![]() ![]() James himself advocated for the importance of only punishing those who were guilty, but by torturing and killing so many himself he had already spread fear throughout his country and set an example of what a witch hunt looked like. Though perhaps less brutal than the Malleus Maleficarum, also known as the Hammer of Witches, published in Germany 110 years before, it was still a dangerous book that led some, such as the man who would later be known as the Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins, to believe that they had the right to accuse and torture their neighbours until they were forced to admit to the charges against them. When Elizabeth I died in 1603 and James assumed the throne as James I of England, he brought his suspicions with him six years earlier he’d even written his own book on the importance of hunting witches, Daemonologie, which stressed the importance of persecuting witches in a Christian society. Like the rest of Europe, the punishment for being found guilty of witchcraft in Scotland was to be burned at the stake as opposed to being hanged in England and Wales, and thanks to James’s fascination witch fever swept through Scotland long before it reached the extent that it eventually would in England. ![]() Agnes became James’s first victim, and the king insisted on being present to witness the torture Agnes underwent before she was finally found guilty and executed in Edinburgh on 28 January 1591, her body broken. When he brought Anne from Denmark back to Scotland they were caught in a terrible storm and James took it as a sign that a witch had tried to sabotage their journey and murder the king and his new queen. Denmark has a long history of witch hunts and witch trials, and when James visited the country he became obsessed with rooting out witches.
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