Loading summary
Transcript46 lines
- [00:00]
Blinds.com Narrator
At blinds.com, it's not just about window treatments. It's about you, your style, your space, your way. Whether you DIY or want the pros to handle it all, you'll have the confidence of knowing it's done right. From free expert design help to our 100% satisfaction guarantee, everything we do is made to fit your life and your windows. Because@blinds.com, the only thing we treat better than windows is you. Shop blinds.com Labor Day mega sale happening now. Save up to 50% site wide plus a free measure. Rules and restrictions may apply.
- [00:30]
Marshall Po
Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:37]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased to have back on the podcast Dr. Stephen Vera Pen to tell us about his latest book titled Witches A King's Obsession, published by Berlin in 2025, taking us to an interesting time and place in British history. We're going to be talking about Scottish history and English history and how those things begin to become combined under the reign of King James I, or 6th, depending on which country you're in, who, among other things, was quite famous for being pretty intensely obsessed with witches. Obviously, as the book's subtitle suggests. Why? Why was he obsessed with witches? What did this have to do with politics in Scotland? What did this have to do with religion in Scotland and England? What does expanding our view from just him as an individual help us understand about all of these topics? So I think this is going to be quite an interesting conversation. Stephen, thank you much for coming back onto the New Books Network to tell us about your latest work.
- [02:38]
Dr. Stephen Vera Pen
Thank you very much, Miranda. Thank you for having me.
- [02:41]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Could you please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit, maybe for listeners who haven't heard your previous interview here, and tell us why you decided to write this book.
- [02:50]
Dr. Stephen Vera Pen
Sure. I'm Stephen Verapin and I have recently published. This was a couple of years ago, I published a book on King James himself, the Wisest Fool. What I found when I was working on that book, writing it, researching it, was. Was just, as is the nature with biographies, there are a lot of rabbit holes that you don't really have the opportunity to dive down. I mean, clearly, in terms of word count and witchcraft and witches in the occult was really one of them. So I felt in the Wisest fool that I was kind of acknowledging it, yes, talking about what happened in broad strokes, but there was so much more there. And I really, really wanted to dive into it, discover for myself what was going on with this guy and the occult and witchcraft and everything, you know, what did it mean to him? Why. So that led me into witches. So it was quite a nice thing, actually. So I'm working on one book. I've got the germ of an idea for the next one.
- [03:48]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's nice when it works out that way. Yeah. And now we've got this investigation specifically looking at the witchcraft piece of his interests. But of course, that doesn't come from nothing. It's not like he, as King goes, I've thought about witches and no one ever has before. Right. So can you help us understand a bit of the context? For example, why was witchcraft a concern to say, if we go back in time a bit, to give us that foundation, the 15th century Catholic Church, why was that on their radar?
- [04:17]
Dr. Stephen Vera Pen
Well, that's an interesting point. People have a perception of witch hunting and mass panics and purges and trials and all of that sort of thing. They have this perception that it was a medieval pursuit. So, yes, they are thinking of, say, 14th century, 15th century. And it wasn't. I mean, one of the big criticisms against the Catholic Church, believe it or not, was that they hadn't been tough enough on witches. They hadn't carved out a kind of clear position on witchcraft. And this was a criticism from some voices in the medieval Catholic Church, but then it was also a criticism from various Protestant denominations at the time of the Reformation and Counter Reformation. So what we have going on is this idea that witches were a problem, but not everyone agreed on the extent of the problem or even the reality of the problem. And we have lots and lots of calls for something to be done about it from all kinds of religious hues. We need a position on this, we need an official position on this. So, yeah, the Catholic Church, from quite a lot of perspectives, had failed to deal with this supposed problem.
- [05:31]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that is really interesting, especially given the sort of timing of it and the pressures. It sounds like the Church was getting very much from the sort of outside. So if we're talking then about Reformation, Counter Reformation, obviously Protestant Scotland was pretty intensely on one side of that debate. So if we've mentioned the Catholic Church's position on this, how did Protestant Scotland understand witches and witch hunts sort of in the time that James is coming to power as a young man, as being educated in this context, was it similar to what you've just told us about the Catholic Church, or was it different?
