Pod Insights Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society Who Was The Witch Queen of Scotland? About this episode The 17th century witch trials in Scotland were many and they were brutal.
Amongst the many people tried for being a witch, one woman's confessions stood out for being the most scandalous across all of Europe: Isobel Gowdie.
What made Isobel confess to having sex with the devil? What are the details of what she said? And what was happening in Scotland to create such a fear of witches?
Joining Kate today is author and witch historian Mary Craig https://marywcraig.com, to help Kate find out more about this woman.
This episode was edited by Hannah Feodorov. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Kate Lister? Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.
0:35 Kate Lister? Hello, my lovely Betwisters! It's me, Kate Lister. Welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets! Thank you for coming back once again. I'm so glad that you're here, mostly because if you weren't here, then it's just me, isn't it? It's just me talking to myself. So, thank God you are here with your ears and are listening to this. But before we can go any further, I do have to tell you, and I'm sure you know what I'm going to tell you, but here it is, anyway. This is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults, about adult things and an adult's way of coming around, adult subjects, being an adult too. Right, on with the show!
1:06 Kate Lister? You are joining me in the Highlands of Scotland in spring 1662, and something peculiar is afoot. A local woman from a small town, Isabel Gaudy, is giving what will become known as one of the most detailed and scandalous confessions of witchcraft in European history. And that is up against some pretty stiff competition, I can tell you. Her confession is detailed and lurid, and there is a lot of sexual information in there as well, including descriptions of how she had sex with the devil. She describes him lying as heavily as a sack of malt, and says that she found his nature within me cold as spring well-water. Crikey, Isabel.
1:50 Kate Lister? Obviously, these words are being spoken under duress, but even so, she is really going for it. So, who was Isabel Gaudy? What led her to this place? And what happened to her next?
2:28 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. Isabel Gaudy's four confessions over six weeks came at the height of Scotland's panic about witchcraft, and they were terrified of them. An estimated 206 people were accused between April and December in 1661 alone. And even amongst all of them, Isabel's confession really stands out. So what do we know about her? And what on earth was going on in Scotland at the time to create such a panic? Well, joining me today is Mary Craig, historian and author of books, including The Borders Witch Hunt and A History of Scottish Witches. So if anyone can help us, I think it's her.
3:11 Kate Lister? And whilst I'm here, I wanted to let you know again about the two Betwixt the Sheets live shows that are happening in May, one in Edinburgh and the other one in London Town. Tickets are available at fein.co.uk. Just search for Betwixt the Sheets and we will see you there. Right, let's crack on with it.
3:33 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Mary Craig. How are you doing?
3:39 Speaker 01 I'm very well, thank you. How are you?
3:42 Kate Lister? Oh, I'm thrilled because we're talking witches. It's a gruesome subject, but I'm endlessly fascinated by it.
3:49 Speaker 01 Absolutely. And there's always more to learn. The more I read the trial records, there's more things come out and yeah, there's just so much in there.
3:57 Kate Lister? And you're a historian of witchcraft?
4:00 Speaker 01 Well, yeah. And the thing is that, I mean, I grew up watching the old Hammer horror movies. That dates me a little bit, doesn't it? Ooh, yeah. But the thing is that you don't need all of that extra. There's enough in the reality without you having to add any extras. It's just amazing what was said, what was thought, what was done. So yeah, great to chat to somebody else about my witches.
4:21 Kate Lister? I don't think we'll ever fully understand what really happened. Like, we can get as much detail and information as possible, but the answer as to why, over the course of about a hundred years, roughly, like, one long lifetime, Europe just erupted in this witch hunting craze. It's so bizarre.
4:41 Speaker 01 Yeah. To me, that's always the interesting question in history is the why. We know the, you know, the how and the when and the who and the whatever, but why, why does one person do this and another person faced with the same set of circumstances reacts completely differently? That's what's fascinating. And why, as you say, collectively over that sort of late 16th right through 17th century, which is the early modern period, you know, we're about to go into things like the Enlightenment, that we have this throwback to the devil and sin and witches and magic. It's just fascinating to me, yeah.
5:18 Kate Lister? And we're here to talk about one witch in particular, who I confess I didn't know very much about, Isabel Gaudy.
5:24 Speaker 01 Isabel Gaudy, the queen of the witches.
5:28 Kate Lister? The queen of the witches.
5:30 Speaker 01 She is known, yes, yes. Um, she gives the most bizarre confessions.
5:38 Kate Lister? Really?
5:39 Speaker 01 And unfortunately, because people don't take care, when thinking about what they're reading, it has given rise to so many crazy theories about what witches did and didn't do. And there would be a coven of thirteen and they would dance naked in the woods. I think that certain gentlemen would like that to be true, but never mind. But yes, a lot of what Isabel Gaudy talked about was very strange. But as I say, you have to be really careful trying to interpret what she meant. I mean, of course, what was written down may not necessarily be what she said. And how do we interpret it all these years on? But yeah, Isabel's an amazing case.
