Among these was one Weston, who, in his
enthusiastic admiration for the martyr-traitor, Edmund Campion, had
adopted the alias of Edmonds. This Jesuit was gifted with the power of
casting out devils, and he exercised it in order to prove the divine
origin of the Holy Catholic faith, and, by implication, the duty of all
persons religiously inclined, to rebel against a sovereign who was
ruthlessly treading it into the dust. The performances which Harsnet
examined into took place chiefly in the house of Lord Vaux at Hackney,
and of one Peckham at Denham, in the end of the year 1585 and the
beginning of 1586. The possessed persons were Anthony Tyrell, another
Jesuit who rounded upon his friends in the time of their tribulation;[1]
Marwood, Antony Babington's private servant, who subsequently found it
convenient to leave the country, and was never examined upon the
subject; Trayford and Mainy, two young gentlemen, and Sara and Friswood
Williams, and Anne Smith, maid-servants. Richard Mainy, the most
edifying subject of them all, was seventeen only when the possession
seized him; he had only just returned to England from Rheims, and, when
passing through Paris, had come under the influence of Charles Paget and
Morgan; so his antecedents appeared somewhat open to suspicion.[2]
[Footnote 1: The Fall of Anthony Tyrell, by Persoun. See The Troubles of
our Catholic Forefathers, by John Morris, p.
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