Noble Blood - The Witch-Hunter King

Episode Date: March 3, 2020

During a post-wedding detour in Denmark, James VI of Scotland learned of the evils of witches, and he brought his anti-witch fervor with him when he returned to Scotland. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Vodam. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot.

But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, The cat, just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck.

Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Aaron Manky. Listener discretion is advised. One week before his mother was beheaded, James VI, the King of Scotland, had a premonition. He hadn't seen his mother since he was an infant, just over one year old. She lived for him only in letters, in portraits, and in the stories his tutors told him about her.

She had been a foolish and prideful Catholic. Her rule in Scotland had been chaos fueled by impudence. If Mary, Queen of Scots, hadn't personally overseen the murder of James' father, Lord Darnley, then she had certainly willfully looked the other way. James' mother was right to have been forced to abdicate after Mary, marrying, marrying the man implicated in Darnley's death less than three months later. In James's guiltiest moments, he acknowledged that his mother marries imprisonment in England by their cousin, Elizabeth I, was a godsend.

After all, he was king of Scotland now with no real threats to his power. The expenses of his Catholic mother's confinement wasn't being paid by Scottish coffers. And by making good with Elizabeth by showing his loyalty. to her, and to Protestantism, he was set to be next in line for the English throne, when the virgin queen finally died. They told him that his mother had been beautiful ones. He wished he remembered what she looked like. A week before, Queen Elizabeth I would reluctantly violate the sanctity of the monarchy and deliver a death sentence to the former queen of a sovereign nation, James the 6th came down to breakfast and told his minister that his mother had visited him in a dream.

It was just her head, he said, floating down the black hallway towards my sleeping form, unblinking, unbleeding. The king looked haunted, his eyes were dark circles and his skin was sallow. His feelings towards his mother were strange and laced with guilt. when the sword finally came down on his mother's neck, he wouldn't do much, wouldn't ruffle feathers. He would keep Elizabeth on his good side so that he could inherit her crown. That night, a week earlier,

when he saw his mother's head floating towards him, he felt a profound shame. It's the occult, he said to his minister the next morning, dark magic that's showing me the future. That shame he felt, that fear, it was just the devil trying to manipulate him. The devil was real, and James VI would need to be stronger than the devil. During his reign in Scotland and then later in England, James XIII ignited a fervor of witch hunting

that would lead to as many as 4,000 women being burned at the stake. He was a man on a mission, obsessed with rooting out evil and all who cavorted with it. Nothing masks shame like moral righteousness, and James VI's was nothing, if not always sure, that he was right. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. Back when the future King James VI of Scotland was still an infant cooing in his cradle, his father, Lord Darnley, was murdered. Darnley, only 21 years old, had seduced Mary Queen of Scots with his son kissed Good looks and lazy-fair approach to life. But after marriage, what had been charmingly laissez-faire,

revealed itself to just be lazy. Mary had saddled herself with a boarish, cheating, bull-headed boy, a child himself, and though she managed to bear a son by him, the relationship quickly soured beyond all repair. That was the state of the marriage between the Queen of Scotland and Lord Darnley, when two barrels of gunpowder exploded beneath the floor of Darnley's room where he was staying in Kerkofield in Edinburgh. Mary was back at the palace, Hollywood, where she was celebrating the wedding of a favorite court musician. Darnley's body was found in an orchard in the corner of the property, apparently unaffected by the explosion. He had survived, it seemed, and made it out of the collapsing house, only to be strangled upon escape. Mary wasn't the only one who hated Darnley, who hated his impudence and sloth.

