committed to the Tower, where he suffered such hardships that he wellnigh lost his sight. Eventually in 1603 he was banished, and spent the rest of his days at Seville and Valladolid. He was rector of the latter college at the time of his death, 9 June, 1615.[62] It was in 1586, just when the exorcisms of the Jesuit fathers had unfortunately attracted so widespread attention and foolish comment, that John Darrel, although a Protestant and lacking both appropriate ordination and training, rashly resolved to emulate their achievements. He was young, not much more than twenty, he was foolhardy and he was ignorant, three qualities which even in our own time often win cheap notoriety. It seems that he was first called in to cure a young girl of seventeen, Katherine Wright, who lived at Mansfield, Nottingham. Darrel forthwith pronounced that she was afflicted by an evil spirit, and he prayed over her from four o’clock in the morning till noon, but entirely without result. He then declared that the wench had been bewitched and that the demon, moreover, was sent by one Margaret Roper, with whom the patient had recently quarrelled. The girl backed his story, and the accused woman was at once taken into custody by the constable. When, however, she appeared before Mr. Fouliamb, a justice of the peace, not only was she incontinently discharged, but Darrel received a smart rebuff and found himself in no small danger of arrest. This mischance sufficiently scared the would-be exorcist, and for some ten years he disappeared from view, only to come before the public again at Burton-upon-Trent, where he was prominent in the sensation and the scandal that centred round Thomas Darling, a young Derbyshire boy. This imaginative juvenal was subject to fits—real or feigned—during which he had visions of green angels and a green cat. Betimes his conversation became larded with true Puritan cant, and he loved to discourse with godly ministers. A credulous physician suggested that the lad was bewitched, and very soon afterwards it was noticed that the reading aloud of the Bible, especially certain verses in the first chapter of S. John’s Gospel, threw him into frantic convulsions. He also began a long prattling tale about “a little old woman” who wore “a broad thrimmed hat,” which proved amply sufficient to cause two women, Elizabeth Wright, and her daughter, Alse Gooderidge, long vehemently suspected of sorcery, to be examined before two magistrates, who committed Alse to jail. Next those concerned summoned a cunning man, who used various rough methods to induce the prisoner to confess. After having been harried and even tortured the wretched creature made some rambling and incoherent acknowledgements of guilt, which were twisted into a connected story. By now Darling had been ill for three months, and so far from improving, was getting worse.