- [06:08]
Dr. Stephen Vera Pen
It was actually fairly similar. So what we find in this period, James's youth, is both Scotland and England actually had recently passed Witchcraft Act. So in England it was 1562, in Scotland it was 1563. That's under Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots. But nothing hugely happened. I mean, there was no mass panic, there was no overnight sense that we need to start purging. It just became established as a crime like any other crime. But I think, really interestingly, under Elizabeth I, for example, very early in her reign, you see some of her more reformist bishops criticizing her for not doing enough about it, this supposed problem of witchcraft. So, again, just as the Catholic Church had faced calls to do more, these Protestant, I'm not going to say extremist, hotter sort of reformers were saying, we need to do more. So this was a big opportunity. I mean, that sounds really cynical, but it was a big opportunity for Protestant denominations to establish an identity. We need a position on witches. We need to stake out what the official position is. You see, in Scotland particularly, but in England too, after the Reformation, it wasn't as if the new religion was seen as a finished job. There was still a lot of calls. We need to do more. We need to sort of really, really firmly establish what our ideology is.
- [07:41]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's definitely an interesting thing to think about. This isn't just a religious issue, it's all intertwined with politics and power as well. What about in Elizabeth's Eng? Obviously, slightly different position in terms of Reformation politics. Where were they at with witchcraft at this point?
- [07:57]
Dr. Stephen Vera Pen
So, under Elizabeth, what we say is witchcraft is established as a crime, but so it's on the books, it's gone through Parliament. But what we find is there are no mass panics, there are scattered cases, sometimes numerous people at the one time tried. People are certainly executed for it. But the idea is that, well, you have to have murdered someone with witchcraft in order to be executed as a witch. So murderous witchcraft is the kind of the thing that will get you executed, will get you hanged in Elizabethan England. Obviously, we can talk about how ridiculous that proposition is, because you cannot murder people with witchcraft, but if the courts found you guilty of it, you could be executed. So if it basically becomes a crime, like any other crime in Elizabethan England and in Scotland in James's youth, it's just another crime. It's an unusual crime, it's a kind of sensationalist crime. But like thievery, like murder by any other means, with a knife or something like that, these are things that can get you hanged. But there's no great charge, no one's leading a charge against this cream.
- [09:12]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's definitely very helpful to understand, given how often we sort of assume that it's always this completely separate category of crime. It's like, well, actually, hang on a second. When we go back and look at the history properly, as you're telling us, it was known, it was considered an issue, but alongside other ones too. So, moving then to James specifically, how did he start getting interested and involved in the ideas of witch hunts in Scotland?
- [09:38]
Dr. Stephen Vera Pen
Well, it's interesting in James's case because we can pinpoint, I mean, we can really clearly pinpoint when this obsession was born. And it was born after his trip to Scandinavia. So what happened was when James married his bride, Anna of Denmark, he went over to Scandinavia, spent a wonderful winter over there, thoroughly enjoying himself, drinking heavily. And when he got back to Scotland, he started to hear rumors about what was going on in Scandinavia. So it's not whilst he was over there, it's when he got back there became a lot of debate about why in the first place did he have to travel over there. Oh, well, it was because of these storms that had broke out in the North Sea that had prevented Anna from sailing herself. What happened in Copenhagen was some alleged accused witches were charged with having raised those storms. And when news of this crossed over the North Sea back To Scotland. James really became intrigued. And this was a twofold thing. It was because, well, if these witches had been raising storms from Copenhagen, they couldn't have worked alone. He decided they must have had Scottish compatriots. But it had also been a plot against his life and his bride's life. These storms had threatened him. He'd sailed into the heart of them. So his imagination, I think, got fired up. But there was another strand to this and this was, well, the whole reality of witchcraft and the phenomenon of witchcraft was a really hot issue in debating chambers across Europe and universities across Europe. And James was nothing if not an intellectual. And he saw again an opportunity here to dive into this himself, to stake out a possession.