A nobleman, the fourth Earl of Bothwell, was implicated in Darnley's murder, which made it all the more scandalous when Mary, Queen of Scots, married him just weeks after her husband's death. Of course she claimed she had been raped and kidnapped, but that's what she would say, wouldn't she? She was murderous, adulterous, and Catholic. and so the overwhelmingly Presbyterian nobles in the south of Scotland forced her to abdicate and go into hiding. Five days later, in a subdued ceremony devoid of any of the pomp that could be mistaken for Catholic showmanship,

Mary and Darnley's infant son became James VI, King of Scotland. James would be raised right. His tutor, the humanist scholar, George Buchanan, was more than 60 years older than his charge, and drilled into James the basics of Latin and theology in between beatings. James learned Latin before he learned Scottish. Buchanan, a devoted Presbyterian convert, often railed against the former Queen Mary.

Your mother was a traitor, Buchanan told the young James. She was a poisoning witch. Buchanan had once been Mary's tutor, and while back then he had praised her quick wit and abilities, once he converted he turned against her. It was Buchanan who identified Mary's handwriting in a casket of letters that supposedly proved her guilty of conspiring with Darnley's murderers.

And so James grew up learning that his only comfort was to be found in the rigidity of academia. His only pleasures were a philosophical argument well-reasoned, the hectoring noblemen who, crowded him like circling vultures to make sure that the young king would be raised properly, couldn't take umbrage with that, with his schoolwork, with his devotion to the Bible and his studies. And those noblemen made sure to do away with any other pleasures James might enjoy. When James was 13, his cousin, as May Stewart, swept into court from France.

Stuart, who has quickly styled the Duke of Lennox, was 37 years old. immediately he charmed the teenage king with confidence, his good looks and his, let's say, certain joie de vivre. Other noblemen noticed the way that James would throw his arms around Lennox and kiss him every time he saw him. And they noticed the way pious James began to swear more, began to pay less attention in church, and more attention to the strapping man who treated him like a peer and not a delicate kingling. Lennox had made a show of converting to Calvinism from Catholicism, but no one really believed that was anything but a performance. They knew how dangerous a Catholic influence could be on a young king,

first because he could teach James about the divine right of monarchs. The Scots believed a king existed to serve the people, but also because they noticed the way James's gaze always lingered. Lennox was influencing James to carnal sin. and the group of noblemen were willing to hold James the 6th hostage, literally, until Lennox was gone, and there would be no more evil Catholic influences on their young king. After that whole affair, James found himself once again alone, told that piety was the only important thing to being king,

and any confusing feelings he had, any shame, any guilt, could be tucked away and forgotten about and folded into a book. Nobleman watching over the young Scottish king used to talk with pride about how we never philandered with ladies, how well-behaved James had been with regards to his virtue and the young women of court.

After Lennox, they didn't say that as much. But eventually, the time came for James to find a bride, and he, then 23, chose the blonde princess Anne of Denmark, only 14 years old, but already celebrated for her blonde, her beauty. As soon as she learned she had been selected to be James's bride, she began learning French so the two would have a common language with which to communicate. Though James hadn't

ever shown an interest in women, once his bride to be was set, their proxy marriage completed, James couldn't wait for her to arrive in Scotland for the two of them to get married in person. Unfortunately, he would have to. When Anne and her entourage, began to sail from Denmark to Scotland, terrible storms interfered and forced her ships to turn back not once, not twice, but three times. Finally, they tucked away for safety in a Norwegian fjord to wait out the storms. It would be months before James would have his bride delivered to him, and since no ships were getting through, not even ones delivering messages, James had no way of knowing what was going on. He waited for his bride, hoping that the love letters he had

thoughtfully written in French would make their way to her, but having no way to know for sure. Where is she, James would mutter, pacing the palace in Edinburgh? He had a wife, she just wasn't here. And then James was struck with a brilliant idea. He would be a conquering hero, a champion of romance. He would sail out himself and rest of the same. rescue his damsel in distress. He would come to her. His ministers were less convinced of the brilliance of the idea. A king leaving would leave the country vulnerable, and even Elizabeth I first down in England muttered that James's rash decision could give the Catholics the inn in Scotland they so desperately wanted. But James would not be deterred. He would be

chivalry incarnate, braving storms and more to meet his teenage bride. When he finally made it to Oslo after a long and treacherous journey, James resplendent in the finest outfit he had brought with him on the trip, came over to Anne and attempted to plant a kiss on his new wife. Anne pulled away, shocked and embarrassed. It's custom in Scotland for husbands to greet their wives this way, James said. Oh, Anne said, and let him kiss her.

