The queen behind the witch hunts
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A man is sailing across the North Sea in the late 16th century. He's finally with his young bride after delays and failed voyages, but there's something wrong. The sea seems angry, almost furious at him. And he thinks this is more than just a bad story. This is something supernatural.
He believed that there was a community of maleficent witches that were trying to enact their revenge upon him.
This tempest instills in him Paranoia. Hatred. One that sparks one of the earliest witch trials in British history.
Which saw hundreds and hundreds of women arrested, tortured. There was a lot of fear and fear breeds terror and terror breeds hatred and hatred breeds bloodshed.
My name is Mark Finnell, and this is the epic tale of how a coerced queen's signature set into motion a reign of terror that continued for over a century. One that, believe it or not, still reaches into our lives to this very day.
The demonisation, the misrepresentation continues.
And yet, at the time, no one saw it coming.
All right. So let's start with a queen.
Mary, Queen of Scots, the romantic, beautiful, tragic heroine who has been so, so misrepresented for more than 440 years of propaganda against her name. And I'm here to set you all straight on that. So this is Kate Forsyth. I'm an author and a storyteller and a folklore scholar. I generally write historical fiction and I make my living by making stuff up and writing it down.
So our story begins in the mid-1500s. Now, look, just a little heads up. This particular chapter of history is, let's just say, complex. There's like royal bloodlines and religious feuds. And so for the purposes of our story today, I'm going to give you a very streamlined version of the history, which brings us to 1542. A baby girl has just been made Queen of Scotland. She's not even a week old.
What stormed James VI’s ship and sparked his fear of witches?
And her name is Mary Stewart.
Her father, who was called James, James V, he had just lost a major battle against the English and he just basically died of a broken heart, they say.
So Mary's family tree is, between you and I, utter chaos. Stick with me on this one. So Mary's dad just died. That would be James V of Scotland. He was the son of the sister, stay with me, son of the sister of the English king, Henry VIII. the one with all the wives and the beheadings.
The Scottish royal family and the English royal family were connected, so that means that Henry VIII was Mary, Queen of Scots' great-uncle. And he invaded Scotland trying to force the little baby queen to marry his son, who would have been her second cousin.
Family. Am I right? Now, the important thing here is that Henry VIII really wanted to use this marriage to unite Scotland and England. However... The Scots were not into this plan. The arrangement was broken and Henry, well, he sent his army to attack Scotland.
So Mary, Queen of Scots, was smuggled out of Scotland when she was five years old to protect her from the English. And she was brought up in the French court with the French prince and princesses. She married the French Dauphin when she was just a teenager. And then when his father died, she became Queen of France at 16. But when he died, like the following year, all of a sudden she was no longer welcome at the French court. His mother sent her back to Scotland.
OK, so smuggled out of Scotland as a kid while it's being attacked by the English, turfed out of France and now a teenager back in Scotland. And it turns out there's been some changes since she left.
When she left Scotland, it had been a Catholic country. When she returned, it was a Protestant country.
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