assing of Elizabeth's statute against witchcraft in 1562 does not
seem to have been intended to increase the number of trials, or cases of
conviction at least; and the fact is, it did neither the one nor the
other. Two children were tried in 1574 for counterfeiting possession,
and stood in the pillory for impostors. Mildred Norrington, called the
Maid of Westwell, furnished another instance of possession; but she also
confessed her imposture, and publicly showed her fits and tricks of
mimicry. The strong influence already possessed by the Puritans may
probably be sufficient to account for the darker issue of certain cases,
in which both juries and judges in Elizabeth's time must be admitted to
have shown fearful severity.

These cases of possession were in some respects sore snares to the
priests of the Church of Rome, who, while they were too sagacious not to
be aware that the pretended fits, contortions, strange sounds, and other
extravagances, produced as evidence of the demon's influence on the
possessed person, were nothing else than marks of imposture by some idle
vagabond, were nevertheless often tempted to admit them as real, and
take the credit of curing them. The period was one when the Catholic
Church had much occasion to rally around her all the respect that
remained to her in a schismatic and heretical kingdom; and when her
fathers and doctors announced the existence of such a dreadful disease,
and of the power of the church's prayers, relics, and ceremonies, to
cure it, it was difficult for a priest, supposing him more tender of the
interest of his order than that of truth, to avoid such a tempting
opportunity as a supposed case of possession offered for displaying the
high privilege in which his profession made him a partaker, or to
abstain from conniving at the imposture, in order to obtain for his
church the credit of expelling the demon. It was hardly to be wondered
at, if the ecclesiastic was sometimes induced to aid the fraud of which
such motives forbade him to be the detector. At this he might hesitate
the less, as he was not obliged to adopt the suspected and degrading
course of holding an immediate communication _in limine_ with the
impostor, since a hint or two, dropped in the supposed sufferer's
presence, might give him the necessary information what was the most
exact mode of performing his part, and if the patient was possessed by a
devil of any acuteness or dexterity, he wanted no further ins