Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Mankie listener discretion is advised. One week before his mother was beheaded, James the sixth, 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's father, Lord Darnley, and she had certainly wilfully looked the other way, James's mother was right to have been forced to abdicate after marrying marrying the man implicated in Darnley's death less than three months later, in James's guiltiest moments, he acknowledged that his mother mary imprisonment in England by their cousin Elizabeth
the First 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 the First would reluctantly violate the sanctity of the monarchy and deliver a death sentence to the former queen of a sovereign nation. James the sixth 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 the sixth would need to be stronger than the devil. During his reign in Scotland and then later in England, James the sixth ignited a fervor of witch hunting that would lead to his many as four thousand 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 the sixth was nothing if not always sure that he was right. I'm Danis Schwartz and this is noble blood. Back when the future King James the sixth of Scotland was still an infant cooing in his cradle, his father, Lord Darnley, was murdered. Darnley, only twenty one years old, had seduced Mary Queen of Scott's with his son kissed good looks and lazy fair approach
to life. But after marriage, what had been charmingly lays a fair revealed itself to just be lazy. Mary had saddled herself with a boorish, cheating, bullheaded 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 kirk
Afield in Edinburgh. Mary was back at the Palace Holyrood, 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 Scott's Mary 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, adulteress 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, the six King of Scotland. James would be raised right. His tutor, the humanist scholar George Buchanan, was more than sixty 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 Mayor. Your mother was a trader, 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 nobleman 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 score work, 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 thirteen,
his cousin and as Mace Stewart, swept into court from France. Stewart, who was quickly styled the Duke of Lennox, was thirty seven years old. Immediately he charmed the teenage king with confidence. His good looks and his let's say, certain joys devive.
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 the young king, first because he could teach James about the divine right of monarchs the Scots believe of the 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 Six 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 a 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 twenty three, chose the blonde Princess Anne of Denmark, only fourteen years old but already celebrated for her blonde
curls and 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 at the storms. It would be months before James would have his bride delivered to him, and since no ships were getting through, not even once 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 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, the first down in England, muttered that James is rashed to say vision 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 pre eminent 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 Edinburgh, a man named David Seaton started noticing some strange behavior from his maid, Gilly 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 Gilly 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. Gilly 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 the thumbs 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 fifteen ninety and continued on for another two years. James the Six 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 Gali named were women. Among her cohorts was a man named John Fian, a school teacher who purportedly made a pact with the devil
for mystical powers. He had been among the coven that brought the storms on the king's voyage, but John fians 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 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 ware to his teacher the next day. The boy did, and wouldn't you know it, the day after that, there was a cow following John Pheen around, leaping up at him madly in love. John Phie and 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 finger nails. 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 sixth. 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 and 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 Holyrood 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 Demonology 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 Samson's witches 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 home 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 the sixth 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 sixth of Scotland would bring his commitment to rooting out, which is with him when he became in addition to a Scottish title, also James
the First 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, which is 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 less willing to engage with the anti witch fervor than the Scots had been, and even James's blood lust 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 has responded, I pray God,
he may be my heir in such discoveries. Most miracles nowadays proved but illusions, and he may see this by how wary judges should be entrusting accusations. 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's 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 discussed raising tempests and controlling the winds. Isn't that what witches due? 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 that series Outlander, the protagonist Claire meets a woman with a talent for herbs. Outlander is set about two hundred years after James's reign in Scotland, but the author snuck in a small homage to the witch Finder King. The character that Claire meets is accused of being a witch and she goes to trial. The character's name Gillis Duncan. Noble Blood is a production of I Heart Radio and
Aaron Mankey. The show is written and hosted by Dani Schwartz and produced by Aaron Mankey, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and every Young. Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales and you can learn more about the show over at Noble blood Tales dot com. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. M