Martin Dey's Blog

Isobel Gowdie

It started for me with the Sensational Alex Harvey Band song "Isobel Gowdie". Strange ,haunting lyrics. Years later I found Isobel's 4 confessions and Janet Breadheid's one confession online within the 1833 book by Robert Pitcairn, transcribing and commenting on Ancient Criminal Trials of Scotland. I set out to read them and feel what they said to me. I must admit I reeled in confusion. If there was any truth to the claim of lawyer John Innes, who recorded the confessions , that the accused "without any compulsitoris proceidit in her confessione" (that they were not tortured and spoke willingly) then these were truly remarkable things for any woman to say in front of stony-faced judgemental accusers, with power of life and death, depending on what they heard. Even the paragraph in Isobel's third confession spoken on 15th May 1662, which led to my book's subtitle, "Alas that I should compare him to a man", is a remarkable statement for a lone woman to speak in front of pious and vengeful accusers. Whatever Isobel had, she had verbal panache, humour and courage. Here she is telling the local Kirk ministers about the joys of sex with the Devil. "the youngest and lustiest women wil haw verie great pleasur in their carnal cowpulation with him. Yea much mor than with their awin husbandis and they will haw exceeding great desyr of it with him, als much as he can haw to them and mor and never think shame of it. He is able for us that way than any man can be. Alas that I sould compare him to an man!" Now I have done some bad job interviews in my time but I have never condemned myself (literally and defiantly) as Isobel just has. I was immediately attracted to the mutual pleasure of the carnal copulation, not passive victims. "No shame" is repeated in the confessions. Did the interrogators invent this passage? I believe they did influence the testimony but they have no incentive to extol the Devil as a consensual sex-God. In my novel, both through Isobel's own plausible human experiences and through an investigation by my great x7 grandfather, I have aimed to de-code, de-mystify the bewildering confessions and set out something close to what might have happened. There were always 13 crows sitting on the big tree at the bottom of my garden as I wrote, so I might just have got the story right! I learnt a lot while writing. If you read the book ,please enjoy and comment.