John Darrel, a Cambridge graduate, was a Puritan preacher in Derbyshire when (in 1586) he began his career as a caster-out of devils. In 1598 he was summoned before an ecclesiastical commission over which Archbishop Whitgift presided. Bishop Bancroft and Chief Justice Anderson were members of the commission. More than forty witnesses were called. Some of the demoniacs confessed fraud, and Darrel, with his associate George More, was convicted of imposture and imprisoned.86 There had been an uproar over the possessions and the exorcisms, and popular opinion sided with Darrel. Samuel Harsnet, the cleverest of Bishop Bancroft's chaplains, was delegated to write up the case. His famous Discovery came out in 1599, and was expected to overwhelm Darrel with ridicule and odium. In the long run it has had this result, for Darrel is usually treated nowadays as an impostor. But it had no such effect at the time. Both Darrel and More wrote long replies, and printed them surreptitiously in defiance of the authorities.

Bancroft soon discovered that Harsnet's skirmishing was not sufficient, and he brought his heavy troops into action. Two treatises, of unimaginable ponderosity in style and matter, each elaborated in concert by two preachers, John Deacon and John Walker, came out in 1601.87 Harsnet had railed and ridiculed and "exposed," but he had steered clear of dialectics. Deacon and Walker toiled to supply the desideratum. Using all the scholastic machinery, they tried to prove, by logic and Scripture, that there is no such thing as demoniacal possession nowadays, and that Darrel's demoniacs were either counterfeiting or else afflicted with natural diseases. Darrel promptly replied to both books, printing his answers surreptitiously, as before.

Strange as it may seem, Darrel has the best of the argument. For his opponents admit both too little and too much. They admit too little, since they wish the fits to appear fraudulent, whereas these were, beyond a shadow of doubt, genuine hysteria, of which lying and imposture are well-recognized symptoms. Darrel was sharp enough to see that, as managed by his opponents, the hypothesis of fraud

86 Harsnet, Discovery, 1599, pp. 8-9.

87 Summarie Answere, and Dialogicall Discourses.

and the hypothesis of disease thwarted each other, and left some kind of demonic assault in possession of the field. They admit too much, because they themselves grant the existence of evil spirits of vast power (nay, take pains to demonstrate their existence), and because they accept demoniacal possession as a fact in ancient times, though they reject it for the present age. This rejection was, of course, quite arbitrary, and their attempts to justify it from Scripture were pitifully weak. Darrel could appeal to facts and experience. His patients had manifested the same symptoms as the demoniacs of old, and it was obviously absurd to force a distinction. If the afflicted persons in Bible times were possessed with devils, then his patients were possessed with devils; and if he had relieved them (as he surely had), then there was no reason which Deacon and Walker could make valid to reject the corollary of dispossession.

But what connection has this strange affair with witchcraft? Here we must walk circumspectly, for misapprehensions are rife. It is often inferred that Bancroft and Harsnet, because they denounced Darrel and his patients as tricksters, had no belief in witchcraft. This is a false conclusion. A demoniac is not necessarily bewitched. He may owe his dire condition to some witch's malice, or, on the other hand, the devil may have assailed him immediately, without a witch's agency. Further, there are many evil things done by witches which have no reference to demoniacal possession. In all of Darrel's cases, to be sure, witches were accused. To some extent, then, Bancroft and his assistants were, in effect, attempting to discredit the witch dogma, since they were attacking the genuineness, or the diabolical origin, of certain phenomena ascribed, in these particular instances, to witchcraft. But (and we cannot be too careful in making the distinction) they did not deny either the existence or the criminality of witches in general, any more than they denied the existence of wicked spirits. They strove to explode the theory of demoniacal possession; but they did not attack the witchcraft dogma. Indeed, they took care to avoid committing themselves on that head. For, even if they had no faith in the dogma, they knew that to assail it would throw them out of court, inasmuch as the belief in

witchcraft was, in some form or other, universal among all classes and all persuasions.

Further, Bancroft and his aids, in their opposition to Darrel, were not espousing the cause of alleged witches, or, if so, they were doing it in a purely incidental way. Their object was quite definite and unconcealed. They were warring against the Puritans 88 and the Roman Catholics, whom they regarded as foes to Church and State. Puritan preachers and Roman Catholic priests both professed to cast out devils. In Bancroft's eyes these were absurd pretensions. Yet the people and many of the clergy were much impressed. There was danger ahead, so the Bishop thought. A vigorous campaign was necessary. But the campaign was political and ecclesiastical, not humanitarian. Its aim was not to save witches, but to crush exorcists. 89

Here is a significant bit of evidence on this point. In 1602 Mary Glover, the daughter of a merchant in Thames Street, had weird seizures, which she attributed to the malign spells of Elizabeth Jackson. The neighbors were eager to prosecute, but a physician informed Chief Justice Anderson that "the maid did counterfeit." Anderson directed Sir John Croke (Recorder of London) to summon the girl to his chamber in the Temple and test the matter. Croke

88 "Phantastical giddy-headed Puritans" Archbishop Matthew Hutton of York calls them in a letter to Whitgift, Oct. 1, 1603 (Strype's Life of Whitgift, 1718, p. 570).

