Thread by @firstladyship

This is the extraordinary story, of how the terror of satanic witchcraft infected the British Isles & plunged it into chaos.

My story is set, 400 years ago. Mass trials & executions erupted across the country.

And the reason for the violence & chaos, was Witches.👇

People were convinced, witches sacked ships, brought famine & disease, murdered & maimed, bcos witches were for satan.

My story began in Scotland.
In Holyrood House, Sept 1589, King James VI new bride, Anne of Denmark, set out across the North Sea to join him & be crowned queen.

She never made it.

Queen Anne’s ship had been battered by a violent storm, one ship sank, Anne’s almost capsized.

The badly battered convoy had limped back to Scandinavia. King James decided, he would have to go & fetch his new wife himself.

But James wud bring back far more than just a new queen from Denmark

He arrived at Kronborg castle near Copenhagen,in Jan 1590. His crossing had been equally violent

The world James walked into,was different from his native Scotland. Witch hysteria was infesting mainland Europe

Hundreds were already executed as witches. Tens of thousands would follow.

The violence, fear & hysteria spreading across Europe were largely the result of one incendiary book, “the Malleus Maleficarum or the Hammer of the witches.”

It was principally written by one German-Dominican monk called Heinrich Kramer.

And he wrote it to argue that witches existed & that they worked for the devil. It was the legal manual for the hunting & execution of witches.

The Malleus Maleficarum pushed countless terrifying beliefs, that witches were obsessed with poisoning, maiming & killing & they were doing it for satan.

Their aim was to harm, to murder & to destroy. And if witches were the problem, “the Malleus” was the answer!

It was a hugely influential book, & one of the reasons it was so influential is printed at the front.

At the front page, the Malleus Maleficarum had a Papal Bull, the Pope’s equivalent of a Royal Proclamation.

It was issued in 1484, just before the Malleus was published.

It stated that witches were heretics, cud have made an alliance with the devil.

Kramer printed the Bull, to prove that the church stood behind his book. Bcos it appeared to have the church’s backing.

The Malleus Maleficarum led to the whole torture & murder of thousands of people who were suspected of being in league with the devil.

This idea that witches were the devils handmaidens held bent on death & chaos.

It haven’t yet reached King Jame’s kingdom, but in Denmark, he came face to face with the reality of satan’s witches.

In April 1590, while James was still at Kronborg castle, two witches were arrested at Copenhagen.

And what was truly shocking, was that they confessed to conjuring art of violent storms that had hit James & Anne’s ships, they had attempted to murder the Scottish King & Queen, because satan wanted them dead.

At least five more witches were later convicted of the same crime or were burn at the stake.

But if James thought he’s left the scourge of witchcraft behind him when he returned to Scotland, he was wrong.

With the Danish witches dead, the whole thing might have become nothing but a historical footnote & King James might have lived out his reign untroubled by the devil, if it were not for one man.

His name is David Seaton & he was the Deputy Bailiff in the small town of Tranent,

9 miles East of Edinburgh.

What Seaton did in Nov 1590, proved to King James that the devil & his witches were alive & well in Scotland.

He claimed his young housemaid Gillis Duncan, had suddenly acquired healing powers, & he’d seen her sneaking out at night.

According to a contemporary source, Seaton believed only one thing could explain her behavior, witchcraft! And he was going to proof it.

In Europe, King James VI has seen that the witches working for the devil have been hellbent on killing him.

He was about to receive proof that this dangerous belief was infecting Scotland too.

The man responsible was bailiff, David Seaton. He was systematically brutalizing & tourtuing his housemaid, Gillis Duncan, to make her confess to being a witch.

But Gillis wud not yield. Then David began to search her body, because people believed the devil always left a mark on the bodies of his disciples.

It cud be anything; a birthmark. Seaton found what he was looking for on Gillis’s neck & for some reason, this was what broke her.

We will never know why Gillis confessed now, after she resisted untold torture.

Perhaps the mark was from a sexual liaison & it’s likely she felt too much shame & guilt.

Gillis’s confession had a seismic impact. It was the first recorded incident of a Scottish witch admitting to working for the devil.

It set in train, a sequence of events that would kill hundreds of people. The repercussions would last a hundred years.

Hundreds of innocent people were persecuted, tortured & put to death in a hysterical effort to stamp out the scourge of witchcraft.

Imagine living in that world, you could be accused, tortured & executed on the basis of nothing more than gossip & superstition.

How could such a deadly & violent hysteria gotten so out of control in Britain? What drove such a persecution to such awful lengths?

And what was it like for the victims who were tortured & executed, for crimes they couldn’t possibly have committed?