6:19 Kate Lister? She's a Scottish witch and witch trials exploded all over the place, but Scotland seems to have been a particular hotspot for them. Is that right? Or have I got that wrong?
6:32 Speaker 01 Absolutely. We appear to have persecuted, tried and executed 10 times more witches per head of population than England.
6:41 Kate Lister? That's a lot, isn't it?
6:43 Speaker 01 I think there are a variety of reasons, but I think one of the reasons was that the Reformation happened almost gradually in England. You know, Henry VIII wanted a son, you know, and he falls out, so he divorces himself from from Rome. So the Reformation in England happens quite gradually, whereas in Scotland it's quite sudden. And also the form of Protestantism that we went for was a very strict Calvinist form of Protestantism. It was almost as if you'd sort of flicked a switch, you know, on Monday you're Catholic and on Tuesday you're Protestant. There was, you know, there was no.
7:18 Kate Lister? That's quite jarring, isn't it?
7:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, that was quite jarring. And then, of course, the king leaves the country, so that leaves a power vacuum, the church isn't sure where it's going, and all of these factors combined to to make it a bit of a hotspot, yeah.
7:30 Kate Lister? And of course, James, James the sixth of Scotland, first of England, he had a real thing about witches, didn't he?
7:40 Speaker 01 Well, it's really interesting. He was supposed to marry Anne of Denmark. And Anne of Denmark sets off from Denmark and her ships found her in a storm and they have to sort of seek shelter. And an argument happens between a chap called Monk and a chap called Valkendorf in the Danish court as to whose fault it was, because everybody was laughing about the fact that, you know, they're Denmark, they're a sailing nation and they couldn't get their ships right. So these two men are arguing. One of them was the Admiral of the fleet and the other was, I think, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. And then conveniently they both looked at each other and said, oh, there's that woman called Anne Coldings that's in jail for being a witch. Let's say the storms were because of her and her witches. So that lets the two guys off the hook. So a witchcraft trial takes off in Denmark.
8:25 Speaker 01 Now, James at this point knows that Elizabeth I of England is going to die and he'll get the English throne. He knows that most of England don't want a Scotch king. He's from a small, insignificant, poor little country, so he has to prove himself to be the equal of everybody else.
8:44 Speaker 01 If the devil's going to attack godly people, he's going to use witches. And if Denmark's having witches, then James is having witches. So James kicks off the witchcraft trials in North Berwick where a hundred people get arrested. And then, of course, he brings that down to England and the English take one look at him and think, hmm, maybe not. So you had a little bit more sense down there than we did up here. But of course, because the king had.
9:09 Kate Lister? Yeah.
9:11 Speaker 01 And of course, he writes his Big Boys Book of Witches.
9:13 Kate Lister? His demonology.
9:14 Speaker 01 And everybody bought the Big Boys Book of Witches. I always think it was like, remember the chap Stephen Hawking? And he wrote that book, A Brief History of Time.
9:24 Kate Lister? Yeah.
9:25 Speaker 01 And we all went out and bought it. We didn't read it, but we bought it to show off that we bought it.
9:29 Kate Lister? That's true.
9:30 Speaker 01 I think the king's book and demonology was a bit the same. The king had written this book, so everybody said, oh, well, you know, it must be great. So all of these factors come together.
9:40 Kate Lister? You could see why, like, if the king of Scotland is doing this, and and he got personally involved in the witch trials as well, that you could see why that had spread.
9:48 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. And of course, you also had, there was a book written previously by a chap called Kramer, called the Malice Malificarum, The Hammer of the Witches. Which is the craziest book going, it's actually quite good for a giggle, that book. And it was so bonkers that the the Catholic Church denounced the book and him. But it got written at the time of the spread of the printing press. So it went viral, the way something crazy on the internet can go viral today. So. You know, you've got the crazy book going viral, you've got the king writing a book. There were storms that that did affect Anne coming over from Denmark. You've got all these factors coming together. You've got politics. You've got people who. Genuinely were religious, you know, people did believe in God and the devil.
10:31 Speaker 01 And then there's a bit of famine and a bit of pestilence and a bit of war and a bit of politics. So you can see how.
10:37 Kate Lister? That's it.
10:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, maybe the devil's out there to get us all, yeah.
10:41 Kate Lister? I mean, you sort of look around at the moment, don't you, and and how fractious everything is, how paranoid and how reactionary. Everybody is. And I do kind of wonder if there was the option to go, they're a witch, let's burn them. How. Far we are away from all of this today, actually.
10:57 Speaker 01 Well, I have heard a few politicians recently who have been called to book about certain things and they'll use the phrase witch hunt.
11:05 Kate Lister? Witch hunts, yeah.
11:06 Speaker 01 Rather than say. My opposition, you know, whatever it is, you know, I've done a policy on A or B and I'm being called to account for that policy and they'll claim it's witchcraft. You know what I mean? There are people being executed as witches today around the world.
11:19 Kate Lister? Yes, there are.
11:20 Speaker 01 Unfortunately, there are large numbers of people being executed as witches around the world. So it is, we don't tend to have it in Europe, but the phenomenon has not gone away. One of the biggest problems to see, of course, is the fact that, what do we mean by the word witch? Was, is and will, how do you witch?
11:35 Kate Lister? Yeah. What, what exactly does that mean? It's something that historians of witchcraft have like tried to get to grips with. What's your definition of a witch for the research that you do? I suppose for, for early modern Scotland and wider year, what was their understanding of a witch?
11:51 Speaker 01 A witch would have been somebody who was a Christian, did believe in God, but tended to be a healer or a charmer. And they got their power from the fairies.
12:04 Kate Lister? Not the devil?
12:05 Speaker 01 No, not the devil. That would have been a witch's definition of what a witch was and was probably the community's definition of a witch. For the Kirk, they had a problem with fairies. And so as far as they were concerned, power was unnatural to women. So women who had power must have had it from an unnatural source. So they take the fairies out. And say that you've got the power from the devil. Therefore you are an enemy of God.
12:31 Kate Lister? I haven't heard of fairies before. Is that a uniquely Scottish? I mean, I, I know that people believed in fairies, but is that a uniquely Scottish thing? That the fairies are like a conduit to, to the devil in these trials?
12:43 Speaker 01 Oh, you see, as far as a witch was concerned, the fairies had nothing to do with the devil at all.
12:48 Kate Lister? Okay.
12:48 Speaker 01 The trouble is that the Kirk of Scotland couldn't quite decide what fairies were. So some of them, they didn't have an official line on it, which made it quite confusing. Because everybody knew the fairies existed. Everybody believed in fairies. Glen Sheen is the Glen of the Fairies. Shallean is the Fairy Mountain. You know, if, if places are named after the fairies, of course they exist. You know, that explains phenomena that the Kirk could not explain. So you would go to the local fairy fort. Or a ring of mushrooms or something like that, where you know the fairies are, and you might say a prayer or say a chant to the fairies. And if you were very, very lucky, the fairies would give you power, usually to women, and it usually was handed down, or you might have second sight.
13:33 Speaker 01 And that would allow you to heal your neighbour's baby if they went well, or help somebody whose chickens had stopped laying. It was a benevolent force. And the belief in magic was ubiquitous. I mean, Elizabeth the first had John Dee. John Dee was a necromancer and a conjurer, and he was her adviser at court.
13:53 Kate Lister? He was an astrologer.
13:54 Speaker 01 Yes, he was an astrologer. Magic was ubiquitous. It was starting to fade as the Kirk and the churches become more established and they start to take power back because they're saying there is God and the angels and there's devil and there's imps. With fairies, we're not quite sure.
14:10 Kate Lister? Let's talk about Isabel Gaudy, because I don't think that we know very much about her life, but what's your research turned up?
14:16 Speaker 01 We really don't know much about her at all. We know that she's married to a chap called John Gilbert. We don't know if she has any children. We don't know how old she is. She couldn't have been any younger than in her thirties, but she could have been as old as in her sixties. We don't know why she's first arrested. We know she gives four confessions, well, three confessions, and then the fourth one is a sort of reiteration of the three that she gives. She seems to have had a falling out with the local minister, which, well, you know, ministers are what ministers are, and he appears to have been quite a sort of vehement witch hunter type guy. So I don't know if that was coming.
14:54 Kate Lister? It's always one of them.
14:55 Speaker 01 It's always one of them, yeah. So I don't know if Harry Forbes was particularly, I think what's happened is, is he seems to have been quite extreme. He's been an extreme Calvinist. And the trouble is that the Kirk of Scotland hadn't settled into its Presbyterian format, which is why we had the Bishop's War, which led to the English Civil War, which led to the War of the Three Kingdoms. We know all that. So Charles the Second is back on the throne in sixteen sixty, and one of the first things he does is he reintroduces Episcopalianism into the Scottish Kirk, which is a nasima to the Presbyterian Calvinists.
15:35 Speaker 01 Well, you can't blame the king because the last time we did that, we chopped the king's head off. We don't want to go down that road again. So the only person that can be responsible is the devil. And it must be witches, which is why in sixteen sixty two, we get huge numbers of accusations.
15:50 Kate Lister? Wow.
15:50 Speaker 01 So that's the sort of background. Everybody's getting really worried about the devil. And, you know, you've got this minister Forbes who's quite strong in witches and witchcraft and sin and the devil and all these sorts of things. And Isabel might simply have gone down the road one day and said, oh, isn't the minister a bit awful or something? And somebody's overheard that, as simple as that, and she gets dragged in.
16:12 Kate Lister? Do we know what date this was?
16:14 Speaker 01 This was in April sixteen sixty two.
16:18 Kate Lister? Right, it's like right bang in the middle of this quite paranoid fever then.
16:23 Speaker 01 And she is interviewed, she's interrogated, sorry, four times in the space of six weeks. Now, sixteen sixty two is really important because at that time, the Privy Council in Scotland banned the use of torture. Unless you had a really good reason for doing it, whereas previously people were tortured. And this is why a lot of people look at Isabel's confessions and say, well, she wasn't even being tortured. Why would she say all this? I maintain being dragged from your house by the moral authority in your area, the minister, being thrown into a cold, dark cell, being kept in isolation. You're frightened, you know what happens to witches, you're terrified, you're living in a world of sin.
17:06 Speaker 01 I think that's pretty close to psychological torture.
17:09 Kate Lister? Oh, I I agree completely.
17:11 Speaker 01 And then the interrogation isn't like today, you know, when you watch the true crime things and you see the policeman and well, but you know, we're going to investigate. There would have been three or four men crowding into her personal space, screaming at her. You're going to hellfire. Your immortal soul is in danger. Day after day after day, until she starts to confess, because we don't know how long she had been imprisoned before she gives her first confession.
17:36 Kate Lister? Wow. Were they, would they be searching for witches' marks and things like that as well?
17:43 Speaker 01 Yes, because one of the four proofs under Scots law was the devil's mark, where the devil had marked you, so they would look for that.
17:48 Kate Lister? That's torture, that's torture as well. I would have said that. Could you just explain a little bit about what that would involve?
17:55 Speaker 01 Well, again, if you think about it, if you are a woman in sixteen sixty-two, the only person that can physically touch you is your husband. So men are physically touching you, men are physically taking that, the much cap, your little cap off your head, and they're putting their hands on you. They're maybe even razor-ing off your hair, cutting off your hair so they can look on your scalp. They'll loosen your clothing to look at the skin around your neck and your shoulders, because that's where it was thought the devil would touch you. That's a massive, massive thing for men that are not your husband to be touching you in any way at all without this. And other men are looking, because they're all searching and they're looking at your body to see if you have a mark on you.
18:38 Kate Lister? And they'd be looking in your privety places, that's often recorded in the witchcraft trials, is they're looking in your, looking all over your body?
18:46 Speaker 01 They would look all over your body. In Scotland, it tended to be more your head and your shoulders, because that's where it was thought your devil would. But yes, they would, if they were going searching, they were going searching. This didn't happen in Isabel's case, but in some cases you would bring in professional witch prickers or witch brodders.
19:03 Kate Lister? And what would they do?
19:04 Speaker 01 And they would look for the devil's mark, because it was assumed that if the devil had touched you, had marked you, because he was unnatural, the mark would be unnatural. And if you pricked it with, say, a bodkin, say, yeah, but that big of a bodkin,
19:17 Kate Lister? A pin.
19:17 Speaker 01 And you print it, it wouldn't bleed, or you wouldn't feel pain. Now, obviously, we know about acupuncture, there are points in the body where you can do this, but they might just keep on going. You might call out the first time, well, well, that wasn't the devil's mark. They keep on going and keep on going and keep on going, until they find a point where you don't cry out, and that was the devil's mark.
19:37 Kate Lister? That's torture, isn't it? That's, there's no, I know that it doesn't officially, it's not officially torture.
19:43 Speaker 01 Again, what we're saying about the meanings of words, to you and I, that's torture, that's not officially torture, that's just looking for the devil's mark. And of course Isabel says that she's renounced her baptism. She says that she's been baptized by the devil, that the devil has marked her. But again, because, because the ministers are fighting against the devil, these are the questions you're going to ask. You're not going to go in and say, "Hello Isabel, how are you? Sit down, have a cup of tea, tell us all about it. Did you happen to meet the devil?" No, they're coming in saying, "We know you're a witch, we know you met the devil. Tell us everything that happened when you met the devil." These are, you know, leading questions.
20:33 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Mary and Isabel after this short break.
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21:49 Kate Lister? Today, there's like quite strict guidelines and guidance about interrogating witnesses. But people still give false confessions, even under those circumstances. It's very easy, if you've got someone who's vulnerable, to manipulate them and force them into it. And, and this is in a dungeon and she's on her own and she's frightened and like, what chance did any of them stand?
22:13 Speaker 01 Exactly. I mean, she could have been, if she was an older lady, she might have had arthritis or something like that. You know, who knows if she's in pain, she's certainly frightened, she's cold, she's lonely. She knows that she's facing a potential death sentence. And there are four grown men shouting at her, screaming in her face and telling her that her immortal soul is going to hell for her damnation. That's terrifying. And they're touching her, they're pulling her clothing apart, they're demanding to know things from her.
22:43 Kate Lister? What does she confess to? Because this is the reason that, that she's become as famous as she is, isn't it? It's because of the, the detailed confessions.
22:52 Speaker 01 Yeah. So she confesses to having renounced her baptism. Now, that's a very common one. You'll see that in a lot of trial records because they'll say to you, did you renounce your baptism? She confesses to the devil having marked her. She confesses to having had sex with the devil. And she describes him in pretty graphic detail as to the sex, which is fair enough. She says that she goes out flying at night and she takes her broomstick and puts it in the bed beside her husband. So her husband doesn't know she's out and about. She goes flying through the air on horses. And then goes to houses for great meals. She meets the queen of the fairies.
23:29 Speaker 01 The devil makes her elfshot arrows, which is a confusion because elfshot arrows were little arrows that came from fairyland. So she confused that with the devil. And if she shoots somebody, often if people, if their cattle were ill, they would say they've been elfshot. They've been attacked by the fairies. She says that she can turn into a hare. And she can run away from people and she would run into people's houses as a hare. And she would escape and then eventually she'd run into a house, she would be being chased by dogs. And eventually she would be so far ahead of the dogs that she would say a chant and that would turn her back into person. She talks about seeing the king of the fairies and the queen of the fairies and all this wondrous food that she eats and visiting fairyland. She doesn't actually confess to much witchcraft.
24:14 Kate Lister? Just hanging out with the fairies.
24:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, because most witchcraft trials are things like, I tried to lame my neighbour's horse. Or I laid sickness on a child, or I made them fall over and break their leg. There's very little of that there. It's all about the fairyland and all about the devil. And it's, it's actually quite a confused confession. And I'm wondering if she was what was known in the time as addled in her wits. I'm wondering if this is a frightened old lady who might have had early stage dementia. Who's just telling them what they want to hear so they'll stop shouting at her.
24:50 Kate Lister? Wow.
24:51 Speaker 01 I don't know.
24:52 Kate Lister? How long is the confession? How much of this material is there?
24:56 Speaker 01 There are four confessions and there is quite a bit of material there. But as I say, the fourth confession is just really a repetition of the first three. And there are things like there are chants, I will go into a hair with such sorrow and such care, I will go into a hair. So there are spells and chant, spells and chants, or are they just rhymes that she's made up? Who knows actually in this, in these confessions?
25:20 Kate Lister? Do they not wonder if she can turn herself into a hair, why hasn't she done that to get out of this prison?
25:26 Speaker 01 Exactly. This is the problem.
25:30 Kate Lister? That seems very odd.
25:31 Speaker 01 This is the problem with witchcraft is that if witches are so powerful and they can do these things. Why do they get caught and why can they not help themselves escape? And why doesn't the devil come and get them? These questions are never answered by the cook. These are glossed over.
25:46 Kate Lister? Also, if you are a witch and Satan himself has come along and given you his power. Why do people confess to such menial things as, oh, I made someone's cow sick. Oh, I, I made somebody a bit lame for it. You've got, like, that's such low level stuff. Go, go big, go much bigger than that.
26:04 Speaker 01 I know, it's crazy. I mean, if you think about it, if one of these things is they'll say, why, why would you be a witch? Why would you not be the richest person you could be? You know, I'd be like winning the lottery, going on a cruise and buying cars and, you know. Whereas they'll talk about. Having enough to eat. And the thing is that most people lived on the edge in the seventeenth century. Even if you had a bit of money, all it took was one bad winter, one bad harvest. And you could starve to death, you could freeze to death in a Scottish winter. So going to the Queen of the Fairies and having a great feast was as far as Isabel's imagination would allow her to go.
26:44 Kate Lister? Oh, oh, that's so sad.
26:47 Speaker 01 Because, you know, she's living this.
26:48 Kate Lister? That really, that really broke my heart. It's like, that's, that's the limits of her experience.
26:54 Speaker 01 She didn't, you know, to her, that, that was wealth, that was rich. She's having enough food, riding on a horse. Isabel wouldn't have ever ridden on a horse. She couldn't afford to buy a horse.
27:06 Kate Lister? Wow.
27:06 Speaker 01 You know, and she's, so she's this poor little old lady, and I think she's just bamboozled and scared.
27:13 Kate Lister? Saying anything.
27:14 Speaker 01 And just saying anything. We've all done it. We've all said things to people to make them go away and leave us alone.
27:20 Kate Lister? Haven't we? I, I would have cracked long before this, quite frankly. I would have been like, just write whatever you want. Yeah, fine. I've been meeting with the fairies, da, da, da, da, da. But the really scary thing, I mean, the whole thing is, is awful. Isabel clearly couldn't possibly have done any of these things, but there is an impact from this, isn't there? What is the, what's the fallout from these confessions?
27:41 Speaker 01 Well, interestingly, we don't know. She doesn't go to trial.
27:44 Kate Lister? Oh.
27:45 Speaker 01 Or does she? We're not sure. So they collect all of this information and it goes up to the Privy Council. They say, right, here we are, here's all our evidence. And so you would expect, you go, the Privy Council looks at it and we've got the Privy Council records and they've recorded the fact, they've got all this evidence. So of course, everybody like me sits there going, right, and where's the trial record? And it's not there. There's nothing.
28:06 Kate Lister? Nothing.
28:07 Speaker 01 So, choices. They realise she was addled in her wits and therefore could not stand trial, because under Scots law at that time.
28:16 Kate Lister? That could have happened.
28:17 Speaker 01 But if that was true, you'd expect her to be something, somewhere written down. Or maybe that just didn't get written down, or maybe it's got lost along the way. Maybe the trial records have disappeared, or I don't know, I honestly don't know. Because there is no trial record, so I I've no idea what happened to her.
28:36 Kate Lister? Could she have died before it went to trial?
28:38 Speaker 01 Very possibly, and a lot of people did. The numbers for those in Scotland, just under four thousand people that we have names, well, that we have note of is just under four thousand. But with the number of people who possibly died in prison. And the number of records that have probably been gone over the years, the number's probably closer to six thousand, which would be the equivalent of about thirty six thousand people today in Scotland.
29:05 Kate Lister? God almighty.
29:06 Speaker 01 So the fact that she didn't go to trial, if she's old, I mean, it might well be that the Privy Council have sent a record back and saying, yes, you can take her to trial, and then somebody's thought, actually, she's just addled in her wits, if we take her to trial and somebody comes along and does a little bit of a check.
29:25 Kate Lister? Yeah.
29:26 Speaker 01 Because again, the the problem, going back to the episcopacy, was that Charles had not only brought episcopacy back, he'd said that anybody who did not adhere to it would lose their positions. So there's a lot of ministers, magistrates, judges, lawyers are looking at the political things here, there and everywhere, so the batty old lady that gave that confession, or do we really want to bring her to trial? What if somebody spots it and it's not quite right? Let's just let her go and do nothing about it is another possibility.
30:00 Kate Lister? In the lead up to the trial, like, what was the the state of the the witch trials in Scotland at that time? Because I know in England and in other places, like, there's there's a big, like, yeah, let's get the witches, and then doubts start to creep in, things like in Essex, for example, when they realised Matthew Hopkins was just just out for as much money as he wants. And then people start to get a bit nervous about it. When Isabel Gaudy was was on was giving these confessions, were they still gung ho for it, or was there some? Like caution creeping in.
30:32 Speaker 01 Well, no, actually, the sixty one, sixty two witch panic that we had in Scotland was the worst one we had.
30:37 Kate Lister? Right.
30:38 Speaker 01 I mean, there were people being executed all over the place for things that they could not have done. And we do have records of, I think there's a lady in Leith, who actually the the family got a document from a doctor to say she was addled in her wits and couldn't be taken to trial. And the minister just browbeat the court into taking her to trial anyway. So it was a period where people were being taken to trial. So it's really interesting that Isobel didn't go. And it might just be something as simple as the fact that the records have been lost along the way, frustratingly, it might be just that.
31:11 Kate Lister? Did she have to name people? Because that's quite common in the the confessions as well.
31:16 Speaker 01 She names Janet Bradlebane, Margaret Brody, she names quite a few people. So again, it's this naming people because I'm always surprised when I read the witchcraft trials of those who didn't confess, of those who didn't name somebody else, even after torture. Because like you, I'd have been confessing within two minutes. My sister, my my cousins, everybody would have been getting named.
31:37 Kate Lister? Yep.
31:38 Speaker 01 Um, yes. And again, but we don't have trial records for anybody that she names either.
31:45 Kate Lister? Oh, okay. So we don't know what happened to those people.
31:49 Speaker 01 If she was addled in her wits, you see, then that would mean that all of her testimony was was suspect and would all have to be thrown out.
31:57 Kate Lister? Wow.
31:58 Speaker 01 So we don't know. And we don't know about this minister. You see, again, it could be a situation where if he has been a fervent Calvinist Presbyterian, and then he refuses to adhere to episcopacy, he might well have lost his position. So it might be a case of, you know, just at the end of Isobel's confessions, they send off to Privy Council, say, right, we're going to go to trial. The Privy Council say, right, fine. And he actually loses his job. And all of a sudden, the driving force behind what could have been Isobel's trial is no longer there.
32:31 Kate Lister? Wow, yeah, that makes sense.
32:33 Speaker 01 We don't know because he seems to fade out of history as well. We don't really have a lot of note of him after that.
32:48 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Mary and Isabel after this short break.
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34:05 Kate Lister? We've just got back from Iceland, where we filmed the documentary on the witch trials there, because 93% of the people that they executed there were men, which is quite a startling statistic. And the reason that scholars believe this has happened is because in Iceland, it was men that were more associated with magic than women were, because it was about runes and about learning, and that was considered a masculine thing. In Scotland, was it women that were more associated with magic? Was there a profile of the people that they were persecuting there?
34:39 Speaker 01 About 84% of those that we know of were women.
34:43 Kate Lister? Right.
34:44 Speaker 01 So it was much more female crime. With fairy magic, it tended to be more women that had fairy magic, and that would be healing powers, charming powers. There were men, especially up in the Gaeltach, and men would have second sight. Interestingly, up in the Gaeltach in Scotland, far, far fewer trials. The witchcraft trials that took place in Scotland were a lowland phenomenon, not up in the Gaeltach, where a lot of the clans had remained Catholic, and the belief in fairies and magic was a lot stronger.
35:19 Kate Lister? Yeah.
35:20 Speaker 01 And it was just a case of, of course the witch went to see the fairies. Well, what's the problem with that? There was no association with the devil because you didn't have Kirk ministers, you didn't have enough Kirk ministers to cover the whole of Scotland to start with. And you certainly didn't have Kirk ministers who were up in the Highland glens. So instead of having a Kirk minister telling you that the fairies were part of the devil and the devil's out to get you and, you know, this is what you should be doing. Everybody just kept on going the way they'd been going on for centuries and they didn't really bother as much. I mean, there were trials in the Gaelic, but nothing like there were in, in Lowland, Scotland.
35:54 Kate Lister? So it's mostly women and do, is there an age profile? Do they tend to be older in Scotland? Cause I think that they're older in England when, when they, they break out.
36:04 Speaker 01 No, I mean, it tends to be quite a spread. I mean, we have, shouldn't have, but we do have the note of youngsters as young as eight and 10 being arrested for being witches. Which is ridiculous. The reason we know that is that because the two individuals involved were both arrested when they were in their early thirties. And it was said that they had been arrested previously. So that's how we can go back and go, oh yes, so eight and 10, yay, well done. So the, the, the age range is probably a bit of a spread, mostly actually middle aged women.
36:37 Kate Lister? Okay.
36:38 Speaker 01 And again, not all of them were poor, not all of them were, again, a lot of them were what we would call middling sort.
36:45 Kate Lister? Hmm.
36:46 Speaker 01 There were those that were very poor and poor and the middling sort, there were even a few ladies. As in Lady Manderson, a few others like that, that were arrested for witchcraft. They tended to get acquitted. And that was rare, but they tended to get an acquittal at trial.
37:01 Kate Lister? And if you didn't manage to get an acquittal and if you were found guilty, what would be your fate?
37:08 Speaker 01 Then it's death. You were usually worried to death, which was strangled and then your dead body burned. And that was publicly done so that everybody can come and see that the devil was a prince of liars. Look, he didn't save his witch. This is why you shouldn't do, you know, first of all, it's, we've caught her, the bad person is dying, but also look, the devil did not come to save her.
37:29 Kate Lister? They'd be strangled first, that was the usual.
37:31 Speaker 01 Mostly strangled first here in Scotland, um, and then their dead bodies burned, yeah. And then again, the dead bodies would be burnt to nothing. So there was nothing left. So there were no graves or whatever. And. And it takes a long time to actually burn a human body, and it takes a long time to burn a human body in the open air. So if that's in the marketplace, you're walking past that for days, and children will be walking past that.
37:56 Kate Lister? I often think about about that. It's so grisly that you can't really get your head around it of like, like what that spectacle must have been like, how long that would take to happen. And of course, they might have known who this woman was. They might have like been somebody that they knew from years.
38:15 Speaker 01 That could have been your mother. It could have been your mother or your grandmother.
38:18 Kate Lister? Oh.
38:19 Speaker 01 I mean, the generational, if you think about, if you take a child of five or six years old, and you're living in a society where men are men and women are women, and then all of a sudden, men who aren't your daddy drag your mummy away, and they all tell you that your mummy's wicked, and then the next time you see your mummy, she's had her head shaved, she's covered in bruises, she's in a hair shift, she's in the town square, she's being strangled by the local blacksmith, because you might not have an executioner in your town, then she's tied to a stake and she's burned, and you have to watch that as a five-year-old.
38:49 Kate Lister? My god.
38:49 Speaker 01 There is no way that child's not gonna have trauma.
38:52 Kate Lister? No.
38:53 Speaker 01 By the time that child's fifteen or sixteen, I would suspect that that child would act out that trauma in the way that you and I might recognise today, and the local minister would say, oh, well, see, told you, daughter of a witch, now she's acting like a witch.
39:08 Kate Lister? Wow.
39:08 Speaker 01 And so you get that generational trauma, because it's not a one-off. The Witchcraft Act comes in in fifteen sixty-three and is not repealed until seventeen thirty-six in Scotland. So you might see your mother, your grandmother, you know, all these stories, and if you don't know, if it's not your mother, you'll know somebody who it was.
39:27 Kate Lister? Yeah.
39:28 Speaker 01 This is small-town Scotland as well. We're a country of small towns. We're not like England with big cities. We're a small-town country.
39:34 Kate Lister? Yeah.
39:35 Speaker 01 Everybody knows everybody. You're living in in communities of maybe only five or six thousand. You would know who the local witch was.
39:42 Kate Lister? When were Isabelle's Confessions published?
39:45 Speaker 01 They were published by Pitcairn in the nineteenth century. Pitcairn was a chap who um collected a lot of various Scottish trials. He was a lawyer himself, and he published them in the nineteenth century, and everybody sort of went, oh, okay, that's interesting. Simply because there is all this stuff about fairies and magic and flying and hairs and chants and charms and everything, so it really, it really took off. And, and there's talk about witches and thirteen witches being in a coven and dancing naked and having sex with the devil. I mean, it's, it's, it's Hammer Horror's dream of a story.
40:22 Kate Lister? Always having sex with the devil. That comes up again and again and again.
40:27 Speaker 01 You do wonder about the interrogators as to exactly what the motive is.
40:30 Kate Lister? I wonder about the interrogators. I absolutely wonder about the interrogators.
40:37 Speaker 01 Yeah, there's, there's, there's a little bit of, there's a little bit of too much focus on that from my perspective, but you know, you do wonder about it, yeah.
40:46 Kate Lister? As a final question then, what's your guess as to what happened to Isabel? I mean, you've sort of given us the scenarios, but what's your hunch?
40:54 Speaker 01 I think she possibly died in her cell. I think she died before trial.
41:00 Kate Lister? Yeah, I think that would make sense.
41:02 Speaker 01 I think she's been an older lady. And of course, remember, nobody's feeding her when she's in, I mean, she's in there for six weeks. Well, why, why would you feed a witch? I mean, you barely feed your prisoners anyway. So it literally was bread and water, if you were lucky. She's lying in a cell where she's having to go to the toilet in the corner. She's on a stinking straw with rats and cockroaches. She's an older lady. I think she possibly just died.
41:28 Kate Lister? Hmm.
41:28 Speaker 01 In the cell.
41:29 Kate Lister? I think that would make sense.
41:30 Speaker 01 And they've just got rid of her, got rid of the body.
41:34 Kate Lister? Isabel.
41:35 Speaker 01 And we, we do have notes of that. There's a case I know of in the Borders where an old lady died and they just dumped her body and used her clothes as washing rags.
41:45 Kate Lister? Oh.
41:46 Speaker 01 And the thing is that that old lady in the Borders is thought of as a witch. She never went to trial. Isabel Goudy is named as Queen of the Witches. She didn't go to trial.
41:55 Kate Lister? We have no idea.
41:57 Speaker 01 She did not, as far as we know, there is no trial, you know, it's not as if there's a trial that says she was innocent or guilty.
42:02 Kate Lister? Yeah, yeah.
42:03 Speaker 01 Or there are no trial records for her. There's nothing.
42:06 Kate Lister? Oh, Mary, you have been wonderful to talk to. Thank you so much for sharing this horrendous but fascinating history. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?
42:18 Speaker 01 They can find me at marywcraig.com or I've got a little book coming out next March, which is called A History of Scottish Witches. So that's not exactly pleasant reading, but hopefully interesting reading.
42:31 Kate Lister? I bet it will be. Thank you so much. You've been marvellous.
42:35 Speaker 01 You're welcome. Thanks very much. And thanks for having me on the podcast and I'll come along and talk about other bits and bobs any time you want.
42:41 Kate Lister? Amazing.
42:45 Kate Lister? Thank you for listening. Thank you so much to Mary for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along, whatever it is you get your podcasts. Coming up, we've got Sex and Scandal in Hollywood's Golden Age, the first in a new mini-series where we will be exploring this era. And if you want us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected] . This podcast was edited by Hannah Theodorov and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.
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