Witches: A King’s Obsession by Steven Veerapen review: 'gives the story an overdue subtlety'
This judicious study offers a nuanced understanding of of James VI and I’s preoccupation with witches and witchcraft, writes Stuart Kelly
This book slightly wrongfooted me. The King in question is of course James VI and I, author of Daemonologie: this year is the 400th anniversary of his death, and there has been a trend recently – exemplified by Clare Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi’s How To Kill A Witch: A Guide for the Patriarchy – to reanalyse witchcraft and even seek posthumous pardons. The front cover here is based on Henry Fuseli’s Die drei Hexen, illustrating Macbeth’s weird sisters, and the introduction begins with Simon Forman, a scandalous astrologer and herbalist, who noted seeing the play with its “three women fairies or nymphs”. But Veerapen, who has written an accessible scholarly life of James, pretty much drops the topic of Shakespeare thereafter. He does mention the curious incident when three “sibyls” welcomed James to St John’s College, Oxford, lauding him as the descendant of Banquo, but that’s it.
Yet much more can be picked out. For example, Shakespeare’s witches boast about storm raising and scuttling ships, the very accusation made by Peder Munk, the Danish captain tasked with shipping Anne of Denmark and James, to account for their delays and the tempest that afflicted them. It was also central to the North Berwick witch trials.
Nor do we get anything about Lady Macbeth’s spirit summoning, or the lost (suppressed?) The Tragedy of Gowrie, written the year before Macbeth. It wasn’t Shakespeare’s only exploration of witchcraft and kingship. The earlier Henry VI Part II featured Duke Humphrey’s wife conjuring a spirit, a scene paralleled, significantly, with the imposter Sander Simpcox. It is an odd omission, given Veerapen is au fait with less well known texts like Middleton’s The Witch and Rowley, Dekker and Ford’s The Witch of Edmonton (not to be confused with The Merry Devil of Edmonton, attributed to Shakespeare in the library of James’ grandson, Charles II).
Veerapen astutely suggests that James’s obsession with witches – maybe a slightly strong word – is entangled with the divine right of kings. If anyone doubted he is God’s appointed, then surely the enmity of Satan’s minions proved them wrong? Exodus 22:18 – “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” – has obviously been the justification for a great deal of persecution and suffering. More importantly, I think, is 1 Samuel 28, where King Saul employs the Witch of Endor to summon necromantically the shade of the prophet Samuel. Although Saul had already lost God’s favour, consulting the witch – especially as he had hypocritically banished all “with familiar spirits, and wizards” – seals his fate. For James, and the Kirk, it was a dangerous exemplar of breached divine-royal contracts, the precarious nature of succession and supernatural intervention in politics.
Veerapen is judicious and sensitive is narrating the various accusations, and is alert to the diversity of motives. There obviously were occasions where grudges, prejudice, outright malevolence and pecuniary gain motivated the accusers; there obviously were some people who genuinely believed in the daemonic. There were also wicked people – one does not have to believe in Satan to find the behaviour of, say, Bothwell sulphurous. At times, Veerapen can be hyperbolic and even clumsy – as in calling James “an ideal candidate for Britain’s chief Protestant persecutor” (a persecutor who is Protestant not a persecutor of Protestants). But this is in contrast to noting how James insisted on due legal process and proper evidence, especially as torture was used so frequently. It was possible to believe in the reality of witches generally but hold doubts about specific cases. It is also useful to make distinctions between accusations among “the common people” and how witchcraft could be used expediently against political rivals. Witchcraft was mooted, for example, as a potential charge to deal with Anne Boleyn.
The book slightly chafes against its self-proclaimed title, and extends beyond the lifetime of James; which does mean it can include both the witchcraft panics in the American colonies and the career of “Witchfinder General” Matthew Hopkins. Given it has that license it seems regrettable not to include two later Thomases. Firstly, there was the outwardly upright Major Thomas Weir who was privately a sorcerer, and who was executed, not for witchcraft, but bestiality, incest and adultery in 1670. Secondly there is poor Thomas Aikenhead, executed for blasphemy in 1697. That seems to mark a shift from seeing the supernatural as a threat, to freethinking, atheism and a denial of the supernatural to be more insidious. Breaking history into periods obscures how porous it is: Robert Kirk’s The Secret Commonwealth was published two years after John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
The big predicament is how to explain the difference between Scotland and England – Veerapen asserts “around 2,500” executions in Scotland to 100 in England: although remember there were 3,500 in Switzerland. There is no single explanation. Smaller communities might “fester” more aggressively. James saw how being tough on witches and the causes of witches would further his power struggle against the Kirk. Many of the same questions surround non-theological “witch hunts”, be they conducted by the Stasi or the Gestapo.
I cannot agree with Veerapen’s statement that “James VI and I has been rather a neglected monarch”, especially given the serious attention he has received this year. But this book, and others, are giving his story an overdue subtlety.
Witches: A King’s Obsession, by Steven Veerapen, Birlinn, £20
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