t when read in the Greek. After that he was secretly watched
and his somewhat elaborate preparations for his pretences were found
out. He was persuaded to confess his trickery in court before Sir Peter
Warburton and Sir Humphrey Winch, "and the face of the County and
Country there assembled,"[41] as well as to beg forgiveness of the women
whom he had accused.

It will be seen that the records of imposture were well on their way to
rival the records of witchcraft, if not in numbers, at least in the
notice that they received. And the king who had so bitterly arraigned
Reginald Scot was himself becoming the discoverer-general of
England.[42] It is not, then, without being forewarned that we read
Fuller's remarkable statement about the king's change of heart. "The
frequency of such forged possessions wrought such an alteration upon the
judgement of King James that he, receding from what he had written in
his 'Daemonology,' grew first diffident of, and then flatly to deny, the
workings of witches and devils, as but falsehoods and delusions."[43] In
immediate connection with this must be quoted what Francis Osborne has
to say.[44] He was told, he writes, that the king would have gone as far
as to deny any such operations, but out of reasons of state and to
gratify the church.[45]

Such a conversion is so remarkable that we could wish we had absolutely
contemporary statements of it. As a matter of fact, the statements we
have quoted establish nothing more than a probability, but they
certainly do establish that. Fuller, the church historian, responsible
for the first of the two statements, was a student in Queen's
College[46] at Cambridge during the last four years of James's reign;
Osborne was a man of thirty-two when the king died, and had spent a
part of his young manhood at the court. Their testimony was that of men
who had every opportunity to know about the king's change of
opinion.[47] In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, we must
accept, at least provisionally, their statements.[48] And it is easier
to do so in view of the marked falling off of prosecutions that we have
already noted. This indeed is confirmation of a negative sort; but we
have one interesting bit of affirmative proof, the outcome of the trials
at York in 1622. In that year the children of Mr. Edward Fairfax, a
member of the historic Fairfax family of Yorkshire, were seized with
some strange illness, in which they saw again and again the spec