Heather House: Witch of the Moors
My latest book hot off the press “Heather House: Witch of the Moors” may be more “Nightmare Before Christmas” than Christmas, but it DOES have happy ending!!!
And it still might be fun to read curled up in front of a fire and drinking hot chocolate…
Maybe the hero is enough to warm your toes?
Maybe make you wish he were under your tree? 🙂
Witches and crazy kings throughout history have always fascinated me, and even more when the two are combined together. In researching Scottish witch trials for my next set of books, I became fascinated with James VI of Scotland. Man, that guy was superstitious to the extreme and I couldn’t resist making him the backdrop for my “Heather House’ books.
King James VI was a very impressionable guy and easily manipulated. His fascination with witches began when his bride’s attempt to sail from Denmark to Scotland failed due to bad weather and she ended up in Norway instead. The Danish nobles began pointing fingers pretty darn quickly, ending with the Danish Admiral blaming it all on witchcraft. The Danish king burned six women for the crime.
That piqued James’ curiosity. He sailed up to Norway to fetch his bride and watched the Danish Witch Trials with interest. On the return trip to Scotland with his bride, he encountered a storm himself and when he landed back home, began gossiping how he must be the victim of witchcraft.
Of course, someone got the bright idea to twist the situation to his own benefit. David Seton from North Berwick, a fishing town on the east coast of Scotland, offered up his servant, one Gellie Duncan, as a witch who had tried to kill the king by sinking his ship on the return voyage from Denmark. There is a fascinating book on David Seton, and all of the women he offered to the king as witches. It studies their relationships, and how they all knew him, with the original ‘witches’ being the women who had informed his wife of his illicit affairs, leaving one to believe that David’s ‘witches’ were simply a convenient way to rid himself of his problems and seek revenge. Pretty likely, in my opinion!
It all quickly blossomed out of control, and in the end, the king fancied himself such an expert witch-hunter, that he wrote a book on the subject titled “Daemonologie’, blaming women for their weakness in being trapped by the devil–and with this writing, he effectively launched Scotland’s first witch craze.
In “Heather House: Witch of the Moors”, I cover this story and the story of David Seton offering King James his own serving maid, Gillie Duncan, along with other women in the village who made his life miserable, and of how he and King James tortured these poor souls until they confessed of conjuring up the storm by burning a black cat and throwing it into the sea, along with other unholy rituals.
The North Berwick Trials lasted about two years, and there were other waves of witch trials in the following years. All-in-all, some accounts claim up to 6000 people may have been accused as witches and killed in these trials.
King James VI of Scotland became Queen Elizabeth I of England’s heir, and upon her death, he moved to England to become King James I of England where the playwright, Shakespeare, penned MacBeth to cater to the ego of the new witch-obsessed king. And while King James went on to accomplish other things in his life, he holds the record for hanging more witches than any other member of England’s monarchy.
Leave a Comment