How many in all were accused we do not know. Webster, writing later, said that seventeen were found guilty.[15] It is possible that even a larger number were acquitted. Certainly some were acquitted. A distinction of some sort was made in the evidence. This makes it all the harder to understand why the truth of Robinson's stories was not tested in the same way in which those of Grace Sowerbutts had been tested in 1612. Did that detection of fraud never occur to the judges, or had they never heard of the famous boy at Bilston? Perhaps not they but the juries were to blame, for it seems that the court was not altogether satisfied with the jury's verdict and delayed sentence. Perhaps, indeed, the judges wrote to London about the matter. Be that as it may, the privy council decided to take cognizance of an affair that was already the talk of the realm.[16] Secretaries Coke and Windebank sent instructions to Henry Bridgeman, Bishop of Chester and successor to that Morton who had exposed the boy of Bilston, to examine seven of the condemned witches and to make a report.[17] Bridgeman doubtless knew of his predecessor's success in exposing fraudulent accusations. Before the bishop was ready to report, His Majesty sent orders that three or four of the accused should be brought up to London by a writ of habeas corpus. Owing to a neglect to insert definite names, there was a delay.[18] It was during this interval, probably, that Bishop Bridgeman was able to make his examination. He found three of the seven already dead and one hopelessly ill. The other three he questioned with great care. Two of them, Mary Spencer, a girl of twenty, and Frances Dickonson, the first whom Robinson had accused, made spirited denials. Mary Spencer avowed that her accusers had been actuated by malice against her and her parents for several years. At the trial, she had been unable, she said, to answer for herself, because the noise of the crowd had been so great as to prevent her from hearing the evidence against her. As for the charge of bewitching a pail so that it came running towards her of its own accord, she declared that she used as a child to roll a pail down-hill and to call it after her as she ran, a perfectly natural piece of child's play. Frances Dickonson, too, charged malice upon her accusers, especially upon the father of Edmund Robinson. Her husband, she said, had been unwilling to sell him a cow without surety and had so gained his ill-will. She went on to assert that the elder Robinson had volunteered to withdraw the charges against her if her husband would pay him forty shillings. This counter charge was supported by another witness and seemed to make a good deal of an impression on the ecclesiastic.