89 The exorcisms of the Jesuit Edmunds (alias Weston) and his associates in 1585 and 1586 were similarly attacked by Bancroft and Harsnet. See Harsnet's famous diatribe, A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, 1603 (2d edition, 1605). The Roman Catholics were no more convinced in this case than the Puritans were in that of Darrel (see the references to Yepez and others in Mr. T. G. Law's article on Devil-Hunting in Elizabethan England, in the Nineteenth Century for March, 1894, 35. 397 ff.). On Sir George Peckham, who was involved in this affair, see Merrimam, American Historical Review, 17, 492 ff. Compare Sir George Courthop on the Nuns of Loudun (Memoirs, Camden Miscellany, 11. 106-109); see also Evelyn's Diary, August 5, 1670.

Darrel's opponents did their best to stigmatize his principles and practices with regard to demoniacal possession as identical with those of the Roman Catholic Church. Thus Deacon and Walker, speaking of Darrel, inform their readers that "he hath for a season (though feare and shame enforceth him now to pluck in his head) very prowdlie ietted from countrie to countrie like a pettie new Pope among his owne Cardinals; yea and that also in his pontificalities, portrayed and contriued after the new-found popelike cut" (Summarie Answere, 1601, Address to the Reader).

did so in 1603, having both the maid and the witch present, with divers neighbors and certain ministers. He was convinced, by various drastic tests, that there was no imposture, and committed Mother Jackson to Newgate. At the Recorder's instance, several ministers undertook to relieve the girl by fasting and prayer. They were completely successful. One of them, Lewis Hughes, was despatched to Bishop Bancroft with the tidings. He was not well received. "I ... could have no audience," he writes, "and for my paines I was called Rascall and varlot, and sent to the Gatehouse, where hee kept me foure moneths." 90 But Mother Jackson was arraigned and convicted in due course. Bancroft, we observe, was certain that this was not demoniacal possession, and he imprisoned the exorciser. But he made no effort, so far as we can learn, to rescue the witch. He left her to the courts with a good conscience.

This episode fell just after the so-called exposure of Darrel. The date makes it instructive. The Recorder, we note, was still a believer in possession, despite the arguments of Bancroft's literary bureau, and so were many (perhaps most) of the clergy. Indeed, we must not too hastily assume that all the bishops even were ready to subscribe to Bancroft's extreme tenets. Take the case of Thomas Harrison, the Boy of Northwich, in Cheshire. His fits began in 1600 or 1601 and lasted a year or two. He was kept for ten days in the Bishop of Chester's palace and carefully watched, but no fraud was detected. The Bishop (Richard Vaughan) and three other commissioners issued an order that, "for [his] ease and deliverance" from "his grievous afflictions,' public prayers should be offered for him in the parish church "before the congregation so oft as the same assembleth.” They delegated seven clergymen to visit him by turns, and "to use their discretions by private prayer and fasting, for the ease and comfort of the afflicted." Some held, this

90 Certaine Grievances, 1641, p. 20. See George Sinclair, Satan's Invisible World Discovered, 1685, Relation XII (reprint, 1871, pp. 95-100; cf. Ferguson, Publications of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society, 3. 56-57); Commission on Historical MSS., 8th Report, Appendix, Part i., p. 228. An account of the affair, by George Swan, was published in 1603, under the title, A True and Brief Report, etc. On Lewis Hughes see Kittredge, George Stirk, Minister (reprinted from the Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts), 1910, pp. 18-21.

document informs us, "that the child [was] really possessed of an uncleane spirit.' This Bishop Vaughan and the other commissioners doubted. But they did not think he was shamming. They had "seene the bodily affliction of the said child," and observed in sundry fits very strange effects and operations, they tell us, "either proceeding of natural vnknowne causes, or of some diabolical practise." 91 And Harvey, one of the clergymen appointed by the Bishop to fast and pray, wrote to a friend that nothing like the "passions [i.e. sufferings], behavior, and speeches" of the boy had "ever come under his observation or occurred in his reading." "Few that have seene the variety of his fits, but they thinke the divell hath the disposing of his body. Myselfe have divers times seene him, and such things in him as are impossible to proceed from any humane creature. The matter hath affected our whole country. The Divines with us generally hold, that the child is really possessed." 92 A contemporary memorandum assures us that once, when the Bishop was praying with him, "the Boy was so outragious, that he flew out of his bed, and so frighted the Bishops men, that one of them fell into a sown, and the Bishop was glad to lay hold on the boy, who ramped at the Window to have gotten out." 93

Joseph Hall, afterwards Bishop of Exeter (1627) and of Norwich (1641), in disputing with a Belgian priest in 1605, asserted roundly that "in our church, we had manifest proofs of the ejection of devils by fasting and prayer. Hall was a firm believer in witchcraft and approved of the statute of 1604.95

" Darrel, Replie, 1602, p. 21.

"Darrel, pp. 21–22.

94

93 John Bruen's memoranda, in William Hinde's Life of John Bruen (born 1560, died 1625), in Samuel Clarke, Marrow of Ecclesiastical History, Part ii., Book ii., 1675, p. 95. Bruen (who was a Cheshire man) was an eyewitness of the boy's fits, and his notes, as excerpted by Hinde, give a good idea of his ravings (pp. 9496). The boy cried out against "the witch," but I do not find that anybody was brought to trial.

"Autobiography, Works, ed. Hall (1837), 1. xxi. Hall may have had in mind the case reported by Bishop Parkhurst in a letter to Bullinger, June 29, 1574 (Zurich Letters, ed. Hastings Robinson, 1842, No. 118, translation, p. 118, original, p. 178).

95 Works, 6. 186-137; 7. 245-246; Contemplations, Works, ed. 1628, pp. 11341135.