If the legends are true – and pray they’re not, as this legend is so awful it would whiten your hair – then James IV of Scotland was a monster in human form, a creature akin to a Nazi doctor, inspired by his own barbaric religious fantasies.

It’s claimed that James used the isle of Inchkeith to conduct the most horrific experiments imaginable on new-born children, all in the name of uncovering his god’s secret language.

James is said to have sent two babies to be raised by a mute woman on the island. The children were to be brought up without ever hearing another human being speak. The intention was to discover if children raised in such deprivation would speak the original language which Adam and Eve spoke in the days before the Tower of Babel.

This is what’s known as The Forbidden Experiment, or the Language Deprivation Experiment. James was not the first king to attempt such a dreadful study. He was seemingly following the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, who not only ordered surrogates and wet-nurses to never speak to the unfortunate children he selected, but to have no interaction beyond feeding and washing.

Is there any sin more damnably cruel than robbing children of the richness of intellect? To think of all the many billions of children throughout history, who, because of the poverty of their parents, were robbed of the chance to read and learn, is to contemplate fate’s implacable, blind malice.

Read more by Neil Mackay

Consider the Shakespeares lost, the Einsteins and Marie Curies, the Turings, the Lovelaces, the Emily Brontës, and the James Baldwins. To starve a child of education is, in its fashion,........

© Herald Scotland