The possession of Mary Glover and the trial of Elizabeth Jackson

Thames Street, London. 1602. Timothy Glover was a merchant and a staunch Puritan. His daughter Mary was 14. In April 1602 she quarrelled with Elizabeth Jackson, an older woman from the same parish, described in some accounts as a charwoman. That same month, the fits began. The Glover family blamed Jackson.

Those around Mary Glover described a body under siege. Violent fits. Convulsions. Repeated spells of blindness and muteness. Her neck and throat swelled so badly that she could not eat. Paralysis took her hand, then her arm, and eventually her entire left side. The fits were said to grow worse whenever Jackson came near. And each time Jackson was brought into her presence, Mary murmured two words. "Hang her."

Sir John Croke, later Recorder of London, put the girl to the test. Jackson was brought before her in disguise. Mary still reacted. Heat was applied to her body. She showed no response, even as it left visible burns. Croke concluded that Glover was bewitched. Elizabeth Jackson was held in Newgate to await trial.

The case split the London College of Physicians. Thomas Moundeford, Francis Herring and Stephen Bredwell reported that the girl suffered from magic spells. Edward Jorden and John Argent held that the illness was natural. Ten parishioners testified to Jackson's good character.

In December 1602 she stood trial before Sir Edmund Anderson, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas. Jorden argued for a natural disease. Anderson slighted and ridiculed the argument, because Jorden could give neither a cause nor a cure. Jackson reportedly failed the Lord's Prayer test. She was found guilty and sentenced to a year in prison and four appearances in the pillory, described as the maximum under the 1563 Witchcraft Act for a witch who had killed no one.

Thursday, 16 December 1602. Early evening. Puritan ministers had spent the day in prayer, fasting and supplication over the girl. Lewes Hughes was holding her. Then, in the words of the later accounts, her body came back to life. She cried out. "He is come, he is come." And then: "The comforter is come. O Lord, you have delivered me." The account of John Swan, a student in divinity who was there, presents these as the words her grandfather, the Marian martyr Robert Glover, spoke as he went to the stake at Lichfield in 1555.

Richard Bancroft, Bishop of London, believed the girl was faking. He held the fast to be an illegal conventicle, held without his permission. Hughes was reportedly imprisoned for four months. Bancroft's chaplain, Samuel Harsnett, mocked the ministers as "devil-finders and devil-puffers, or devil-prayers." Jackson was reportedly soon released, probably due to Bancroft's intervention. In 1604, Canon 72 required a bishop's licence for any fast to cast out devils.

In 1603 Jorden published A Briefe Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother. It argued that strange actions and passions of the body, often blamed on the devil, came from a natural disease, with choking in the throat as a common symptom. It is described as the first explanation of the causes of hysteria written in English. The historian Michael MacDonald argues that it grew out of a bitter religious and political quarrel between Bancroft's camp and the Puritans, not purely medical curiosity. One scholar goes further, writing that the prayer Mary supposedly said while possessed was almost certainly written by John Swan.