The Possessed Maid of Thames Street111
In 1603, Mary Glover, a merchant’s daughter in Thames Street, gave herself out as bewitched, and said that Mother Jackson had done it. A little glimmering of reason made the physician Dr. Boncraft tell the Lord Chief Justice Anderson that Mother Jackson was wrongfully accused, and the girl was counterfeiting. So the Lord Chief Justice caused the Recorder of London, Sir John Crook, have her to him in his chambers in the Temple. The maid went with her mother and some neighbours, and in an hour’s time came Mother Jackson, disguised like a country market woman, with a muffler hiding her face, an old hat, and a short cloak bespattered with mire. As soon as she entered the maid fell backward on the floor; “her Eyes drawn into her Head, her Tongue toward her Throat, her Mouth drawn up to her Ear, her Bodie became stiff and senseless, Her Lips being shut closs a plain and audible Voice came out from her Nostrils saying ‘Hang her, hang her.’” The Recorder, willing to try her, called for a candle at which to light a sheet of paper, then held the burning paper to her hand till a blister came, rising and breaking and the water running down on the floor. But still the maid lay as if dead, with the Voice coming out of her Nostrils, saying, “Hang her, hang her.” Not satisfied with the trial of burning, the Recorder got a long pin, which he made hot and thrust up her nostrils to see if she would “neese,” wink, bend her brows, or stir her head; but still she lay as before, stiff, senseless, and as one dead. The minister, one Lewis Hughes, who tells this story which Sinclair quotes, told the Recorder that he had often prayed with the maid, and that when he concluded with the Lord’s Prayer and came to “but deliver us from all evil,” the maid would be tost and shaken as a mastiff might shake a cur. Then the Recorder bade the witch say the Lord’s Prayer, but she could not say it: she kept on all right until the clause “deliver us from evil,” and this she skipped over; neither would she confess that Jesus Christ was our Lord in the Articles of the Christian Faith. When Mary was in her fits, if the witch but so much as laid her hand upon her she was tost and shaken fearfully. This the Recorder wished to verify: so he bade first one, then another, of the neighbours come forward and touch her; which they did; but she never stirred till Mother Jackson touched her, when she was shaken as before. Then the Recorder said, “Lord, have mercy upon the woman!” for he was now fully convinced; and sent poor old Mother Jackson off to Newgate. As soon as she was sent off the maid came to herself, the voice ceased out of her nostrils, and she went home with her mother. Three weeks or more after the witch was condemned, the maid had the same fits, strange and fearful to behold, and the Recorder told the minister, and all the 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 Overbury, and Mrs. Turner were all mixed up together.