The trials at North Berwick will be some of the first. James VI, and the Scottish clergy and nobles around him, will be responsible for some of the most intense witch hunts in Europe. Or so James VI, and the witch hunters around him, will come to believe in the months and years to come. The spell will conjure up storms, meant to drown the monarch and his Danish wife. Later, they will dig up corpses from graveyards, pull the bodies apart, and tie the limbs to dead cats. They must use their magic to take down the Scottish king. He will gift them great powers, he tells his witches, if only they will do his bidding. The atmosphere is wild, erotic, malevolent. He appears in animal form, scaly and monstrous, and his witches fly around him like moths to a flame. They will call to the Devil and ask him to speak. There they will join hands and whisper sinister incantations. As the sieves pull to shore, figures emerge: hundreds of them, winding their way to St. Something floats across them: small boats, called sieves, all of them filled with dark, huddled shapes. The sky is dark, the waves in the Firth of Forth restless. Halloween night has fallen over the Scottish coastal town of North Berwick. They will burrow their way into the most fearful corners of the Scottish king’s heart. But some will invoke other, more sinister words: intentional.
A cannon broke loose on the deck, crushing eight sailors right in front of her. It seemed to wrap itself around the queen’s ship, intent on pulling it apart. As the months go on, more news will come, none of it good.Īnne’s ship was turned back not once, or twice, but three times by what sailors call “baffling winds.” The third storm was the worst, they say. He says a storm has put Anne’s life in peril. A wayward member of Anne’s fleet, stumbling in with ominous tidings. And then a clamor comes: a sailor has arrived. But the time for her arrival’s come and gone, and still Anne’s ships haven’t crested the horizon. He married the young Anne of Denmark by proxy back in August, and he is anxious to see her.
King James VI stares out his window at a troubled, stormy sea.