- [11:26]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, so that's actually, I think, a really key part of this is the intellectual interest in it and the kind of wanting to make that public. So can you tell us a bit about kind of his key writings? He writes a lot, he publishes a lot, he talks about his writings and publications a lot. Why was this such a big deal to him? What was he hoping to achieve by this?
- [11:47]
Dr. Stephen Vera Pen
Yeah, it's a good point about it, James. I was at a conference all about King James last month and one of the points I made was the guy never had an unexpressed thought. Everything that went on, he had an opinion on it and he wanted everyone to know his opinion. And this was important because he was the king. I mean, when the king is sharing his opinions, people take them seriously. So he saw this opportunity really to present himself as God's hero, God's champion and Satan's enemy. And that became part of his identity, really his monarchical identity. All monarchs at the time had them. And sometimes they would be fairly protean and they would shift over the course of a reign. James certainly did. But at this moment he saw a potential identity as God's champion. And it was going to be, yeah, I'm king, but I also deserve to be head of the Kirk, the Scottish Church. What better to really make that case than to show just how strongly on God's side I am. So, yeah, he really saw a chance to promote himself as king, as enemy of Satan, and as a real frontline intellectual on the cutting edge. This is one of the things we think of witchcraft, I think, as a kind of backwards looking thing. God, how could they have thought in these ridiculous old fashioned ways? I think we need to kind of squash that down and think. No, this was cutting edge thinking at the time. This was new progressive thinking. It was wrong. There's no such Thing as witchcraft, but it was cutting edge thinking at the time.
- [13:25]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's definitely helpful to understand, especially given the distance between our thinking now and his then. It is, however, one thing to be, as you said, expressing one's thoughts at all times and making sure people know. And of course, as you said, they do have to pay attention to some extent, just because he's the king. But his ideas seem to have more sway and popularity than just the fact he was king. So what was he tapping into? Why were his ideas so popular?
- [13:53]
Dr. Stephen Vera Pen
Well, this is something that I think is fairly easy to answer because what he did was he led that first great Scottish witch hunt, the kind of national witch hunt which was in the wake of his return from Scandinavia. This became known as the north berwick witch trials, 1590-91. On the back of that, following that, he wrote his demonology. And it is a fascinating read and it remains a fascinating read. And the reason is it's spooky, it's sensationalist, it's dark, it's interesting. It goes into things like possession and types of possession, touches on werewolves and things like this. So these are things that are still popular today. I mean, we are still interested in spooky stories, horror, the occult, all of that stuff. So I think there was a strong element of. There, I mean, in grasping witchcraft and this subject of witchcraft, he was touching on true crime, which is still popular, true crime of its day. He was touching on horror, which is still popular. So just this was interesting stuff and you can see the proof of that in the various sequels. I mean, playwrights ended up getting hold of this sort of stuff, pamphleteers got hold of this stuff, turned it into really popular pamphlets. So there was a huge public appetite for unusual crime. There still is.
- [15:20]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah. I think that's worth making the connection to things like true crime and horror today. I think so often the idea is like, oh, well, King James so crazy about the witches. We would never think like that now. And it's like, well, actually, there are some threads here that are worth pulling out. There is, of course, though, also the political side of this that we mentioned a bit earlier in terms of the Kirk and the Catholic Church being interested in witch hunting. When James got so interested in this, was this something that the Kirk in Scotland that didn't always like James having lots of power. Was this something they were happy for him to get involved in, or was this sort of another area of contention for the King and the Kirk?
