Recent reports suggest that the Scottish government plans to pardon people convicted under the terms of the Witchcraft Act of 1563—mostly women—in response to a petition organized by Claire Mitchell, Queen’s Counsel.[1] The proposal prompts questions about the histories of both witchcraft and posthumous pardoning. What are such pardons for in the present and what might they do to popular understandings of the past?
Despite some news reports’ references to pardons for British ‘witches’, and arguments that people condemned for the crime in England ought to be pardoned, too, the current proposal relates to those convicted in Scotland alone. Both Scottish and English parliaments passed measures against witchcraft in 1563; in 1735/6, the post-union British parliament abolished the death penalty for ‘any kind of witchcraft, sorcery, inchantment or conjuration’ both north and south of the border. But the histories differed in the two jurisdictions in the years in between…
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