been much harm done to worthy and innocent persons in the common way of finding out witches, and in the means made use of for promoting the discovery of such wretches, and bringing them to justice; that oftentimes old age, poverty, features, and ill fame, with such like grounds, not worthy to be represented to a magistrate, have yet moved many to suspect and defame their neighbours, to the unspeakable prejudice of Christian charity; a late instance whereof we had in the west, in the business of the sorceries exercised upon the Laird of Bargarran’s daughter, anno 1697, a time when persons of more goodness and esteem than most of their calumniators were defamed for witches, and which was occasioned mostly by the forwardness and absurd credulity of diverse otherwise worthy ministers of the gospel, and some topping professors in and about the city of Glasgow.”
In the last forty years of the sixteenth century, we have the astounding aggregate of no less than eight thousand persons who suffered, almost invariably by burning, for witchcraft. For about the first decade, not more, perhaps, than forty were so punished in a year, but towards the close of the period alluded to, the annual death-roll probably reached five hundred. The total number of victims, strange to say, represented even a larger proportion than those of the Holy Office, during a corresponding space of time. That during one period the Kirk should have been more disposed to kindle the pile than was the Inquisition, is, without doubt, a startling fact.
For a time, at any rate, the population seemed divided into only two great classes, witches and witchfinders. The dark tales of witchcraft were not even relieved by fairy folk-lore. There was, perhaps, no little truth in what Cleland said in his “Effigies Clericorum,” when he attributed the disappearance of Scottish fairies to the Reformation. In writing of Parnassus, he proceeds:—
“There’s als much virtue, sense, and pith,
In Annan, or the Water of Nith,
Which quietly slips by Dumfries,
Als any water in all Greece.
For there, and several other places,
About mill-dams, and green brae faces,
Both Elrich elfs and brownies stayed,
And green-gown’d fairies daunc’d and played:
When old John Knox, and other some,
Began to plott the Haggs of Rome;
Then suddenly took to their heels,
And did no more frequent these fields;
But if Rome’s pipes perhaps they hear,
Sure, for their interest they’ll compear
Again, and play their old hell’s tricks.”
As far as fairydom survived, however, it was regarded as under the same guilt as witchcraft.
The harsh forbidding creed of the Kirk had its influence in every direction; and music, instrumental at any rate, fell under its ban. During the sway of the Covenant, indeed, the Scottish minstrels were popularly supposed to be under the special care and protection of the devil. The Reverend Robert Kirk, author of the “Secret Commonwealth,” attributed certain impressions produced by music to diabolical influence. “Irishmen,” says he, “our northern Scottish, and our Athole men are so much addicted to, and delighted with harps and musick, as if, like King Saul, they were possessed with a forrein sport; only with this difference, that musick did put Saul’s play-fellow asleep, but roused and awaked our men, vanquishing their own spirits at pleasure as if they were impotent of its powers, and unable to command it; for wee have seen some poor beggars of them chattering their teeth for cold, that how soon they saw the fire, and heard the harp, leap thorow the house like goats and satyrs.” Without enlarging on the subject, may we not conclude that such an estimate of instrumental music as became common, especially in Covenanting days, had much to do with the prolonged antipathy of the Kirk to its introduction in worship?
But the Presbyterians went even further than this. At one time they declared that the bishops were cloven-footed and had no shadows, and that the curates themselves were, many of them, little better than wizards. The Episcopalians seem to have been regarded by the Presbyterians with little more favour than the Red Indians were by the early Puritan settlers in America. The extraordinary story of Salem witchcraft shows us that the Puritan clergy assured their people that the Red Indians were worshippers and agents of Satan; and we can but faintly imagine the effect of this belief on the minds and tempers of those who were thinking of the Indians at every turn of daily life. The common people, always susceptible to exaggeration, had been preached into such a holy hatred of popery that they saw its type and shadow in everything which approached even to decency in worship; so that, as a satirist expressed it, they thought it impossible they could ever lose their way to heaven, provided they left Rome behind them.
On the other hand, John Knox was deemed a skilful wizard by the Catholics in Scotland; it was even said that in the churchyard of St. Andrews he raised Satan himself, wearing a huge pair of horns on his head, at which blood-curdling sight Knox’s secretary became insane and died. And in old Kirkton’s “Secret and True History,” in his picturesque account of the curious scene which was witnessed in Lithgow upon the anniversary of the King’s restoration, we see that the Episcopal party lost no favourable opportunity of turning the tables on their opponents. In the pageant they had an arch, in the midst of which was a litany: