James I

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The Daemonologie, a short dialogue published at Edinburgh in 1597, argues that witches are real, that they make pacts with the Devil, and that a Christian magistrate is bound to hunt and punish them. Its author was James VI of Scotland, king since 1567 and from 1603 also James I of England — one of the few works of demonological theory to come from a reigning monarch’s own hand. The book is cast, in its full title, in the form of a dialogue divided into three books: a conversation between Philomathes, a lover of learning who begins as a skeptic, and Epistemon, the knowing voice who answers him point by point until the doubt is talked away. The Greek names declare the design. The skeptic is not refuted by force; he is informed until he agrees.

The book did not arrive out of nowhere. In the years before he wrote it, James had been personally caught up in the North Berwick trials of 1590–91, the largest and most consequential prosecution of its kind that Scotland had yet seen. The occasion was a marriage and a storm. In 1589 James contracted a marriage to Anne of Denmark; when her fleet was driven back by foul weather, he sailed in person to fetch her, and the return voyage across the North Sea in the spring of 1590 was beset by tempests so violent that the party was forced to shelter on the Norwegian coast. To a king newly read in the literature of the demonic, and lately exposed at the Danish court to the Continental theory of the witch, the weather looked like an attack. Two women had already been burned at Kronborg for raising the storms against the queen’s crossing. James returned home convinced that the same conspiracy reached into his own kingdom.

What followed was an investigation conducted at the top. A net of accusation spread from a servant girl named Geillis Duncan outward to some seventy people, among them Agnes Sampson, the midwife and healer remembered as the wise wife of Keith; the schoolmaster John Fian; and gentlewomen of standing such as Euphame MacCalzean and Barbara Napier. James attended interrogations and questioned the accused himself. The confessions, drawn out under torture — Sampson’s thumbs crushed in the pilliwinkes, the bones of a corpse and a christened cat thrown into the sea to raise the gale — described a coven gathering by night at the kirk of North Berwick to work the king’s death. Sampson is reported to have won James’s belief by repeating to him words said to have passed privately between him and Anne on their wedding night, a detail he took as proof that the Devil’s servants knew what no eavesdropper could. The thread of treason ran toward Francis Stewart, Earl of Bothwell, whom the trials implicated as the noble patron of the plot. The Daemonologie reads in part as the considered statement of a man who believed he had been the intended victim of a coven and had watched the proof assembled before him.

The argument of the treatise

Within its own terms the treatise is careful, and it is built to persuade. It does not celebrate magic; it sets out to refute the skeptics — naming in its preface the Dutch physician Johann Weyer and the Englishman Reginald Scot, whose books had argued that most of what passed for witchcraft was delusion, melancholy, or fraud — and to establish, against them, that the threat was genuine and that the law of God required its suppression. Weyer’s De praestigiis daemonum (1563) had granted the Devil’s reality while excusing the accused women as deceived and disordered rather than guilty; Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) went further, treating the whole apparatus as imposture and superstition. James answers both by an evidentiary move that runs through the whole book: the sheer consistency of the confessions, the convergence of so many independent accounts upon the same pact and the same sabbath, is offered as a fact that delusion cannot explain. Where the skeptic sees credulity multiplied, the king sees testimony corroborated.

There is a method behind the choice of dialogue. By voicing the doubts of Weyer and Scot through Philomathes and answering them through Epistemon, James stages the contest he means to win, and lets the reader watch the better-informed conviction prevail. The form was already old in philosophy and older in theology; he turns it to a polemical purpose, so that the skeptic’s case is heard fully before it is dismantled. The book is, in this sense, an argument about evidence as much as about demons — a claim that the testimony of the trials constitutes knowledge, and that the magistrate who ignores it abdicates a duty laid on him by God.

James writes as a theologian of the demonic. The three books partition the field. The first treats magic and necromancy in the narrow sense — the learned art of the conjurer who studies to command spirits, the lineage that runs through the grimoire and the circle, the astrologer and the diviner who presume upon forbidden knowledge. The second treats sorcery and witchcraft proper — the compact by which the unlearned, and disproportionately women, are recruited by the Devil into his service. The third treats the kinds of spirits abroad in the world: the spectres that haunt houses, the spirits that follow and trouble particular persons, those that enter and possess the body, and the fairy-folk of common belief, all of them subsumed under a single demonological frame as varieties of the one fallen order. Across the three the same architecture recurs: the classification of magicians by degree, the marks of the pact — the renunciation of baptism, the Devil’s mark set upon the body, the gathering at the sabbath — and, crucially, the limits on what spirits may and may not do. For James the demonic is real but never sovereign. Every operation a witch can compass is permitted, bounded, and ultimately turned by divine providence; the Devil is God’s executioner, loosed only so far as he is allowed. The most uncompromising claims of the book are framed by that subordination. The witch is dangerous precisely because she is a traitor against an order that remains, at every moment, in God’s hand. The framework was not original to James — it drew on the established Continental demonology that the Malleus Maleficarum of 1486 had codified and that a century of Catholic and Protestant authors alike had elaborated — but it carried, in his hands, the weight of a crown that had judged itself the target. Where the inquisitors had written as clerics, James wrote as the magistrate the theory addressed, the man whose office the demonologists said was bound to act.