- [16:00]
Dr. Stephen Vera Pen
Well, yes, we have this image of James constantly at loggerheads with The Kirk, because he wanted to be head and they wanted him to just be a member like any other member. But on this subject, they could absolutely unite and make kind of unhappy bedfellows, I suppose. Why was that the case? Because witches were the common enemy. Witches were someone that Presbyterians could hate, that the King could show himself as a great enemy of, that the Catholics could hate and try and show themselves an enemy of. And this is probably why it became such a popular pursuit, something that we see, sadly, I think, in various guises across the centuries. How many times have we heard, for example, politicians saying such and such or so and so is a problem and the last government has failed to deal with it, but we are going to deal with it. They're kind of agreeing that X is an enemy. And however much previous governments, previous religious parties have failed to deal with X, they're going to deal with it. So no one wanted to look soft on witches. They were the common enemy. So the Kirk and the King could absolutely unite in leading a charge against them.
- [17:19]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's definitely helpful to understand. Again, kind of goes back to what you said of the moment of opportunity, in a way, to stake political power. So interesting to see how all these threads come together. If we're then talking about James being very publicly invested in all of this and the Kirk also backing him up, what sorts of things do we need to understand for the witch panics that we see in Scotland? I mean, was it always as simple as kind of anytime there was a rumour, then automatically we've got a mass panic with loads of trials and deaths? Or what did this actually kind of look like in terms of sort of these ideas being enacted?
- [17:56]
Dr. Stephen Vera Pen
Well, that's a really good question, because the answer is no. The kind of mass panics were always unusual and they were always rare. And that led to a lot of people talking to, well, why at certain times did things snowball and why other times, most of the time, actually, did they not? And did they just sort of fade into, again, just being a scattered crime like any other crime? You may have a few people executed here and there, centuries, sorry, over the decades, but it wasn't snowballing every time. Scotland wasn't living in a constant state of terror with mass arrests all the time. That was not the case. So this does raise the question, why, at certain times did it snowball into mass panics and purges? And my answer to that, I think, is because at certain times and in certain places, people were leading it, people were leading charges against it. They weren't all the time. James wasn't constantly leading witch hunts in Scotland. He did it twice, two distinct times. Other times he had other things going on. He was busy with other things. So that, I think is why you occasionally get the mass panics and the purges when people either at national level or at local level are driving them.
- [19:16]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's helpful to understand that this isn't sort of like there's an accusation and then inevitably, without anyone having any choice in the matter, it becomes this massive deal. It's like. No, no, no, hang on a second. There are choices being made here. There are leadership elements to consider. And that probably helps explain to some extent why, as you said, Scotland's not living in a constant state of terror when James is king just of Scotland. And does that also explain why the panics die down a bit after he got. He became king of England as well?
- [19:45]
Dr. Stephen Vera Pen
Yes, I think it was when James Arc goes south in 1603, I mean, famously, when he succeeded to England, he couldn't get out of Scotland fast enough. He was the first horse out of Scotland, practically. And when he left, yes, for the rest of his lifetime, up until 1625, yeah, there were cases of witches being accused, being executed in Scotland, but again, just at that kind of low level, so low frequency level, there weren't any of the big hunts because he wasn't there leading them. And no one stepped into his shoes when he left Scotland as the kind of national witch hunter.
- [20:23]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, so that makes sense for Scotland, but it would imply that because he's now focused on England, that as soon as he gets to England, or at least sometime while he's king in England, there are more witch panics in England. Why is that not the case?
- [20:38]
Dr. Stephen Vera Pen
Very good point and very good question. And this has led over the centuries, people to come up with all sorts of interesting views on why he didn't immediately take up the cudgels against witches in England, including, and very often, oh, he became more civilized. That's what happens if you're Scottish and you go south to England, you suddenly become more civilized and you forget all that occult nonsense. That's not the case. What happened when he got to England and he said this in his writings, he said this in his speeches. He literally thought England was the promised land. That's what he called it. He did not think that England had a witch problem or a Satan problem or anything like that. He thought that the Tudors had had an easy time of it. That because being head of the church was part of being the monarch In England, that. Yeah, it was in a settled state of affairs, that country. He was quite happy with the English Church. He wasn't competing with it for power or anything like that. He was at the head supreme governor, supreme head of the English Church. He had no reason to believe that England was the devil's playground. Quite the opposite. Whereas he had held that view about Scotland. James, despite being a Scot, obviously had a very jaundiced view of his home nation. I think, understandably, given how often he'd seen coups against him, rebellions, kidnappings, all that sort of thing.
- [22:09]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, so the idea is that because sort of the political ecosystem was so volatile in Scotland, especially towards him, when he gets to England, he becomes king. Well, but he faces opposition in becoming king. So can we talk a bit more about kind of why he thought Scotland had loads of devils running around it, but England didn't?
- [22:29]
Dr. Stephen Vera Pen
Yes, I think part of that, because it raises a question, it's one that I talk about in the book the Gunpowder Plot, for example, one of the most famous attempts against him or attempted disasters in English history. Why didn't he accuse them of being witches then? Why didn't he use that as a point? Because that's the kind of thing he would have done in Scotland whenever there was a conspiracy against him. The Gowrie conspiracy, for example. In 1600, he tried to accuse the Earl of Gaudy of having been a wizard, worked with witchcraft and sorcerers and things. He didn't do that with a Gunpowder Plot. Now, I think part of this is not just that he's now King of England and he thinks England is settled and stable. He does think that. But he doesn't try and inflate these terrorist attempts on his life into witchcraft plots. And I think that is because he has a big agenda when he gets to England, and he sees this through pretty much towards until the end of his life, and that's peace. He's trying to very strongly bring Protestant sects together, reach some accord with the Catholic Church. His idea is unity. He wants unity between. Between Scotland and England. He wants unity in the Protestant faith. He wants unity throughout Christendom. And I think it would no longer serve him particularly well to be finding disunity. So accusing Catholic terrorists, for example, of being witches would have undermined his point. So his views don't change. That's one of the other big questions, or one of the big claims that's often made, is that he kind of modified his views when he got to England. He didn't. In fact, when Witchcraft cases were brought to him as the anger case was in the early 17th century. He's still interested, he's still intensely interested in this phenomenon. But he points to his book Demonology and he says, read my book, I've laid down the rules, the guidelines, everything that you need there. Sort true witchcraft cases from false counterfeit witchcraft cases. It's all in there, go and read it. So in that sense that the guy had literally written the book on this subject and he kind of still believed everything in that book, but he'd moved on and had to deal with other things.
- [24:57]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
It's true, he did have rather a lot to be getting on with as King of England. So I suppose that makes sense. This isn't, however, the end of the book. Even after James dies, there's still some things going on here and in fact, England's first witch panic happens after he's dead. Why?
- [25:14]
Dr. Stephen Vera Pen
Yes, this was one of the nerve wracking things. When it got to the end of James's life and I was moving from star scruffs into falling bands, I thought, oh God, this is new territory for me. But it was interesting. Yes. And the book had to cover more than James's life because there was an enormous legacy of what he left behind in terms of witchcraft, the occult, witch hunting and yet. Absolutely right. The kind of major hunts and the major panics in England, the ones that people have heard of, he's made about them is the East Anglian ones, Matthew Hopkins, the witch finder general, all of that sort of stuff that's after James. But he had read James's book, Matthew Hopkins. So we still see that really dark.
- [25:59]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Legacy and we see it in Scotland as well. Right. I mean, you talk about how we see which one's happening in a bunch of countries in England, as you just mentioned, in Scotland sort of after his death. But it seems like Scotland kind of more than anywhere else in Europe has them later than anyone else, all the way into the 1660s.
