Britain is nothing if not an island of bad weather and, for better or for worse, a nation of amateur meteorologists.
Many of us have the sense that the Mediterranean heatwaves, micro ice-ages and biblical floods of recent years are something not seen before, and we know our storms so well that we give them names fit for a friend. Our scientists and seers tell us that climate change is afoot, and that our planet is spinning towards an environmental catastrophe which if unchecked will put a stop to human life as we know it.
James VI and I knew differently. The self-styled first King of Great Britain and Ireland knew for a fact that the storms which beset his return voyage to Edinburgh from Denmark in the spring of 1590, in the company of his new wife Anne of Denmark, were the work of the devil; specifically, they were the work of the devil acting through a coven of witches operating in North Berwick in what is now East Lothian.
He knew because they had told him, and were able to report details of the conversation he had had with his queen on their wedding night in Oslo. The result of this discovery was the most famous witch-hunt in Scottish history, in which dozens of treasonous witches were arrested, tried and executed. James’s book on witches, Daemonologie, was printed in 1597, and in 1606, now in London, he was treated to a performance of a new play on the subject – Macbeth, by the house playwright of his royal acting troupe, William Shakespeare.
A letter written by James VI and I in the autumn 1589 while waiting anxiously for news of his bride is one of the highlights of Lyon & Turnbull’s Rare Books, Manuscripts, Maps & Photographs sale on 07 February 2024. The first letter written entirely in his hand to come to auction in over 50 years, it is accompanied by a selection of important documents from key figures at the court of his predecessor Elizabeth I.
Elizabeth’s lord treasurer William Burghley is found making urgent preparations for the Spanish Armada, which in the event met its own weather-borne catastrophe. Francis Walsingham, her principal secretary and spymaster, cuts a rather more dubious figure engaging in secret manoeuvres to put his man in the influential position of chief baron of the exchequer. The ill-starred Earl of Essex appears twice, first as a young man desperate for money, and later as an established courtier plotting a secret alliance with France against Spain.
