Series 5 > Miscellany [of the Scottish History Society] XIII

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MISCELLANY XIII
When the case is compared with the commissions issued to
Cochrane, Lord Sempill and Bryce Sempill of Cathcart, it can be seen
that they received commissions to try another 30 men and women. Put
in the context of the pattern for witch prosecutions across the entire
1630s, the episode can be seen as an anomaly. It accounts for a third of
all witchcraft accusations over the entire period covered by the register.
No other local panic between 1631 and 1642 produced more than 8
accused witches; the Inverkip panic produced 32 accusations which
reached the privy council in one form or another. In this respect it was
on a par with the most intense local panics of 1629-30. The only
comparably intense panic in such a small area was the Peebles hunt of
1629 which also produced 30 accusations in privy council
commissions.1
The roots of the episode are ffustratingly obscure as no depositions
or trial records seem to survive. The key probably lies in the support of
the local Catholic noble family, the Sempills combined with a successful
partnership between Cochrane and Hamilton.2 The complaints of Love
and Wodrow to the privy council show neatly how the ecclesiastical and
secular arms worked hand in hand. Ironically it was the minister and not
the sheriff depute who took the role of torturer-in-chief whilst the sheriff
depute whisked away prisoners under cover of night. This was unusual;
as Michael Wasser has shown, torture was rare and was not as a rule
authorised by privy council commission.3 The privy council was clearly
less than happy with their over-enthusiastic approach to the matter, as its
action in taking both women out of their immediate jurisdiction
showed.4
It was perhaps a case of too much education, rather than too little on
the part of minister and sheriff depute. They were educated at the
University of Glasgow in the 1620s, which had strong links with the
continent, drawing its professors from the Protestant universities of
France. Cochrane as earl of Dundonald retained a strong connection
with the university, endowing bursaries there.5 Up to the early 1620s
1 Lamer et al., Source-Book, 85-98.
2 Hamilton had a Glasgow MA 1622: H. Scott (ed.), Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae [Fasti],
7 vols. (2nd edn., Edinburgh, 1915-), i, 265.
3 Wasser, ‘The privy council and the witches’, 34.
4 RPC, 2nd ser., iv, 473.
5 Robert Boyd of Trochrig, principal 1615-22, had studied at the French Protestant
universities of Tours, Montauban and Saumur, and John Cameron, his successor, at
Bordeaux, Bergerac and Sedan: J. Coutts, A History of the University of Glasgow
(Glasgow, 1909), 85-7; Dictionary of National Biography [DNB], iv, 631.