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If you visit the coast of Scotland east of Edinburgh you might hear the legend of strange goings-on long ago in the village of North Berwick. The details vary from one teller to another but the people involved are portrayed the same, as a sinister band of witches. Here is the tale - in the autumn of 1590, a group of wicked men and women came together to perform a hideous ritual in an empty church not far from the North Sea. The intentions of the witches were both grand & terrible, they planned to take control of the forces of nature and to change the course of Scottish history by raising a terrible storm at sea.
In the small church, the witches huddled around a cat, chosen as the agent of their magic. First, they christened the unfortunate in a ritual ceremony, then tortured it cruelly, passing it back and forth across a flaming hearth. Next, they affixed the hands and feet of a dead man, whose body they had stolen from a cemetery, to the cat's paws and attached the sex organs from the dismembered corpse to the cat's underside. This done, the witches carried their gruesom offering to a pier at the nearby village of Leith and flung it into the sea.
At once, the story goes, a terrible storm arose, turning the skies black and sending up a howling wind across the churning sea. A ship making the crossing from Kinghorn to Leith was engulfed in the squall and smashed to pieces, killing many sailors. This tragedy did little to satisfy the blood lust of the Berwick witches. Their target was a different ship. That night , a royal man-of-war was scheduled to make passage from Denmark to Scotland. On board, along with his bride, was His Royal Majesty King James VI of Scotland, who later became King James I of England. To the dread of the Berwick coven, the king's ship escaped destruction. They would have to find other measures.
The story of the attempted murder of the king came to light shortly thereafter, during an investigation of suspected witchcraft in the Edinburgh area. A young servent girl named Gilly Duncan, who was known for her skills in nursing the sick, had confessed to evoking the aid of the devil to enhance her powers. The fact that this confession was given under severe torture made little difference to anyone; such methods were standard practice in cases involving witchcraft. Poor Gilly was forced to name her accomplices, and she implicated nearly seventy of Edinburgh's most prominent citizens.
When the girl's testimony came to the attention of the king, he decided to listen in on the interrogations of the other accused witches. He began with Agnes Sampson, a grave and matronly gentlewoman.
(Continued)
