practice which offered at all times to all comers a path to notoriety. James had not been on the English throne a year when he became interested in a case of this kind. Mary Glover, a girl alleged to have been bewitched by a Mother Jackson, was at the king's wish examined by a skilled physician, Dr. Edward Jorden, who recognized her fits as disease, brought the girl to a confession, published an account of the matter, and so saved the life of the woman whom she had accused.[27] In the very next year there was a case at Cambridge that gained royal notice. It is not easy to straighten out the facts from the letters on the matter, but it seems that two Cambridge maids had a curious disease suggesting bewitchment.[28] A Franciscan and a Puritan clergyman were, along with others, suspected. The matter was at once referred to the king and the government. James directed that examinations be made and reported to him. This was done. James wormed out of the "principal" some admission of former dealing with conjuration, but turned the whole thing over to the courts, where it seems later to have been established that the disease of the bewitched maidens was "naturall." These were but the first of several impostures that interested the king. A girl at Windsor, another in Hertfordshire, were possessed by the Devil,[29] two maids at Westminster were "in raptures from the Virgin Mary and Michael the Archangel,"[30] a priest of Leicestershire was "possessed of the Blessed Trinity."[31] Such cases--not to mention the Grace Sowerbutts confessions at Lancaster that were like to end so tragically--were the excrescences of an intensely religious age. The reader of early colonial diaries in America will recognize the resemblance of these to the wonders they report. James took such with extreme seriousness.[32] The possessed person was summoned to court for exhibition, or the king went out of his way to see him. It is a matter of common information that James prided himself on his cleverness. Having succeeded in detecting certain frauds, he became an expert detective. In one instance "he ordered it so that a proper courtier made love to one of these bewitched maids"[33] and soon got her over her troubles. In another case a woman "strangely affected" by the first verse of John's Gospel failed to recognize it when read in Greek,[34] proof positive that the omniscient Devil did not possess her.