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. 103.]

[Footnote 2: He was examined by the Government as to his connection with
the Paris conspirators.--See State Papers, vol. clxxx. 16, 17.]

68. With the truth or falsehood of the statements and deductions made by
Harsnet, we have little or no concern. Western did not pretend to deny
that he had the power of exorcism, or that he exercised it upon the
persons in question, but he did not admit the truth of any of the more
ridiculous stories which Harsnet so triumphantly brings forward to
convict him of intentional deceit; and his features, if the portrait in
Father Morris's book is an accurate representation of him, convey an
impression of feeble, unpractical piety that one is loth to associate
with a malicious impostor. In addition to this, one of the witnesses
against him, Tyrell, was a manifest knave and coward; another, Mainy, as
conspicuous a fool; while the rest were servant-maids--all of them
interested in exonerating themselves from the stigma of having been
adherents of a lost cause, at the expense of a ringleader who seemed to
have made himself too conspicuous to escape punishment. Furthermore, the
evidence of these witnesses was not taken until 1598 and 1602, twelve
and sixteen years af