Doctor John Fian
Kings James VI of Scotland and future King of England was paranoid about witchcraft. In the autumn of 1589, the King sailed to Oslo to collect Princess Anne of Denmark who he had married by proxy. Dangerous storms had stranded Anne in the Norwegian capital, preventing her from traveling on to Scotland-, and both the Danes and her new husband blamed witches.
The Danish authorities promptly arrested and executed six people for the crime. Once back in Scotland, James became convinced that the devil had marked him as his greatest enemy. So he began his own search for the magical traitors. The name of John Fian as the leader of the conspirators came up from an unlikely source. A David Seaton of Tranent in East Lothian had noticed his maid; Gillis Duncan had begun to behave strangely. Gillis had acquired strange healing abilities and started sneaking out at night. Seaton handed Gillis over to the authorities, and under torture, she confessed to a conspiracy of witchcraft against James.
Dr. John Fian, had, until this point been a respectable schoolmaster. Th epicture painted by Gillis was quite different. Fian was said to preside over Sabbaths held at Auld Kirk Green, North Berwick. There, the witches danced widdershins (counterclockwise) about the church before Fian let them into the building by blowing into the keyhole. There, in the company of the devil, (who was obtrusively disguised as a tall black man with a goatsbeard, rabbits nose, hawks beak, a long tail and dressed in a black robe and skull cap), they had planned James’ death.
The authorities arrested Fian, who managed to escape- perhaps lending credence to his trick with the church lock. However, he was recaptured and tortured, losing his fingernails, having the bones crushed in his feet, pins stuck in his tongue and the turcas applied. He then confessed, only to recant after the torture claiming: “what he had done and said before was only done and said for fear of pains which he had endured.”
However, Fian had been convicted- on the King’s unambiguous orders, so that was enough. In January 1591, he was placed in a cart and taken to Castle Hill in Edinburgh where he and his fellow ‘witches’ were strangled and then burnt.