During a series of raging storms in 1590,

James the 6th of Scotland struggled across an angry North Sea

with his new bride, Queen Anne, travelling from her native Denmark to Scotland.

One ship was lost to the rages of the sea,

and it was said that James himself very nearly lost his life

in the disaster.

But this tempest was not seen as a natural phenomenon.

Instead, it was blamed on the work of witches,

who had supposedly joined with the devil

to plot the downfall of the king.

This formative experience would profoundly shape James's reign in Scotland

and later, as James I, would spark the English witch hunts into a raging fire. I've always been fascinated by the history of the witch hunts in England

and the fears and beliefs that drove this frenzied quest through the 16th and 17th centuries.

Was this a story of gendered violence,

of the powerful stamping on the powerless,

of control and manipulation by the state itself?

It's hard not to feel attached,

even angered by the plight of the many thousands of women

who died at the hands of the witch hunts and its foundations in misogyny.

At historical palaces we have a particular connection to this topic, as it was James I of England and 6th of Scotland who wrote demonology, a treatise on how to hunt and identify witches.

I'm Joint Chief Curator Tracy Borman, and today we're going to be examining how James

the first fear and obsession around witches shaped what has been called a Holocaust against women, the English witch hunts.

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