e
ministers of London, "that we might be ashamed to see a Child of God in
the Claws of the Devil without any hope of deliverance but by such means
as God had appointed--Fasting and Prayer." Then five ministers, all good
Christians and sound believers, assembled and prayed from morning to
candle-light, when Mary suddenly started out of her chair--they crying
"Jesus help, Jesus save!"--and came up to Lewis Hughes, in a state of
wildness and dismay. As he stood behind her holding her by the arms, she
lifted both herself and him off the ground, foaming at the mouth and
struggling thus all over the chamber; and then her strength gave way, and
she fell as if dead, her head hanging down and her limbs, which had been
so stiff and frozen, now supple and limber. In a short time her eyes came
back into their place and her tongue came out of her throat, and she
looked round and said cheerfully, "Oh! he is come, he is come! The
Comforter is come! the Comforter is come! I am delivered, I am delivered!"
Her father hearing these words wept and said, "These were her
grandfather's words when he was at the stake, the fire crackling about
him," for he died a martyr to the Reformed Faith in Queen Mary's time.
Then she prayed and thanked God till her voice was weak, and so the
company separated, and Mary went home. Afterwards she was put with Lewis
Hughes for a year, lest Satan should assault her again, and Mr. John Swan
wrote the most canting and nauseating book on her "case" that ever fanatic
penned or the duped and the gulled believed. But poor old Mother Jackson
was dead: and those who mourned for her, mourned in secret and silence and
shame.

There was another case of possession, this same year--Thomas Harrison, the
Boy of Norwich--chiefly remarkable for having procured such attention from
the ecclesiastical authorities that seven persons were formally licensed
to have private prayers and fasting for his deliverance. But the bishop
and commissioners who had seen his fits thought him an impostor, so his
case died out for want of public support.[112]

And now we have the master of kingcraft on the throne, with his mania
against witches, his private vices, and public follies, treacherous,
cruel, narrow-minded, and cowardly beyond anything that has ever
disgraced the English throne before or since. And one of the first trials
for witchcraft during his reign was that disgraceful affair in which
Somerset and his wife, Foreman, Sir Thomas Ove