The treatise had a companion in print. The pamphlet Newes from Scotland, issued at London in 1591 — its account of the North Berwick affair attributed to James Carmichael, the minister who later advised the king on the Daemonologie itself — had already carried the confessions of Fian and Sampson to a wide readership, and it was reprinted with the king’s book. Sermon, trial record, and royal treatise thus reinforced one another, and the conviction passed from the Edinburgh courtroom into the European literature of the witch. When James came south, the doctrine came with him: the English Witchcraft Act of 1604, passed early in his reign, sharpened the Elizabethan statute of 1563 by making it a capital felony to covenant with, entertain, or employ any evil spirit, whether or not harm could be shown to follow. The law of the Daemonologie had become the law of the land, and it stayed on the books until 1736.

The doubled reputation

His later reputation is double, and the sources pull in two directions. The hunter of witches who staged dramatic interrogations is one figure; the king who, in his English years, grew markedly more skeptical, exposing several fraudulent accusations and sparing the accused, is another. The shift had begun already in Scotland: by 1597, with the hunt sweeping up the innocent on the word of professional accusers, James revoked the standing commissions that had let local courts try witches on their own authority, reining in a machinery he had helped to set running. In England the same testing temper went further. He took a personal interest in suspected impostures of possession, interviewing the bewitched and the bedeviled and more than once catching them out. The boy of Bilson and the case of Anne Gunter, whom he examined in 1605 and judged a fraud, became famous instances of a king who would not be imposed upon — though the demonstration could come too late, as in the Leicester boy whose accusations had already sent nine to the gallows in 1616 before the deception was exposed.

Historians have debated how to reconcile the two figures, and tend to read the early zeal and the later doubt not as a conversion but as belonging to the same temperament — a ruler who took the supernatural seriously enough to insist that its claims be tested. The man who pressed the accused at North Berwick and the man who unmasked the false demoniacs of his English years are continuous in this: both believed the demonic was a matter of fact, and both held that a fact must answer to examination. What changed was his estimate of how often the genuine article appeared, and how easily fraud could counterfeit it. The skepticism was never disbelief in the Devil. It was disbelief in particular witnesses.

Texts and scholarship

The Daemonologie survives in its Edinburgh first edition of 1597, printed by Robert Waldegrave, and in the London reprint of 1603 that followed the king’s accession to the English throne. Modern readers work chiefly from two channels. The full original text is freely available as a public-domain edition through Project Gutenberg, which preserves the dialogue and its preface; and the standard scholarly treatment is Lawrence Normand and Gareth Roberts, Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland: James VI’s Demonology and the North Berwick Witches (University of Exeter Press, 2000), which prints the Daemonologie and the surviving trial documents together with extended commentary, anchoring the treatise in the legal record that produced it. The wider statistical frame for the Scottish trials — some four thousand named accused between 1563 and 1736 — comes from the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft database compiled at the University of Edinburgh, which catalogs the documented cases without endorsing their charges. For the king himself, the contextual life and the demonological writing are summarized in the entry for Daemonologie and its 1597 publication, set against the trial narrative in the record of the North Berwick prosecutions. What these texts hold together, beyond their arguments, is a single binding in which the trial transcript and the royal treatise sit side by side — the king as both witness and theorist of the case.

The king and the learned arts

James’s relation to the wider world of learned magic was wary and one-sided. He had condemned the conjurer in print, and the condemnation reached real men. John Dee, the great Elizabethan mathematician and angel-scryer, lived into James’s English reign in poverty and petitioned the new king to clear his name of the charge that he was a caller and invocator of spirits; James, who had classified exactly that art in the first book of his treatise, gave him nothing. The currents of Hermetic philosophy nonetheless flowed toward the throne from the other direction. Robert Fludd, the Paracelsian physician whose vast engraved history of the two worlds is among the monuments of seventeenth-century esoteric thought, dedicated his Utriusque Cosmi Historia (1617–24) to God and to James in turn, and addressed defenses of his own work and of the Rosicrucians directly to the king. The demonologist who would not absolve Dee was also the patron to whom Fludd appealed. The throne sat at a crossing of the period’s learning, refusing one road and receiving another.

The same monarch lent his name to the 1611 English translation of the Bible that still carries it. The commission came out of the Hampton Court Conference of January 1604, where James, freshly arrived from Scotland and pressed by Puritan petitioners for reform of the church, granted little of what they asked but assented to a new translation, executed by teams of scholars at Oxford, Cambridge, and Westminster and published as the Authorized Version. The theologian of the demonic and the patron of the most widely printed book in the English language are the same man, and the conjunction is exact rather than ironic: both projects belong to a king who understood his office as the defense and ordering of true religion, and who held that the unseen world — its God, its Devil, its spirits, and its Word — was a proper subject for a sovereign’s pen.

What the Daemonologie records, beyond its arguments, is the moment when learned demonology and the machinery of the state met at the highest level. The witch trials of early modern Europe were driven by many hands; here, unusually, one of those hands held a crown and left a book explaining why.

→ In the library: The Book of Enoch (Charles, 1912)

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