James enjoyed spending time with his new wife, but he also enjoyed the philosophers and mathematicians in Denmark. James and Anne wouldn't return to Scotland until the spring, and they spent the winter first in Oslo and then in Copenhagen, where James showed off his world-class Latin in conversations and lectures with some of the age's most preeminent thinkers. When the pair did finally make it back to the British Isles, It was another bumpy, near-disastrous journey.

The waves didn't want them to make it back to Scotland, though they finally did in spite of the storms. Back in Denmark, the Danish government was furious that such weak, ill-equipped ships were sent out for the royals. They summoned the finance minister to a special hearing. How could he have approved those ships? Why had he been so cheap in protecting the lives of monarchs? The finance minister felt the sweat creeping up the back of his neck.

His palms went clammy. This would cost him his job, surely, but if they could prove that he was negligent with the monarch's lives, it would also cost him his life. It wasn't me, the finance minister said finally. The ships were perfect. The dangers were caused by witches. So it was witches.

Let the trials begin. In a small town, outside of the city, Inside Edinburgh, a man named David Seton started noticing some strange behavior from his maid, Gellie Duncan. Recently, she had been curing illnesses. Neighbors began appearing at their back door with rashes and boils and leaving a few coins lighter with a new tonic or ungent to apply. And Gellie was leaving at night, sneaking outside when she thought David was asleep, and only returning when the morning light had begun to creep up the hill. She was a witch. There was no other explanation. Gellie denied it, but David demanded to know where she had been

going at night, and she couldn't give him an answer. But she wasn't a witch, she said. At least, that's what she said at first. After torture, when they crushed her fingers in a thumb screw until her nails turned black and fell off, and until she could hear the creak of bone, then she agreed. She was a witch. She had been one of the coven that had tried to send the storms to kill King James and his new wife, and she was willing to name names. Seventy people were prosecuted in the North Berwick trials, which began in 1590 and continued on for another two years. James VI oversaw many of the proceedings personally. After all, the devil was after him, a king, a devout man of God. Not all of the witches that Gellie named were women.

Among her cohorts was a man named John Fian, a schoolteacher who purportedly made a pact with the devil from mystical powers. He had been among the coven that brought the storms on the king's voyage, but John Fian's sorcery hadn't ended there. He had a crush on the sister of one of his students, and he asked his pupil to bring back a lock of her pubic hair to clobie to class, so that he, John, could work some spell with it and entice the girl to him. The young student was, understandably terrified.

That night, he tried to cut off some of his sister's pubic hair in the bed that they shared, but he was interrupted by his mother. The mother, knowing something of witchcraft herself, told her son to bring back cow hair to his teacher the next day. The boy did, and wouldn't you know it the day after that, there was a little bit of a a cow following John Fian around, leaping up at him, madly in love. John Fian's spell had worked. He was a witch, maybe even the leader of the coven, and that proved it. His confession also proved it, even if it had been given after his feet

were crushed in steel boots, and needles were pressed underneath his fingernails. One of the witches, Barbara Napier, had married into an advantageous family and managed to escape conviction and punishment at trial because she was pregnant. That didn't sit well with James the 6th. He wanted all witchcraft rooted out of Scotland, family connections be damned. He demanded that the verdict be overturned and for Napier to be examined by physicians. If she wasn't actually pregnant, she was to be burnt and publicly disemboweled. The paper trail of Barbara Napier's story ends there. We don't know what happened to her. One of the witches, a woman named Agnes Sampson, the oldest of the women named, was brought to