- [26:19]
Dr. Stephen Vera Pen
Yeah. In fact, further on we see where I live in Paisley, we've got going on in 1690s mass witch trials. So, yeah. Why did this happen after James's death? Why was Scotland still affected and affected for so long? And my argument in the book there is, I mean, it's partly a criticism of James, but it went off in directions he could not possibly have imagined. But he had educated Scotland and the people of Scotland into thinking they had a witch problem. A similar issue that I met when I kept saying England affected, but only regionally. So it would have These mass regional panics, but not national panics. Whereas Scotland had continued to have the big national panics. Scotland had been educated into thinking it had a generational witch problem. Parts of England, but only parts, only regions, had been kind of educated into thinking they had generational witch problems. And you see this even with the same families affected generation after generation, they would get bad names. In Scotland, the country got a bad name partly because its king had given it a bad name. But we can't ignore the elephant in the room here, I think, which is to some extent, these were popular. It doesn't say much for humanity, I suppose. The good thing is they were always rare. So that's. That's one positive about humans. It was always a rare thing to have these mass panics, but they seemed to be popular. So when they started, when the snowball got rolling, it was a popular pursuit. People liked accusing each other. I mean, it sounds horrible to say, but people seemed to like accusing each other and wanted the legal machinery. I mean, there's that demand for the legal machinery that James had instituted. One of the things, one of the innovations James had made was centralizing the process in Scotland by which commissions for witch hunting went out. So it was all. All went through Edinburgh and you can almost see the kind of the popularity radiating out. So in Scotland, it's the lowlands that are really affected. The Highlands escape this almost entirely. Ireland escapes this almost entirely. Where you see the center of power really driving much hunts and processing much hunts at a high level. That's when it's concentrated.
- [28:49]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's really interesting to think about in terms of the legacy of his obsession, really, as the subtitle says. How then did all of this end? When did it actually end? And how did we get to a point where this stopped being something that people kept latching onto?
- [29:05]
Dr. Stephen Vera Pen
Well, I would argue that it never ended. I mean, the terrors, the horror kind of aspect of it ended. The fact that people could be executed ended. But people never stopped believing in witchcraft, I don't think. I mean, you can go online now and buy potions that are supposed to do things. You can buy wax effigies and things. These are things that would have got you executed in the past. What happened really, to bring what I call and refer to in the book as the dark age of witch hunting was the law standards of courtrooms changed. So one of the things James had put in demonology and had a huge legacy, not just in Britain, but across the Atlantic as well, was he made a strong argument for what he considered the gold standards of proof and evidence. And one of them was confession. So if a witch confessed that that was your gold standard evidence, even if that confession came about via torture and maybe talk in a minute about some of the hideous tortures that were involved. He also considered excellent evidence to be accusations from other witches. What do we then find? Very quickly people, people come to assume that's what's expected of them. So they do start accusing one another. So that was considered good evidence. The devil's mark or the witch's mark. So it's any sort of bodily imperfection which very often found in the private parts, which I suppose tells you something about what these witch finders were really primarily interested in. That was considered good evidence. The floating test or the swimming test, which people have often heard of, that had been discussed on the continent. James endorsed that as reasonable evidence. You could float a witch and that would, that would act as proof. So these were his gold standards of evidence. These are things that the courtroom would accept. What we start to see over the period though is each one of these things totally rightly begins to get discredited. So the confessions become so bizarre and of such just indefensible nature that they are no longer taken seriously in the courtroom. Over time, accusations by other witches are disgraced by some self proclaimed witches demonstrably lying and it's proven that they're lying, so that falls away. The devil's mark and the witch's mark, these are discredited, I think by self proclaimed prodders or broders or prickers as they were sometimes called, who made a trade of going from place to place testing bodies, primarily women's bodies. But 85% of accused witches were women. Um, so I think that they give us a very bad name. So all of these gold standards of evidence and proof have become very tarnished towards the end of our period that the courtroom, which again I think what is a courtroom meant to do, it's meant to uphold good standards of evidence. If these have no longer come to be seen as good standards of evidence, the law changes. And that's what happened that overnight, literally overnight, I mean, the law changed. So one day it was illegal to be a witch and practice witchcraft. The next day it was illegal to even claim that witchcraft existed and was a real phenomenon. So the law changed people's views, I think. Didn't change. In fact, there are some horrible stories about the public demand to do something about these people, resulting in lynch mobs and things. Because the law had stopped taking it seriously. They took the law into their own hands and started meting out hideous, rough justice on people they thought were witches. So I'm not sure the belief ever went away, but I think that the law's willingness to take it seriously, thankfully went away.
