t have had weight with
him. Throughout the last years of Elizabeth's reign there had been, as
we have seen, a morbid interest in demoniacal possession, an interest to
which sensation-mongers were quickly minded to respond. We saw that at
the end of the sixteenth century the Anglican church stepped in to put
down the exorcizing of spirits,[26] largely perhaps because it had been
carried on by Catholics and by a Puritan clergyman. Yet neither
Harsnett's book nor Darrel's imprisonment quite availed to end a
practice which offered at all times to all comers a path to notoriety.
James had not been on the English throne a year when he became
interested in a case of this kind. Mary Glover, a girl alleged to have
been bewitched by a Mother Jackson, was at the king's wish examined by a
skilled physician, Dr. Edward Jorden, who recognized her fits as
disease, brought the girl to a confession, published an account of the
matter, and so saved the life of the woman whom she had accused.[27]

In the very next year there was a case at Cambridge that gained royal
notice. It is not easy to straighten out the facts from the letters on
the matter, but it seems that two Cambridge maids had a curious disease
suggesting bewitchment.[28] A Franciscan and a Puritan clergyman were,
along with others, suspected. The matter was at once referred to the
king and the government. James directed that examinations be made and
reported to him. This was done. James wormed out of the "principal" some
admission of former dealing with conjuration, but turned the whole thing
over to the courts, where it seems later to have been established that
the disease of the bewitched maidens was "naturall."

These were but the first of several impostures that interested the king.
A girl at Windsor, another in Hertfordshire, were possessed by the
Devil,[29] two maids at Westminster were "in raptures from the Virgin
Mary and Michael the Archangel,"[30] a priest of Leicestershire was
"possessed of the Blessed Trinity."[31] Such cases--not to mention the
Grace Sowerbutts confessions at Lancaster that were like to end so
tragically--were the excrescences of an intensely religious age. The
reader of early colonial diaries in America will recognize the
resemblance of these to the wonders they report. James took such with
extreme seriousness.[32] The possessed person was summoned to court for
exhibition, or the king went out of his way to see him. It is a matter
of common inf