Hollywood Palace because James insisted on examining her personally. There was a reason that more of the witches were women. James would write later in his book, Damanology, as that fair sex is frailer than man is, so it is easier to be entrapped in the gross snares of the devil. James didn't hate women. He didn't. He just hated those weak enough to be seduced by the devil. And those just happened to be women. Agnes Sampson was shaved bald so every inch of her could be examined for a witch's mark. All witches have a mole or scar. Somewhere small and hidden, usually. That's where the devil bites a witch, where he suckles her. Agnes Sampson's witch's mark,

a small puckered mall, was eventually found along the line of her genitalia. And that's when the torture began. Eventually, Agnes confessed to treason against the king for taking a wax effigy of him and burning it with the intent of causing his death. And she confessed to digging up dead bodies, taking their limbs, wrapping them around cats,

and then throwing the whole mass of it, the dead limbs, the cat, still alive, into the ocean. That brew, that mixture, had been what caused the storms that plagued James and Anne when they sailed from Denmark back to Scotland. How had the king survived all of these feverish magical attempts on his life? Agnes had an answer. Apparently the devil had come to her, and, speaking French, as the devil obviously does, he told her that King James VI was a man of God, and therefore so difficult to corrupt through the devil's evil powers. James was vindicated.

He saw his righteousness in the eyes of every witch who confessed to trying to bring him down. James the 6th of Scotland would bring his commitment to rooting out witches with him when he became, in addition to a Scottish title, also James I of England. Though England had some anti-witch laws on the books, they were not nearly strict enough for James. Prison wasn't good enough.

Witches deserved death. And he shared his expertise with his people in his book, Demonology, which quoted heavily from the Bible and taught would-be witch-hunters everything they would need to know in order to identify and take down a witch. James was, after all, a scholar.

The fervor died down, though. The English people seemed to live. less willing to engage with the anti-witch fervor than the Scots had been, and even James' bloodlust waned in his old age. When he was an older man, no longer as slim or as quick as he once had been, he wrote a letter to his younger son, Henry. Henry had written with pride about rooting out a counterfeit wench on being an expert witch-hunter, just like his father. James responded, I pray God, ye may be my heir in such discoveries. Most miracles nowadays prove but illusions.

And you may see this by how wary judges should be in trusting accusations. What's up, everyone? I'm Ego Wodom. My next guest, you know from Step Brothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell. Woo. Woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever.

I went and had lunch with them one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place that come, look for up-and-coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet. Yeah.

He goes, but there's so much luck involved. And he's like, just give it a shot. He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that.

There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks Dad on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body having its own program. I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. We share stories and scientific insights to help us all better navigate these periods of turbulence and transformation.

There is one finding that is consistent, and that is that, our resilience rests on our relationships. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. Listen to a slight change of plans on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. After James took the throne of England, Shakespeare took it upon himself to write plays that would appeal specifically to the new monarch. He drew heavily from King James' demonology, which included details about those now infamous North Berwick witch trials. The king loved witches.

And so what better way to begin Macbeth, a play about a Scottish king, than with three witches, three chaotic, evil characters of impending doom, who discuss raising tempests and controlling the winds? Isn't that what witches do? they control winds and try to bring down Scottish kings. Double, double, toil and trouble. And the North Berwick witch trials have inspired popular entertainment even more recently. In the Scottish set series Outlander, the protagonist, Claire, meets a woman with a talent for herbs.

Outlander is set about 200 years after James's reign in Scotland, but the author snuck in a small homage to the Witchfinder, King. The character that Claire meets is accused of being a witch and she goes to trial. The character's name, Gilles Duncan. Noble Blood is a production of IHeartRadio and Aaron Manke. The show is written and hosted by Dana Schwartz and produced by Aaron Manke, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the show over at Noble Blood Tales.com. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

I'm Ago Vodam. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot. But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar. of, you know, the cat, just hang in there.

Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast, guaranteed human.