- [33:23]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's definitely a very big change. Is there anything further you want to tell us about what you found out and put in the book? Anything we haven't covered that you want to mention?
- [33:33]
Dr. Stephen Vera Pen
Well, one of the things I think I really wanted to emphasize, because what people very often ask is what message would you like people to take away from this book? One of them, I think, is that it wasn't backwards thinking. So I'm not defending James here or the people that followed in his footsteps. Their thinking was hideous and it was wrong. But as very often in modern fiction, because you'll know probably that there's a lot of modern fiction about witch trials, and some of it sometimes involves James, and he's very often the villain of the piece or one of the villains. But we almost need to reverse our thinking on that entirely, because in his day and from his perspective, he was the hero. He was the hero of the hour because he was God's champion. Similarly, people like Matthew Hopkins, again, if you've ever. Did you ever see the movie with Vincent Price?
- [34:33]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
I haven't, but I've heard of it.
- [34:35]
Dr. Stephen Vera Pen
It's on YouTube. It's worth a watch. It's completely historical, but it's worth a watch. Vincent Price is always worth a watch, but he's very much the villain. Evil Witchfinder General. But Matthew Hopkins was invited by local authorities to come and sort out their witch problem. I mean, he. He was making a trade of it, certainly, and he was extremely cynical, but he couldn't have existed in that. He couldn't have succeeded in what he was doing unless people were actually viewing him as a hero. This guy's going to come and sort out our problems. Let's invite him over. So that's one of the things. But it, I think, suggests something a bit bigger about history, and that's something that we often forget. Very often. I'm guilty of this. We think of history as a kind of progressive march, things constantly getting better and things improving. And you particularly see this with the Renaissance. If we accept that the Renaissance up to the Enlightenment period was the Golden Age or, sorry, the Dark Age of witch hunting, that's unusual because you probably most people will think of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment as these are. These are good things. This was a just nice straight line of things getting better. That's not how history works. And that's what I really wanted to emphasize. Two people like King James hunting witches was progressive. They were getting rid of what they thought was a problem. So, yeah, history is not just a straight line of things getting better. There are a lot of blind alleys and it goes off in horrible directions and wrong directions and things.
- [36:20]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's definitely worth keeping in mind. I wondered, as a final question, whether this book, like your previous one, has already sparked the germ of a next project, or if there's anything you're working on coming up, even if it's not about King James, that you want to give us a brief sneak preview of.
- [36:36]
Dr. Stephen Vera Pen
Well, yes, I'm deep in a previous king. Oh, that sounds odd. Actually, I've gone further back in history. I am looking now at Henry viii. Now I know you're going to immediately think again. Hasn't everyone looked at Henry viii? There is a kind of James and Jacobean link to this. What I'm looking at is Henry VIII in terms of biography, but not just as King of England. I'm really interested in what his relationship was with Scotland particularly, but also Wales and also Ireland. So the book's going to be called Overlord and it's very much looking at Henry as a British figure within a British context and how he was really trying to promote himself and England as not just this kind of isolationist country, but the dominant British nation which should steamroller over all the other British nations. So there's a lot of interesting sources that haven't been used in Henry biographies before, from the Irish perspective, Welsh perspective, Scottish chronicle histories and things which talk about him, talk about his wives, but give it a very different view of him.
- [37:56]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
All right, well, that certainly sounds like some quite interesting sources to be engaging with, so best of luck with that investigation.
- [38:02]
Dr. Stephen Vera Pen
Thank you very much.
- [38:03]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
While you are doing that, of course listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled A King's Obsession, published by Berlin in 2025. Stephen, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and telling us about your book.
- [38:15]
Dr. Stephen Vera Pen
Thanks very much, Miranda. Thank you for having me. Packages by Expedia.
- [38:31]
Blinds.com Narrator
You were made to occasionally take the hard route to the top of the Eiffel Tower.
- [38:37]
Dr. Stephen Vera Pen
We were made to easily bundle your trip Expedia made to travel flight inclusive packages are atoll protected.