The trials of an exorcist, 1597
Watch out for green cats!
It is the easiest thing, sir, to be done.
As plain as fizzling: roll but wi’ your eyes,
And foam at th’mouth. A little castle-soap
Will do’t, to rub your lips: and then a nutshell,
With tow and touchwood in it to spit fire.
Did you ne’er read, sir, little Darrel’s tricks,
With the boy o’Burton, and the seven in Lancashire,
Sommers at Nottingham? All these do teach it.
– Ben Jonson, The Devil Is an AssIt’s October 1597, and something is wrong with William Somers, a young man of around 19 or 20, living in Nottingham, England. We’re told he
began to be strangely tormented in body and so continued for divers weeks to the great astonishment of the beholders and trouble of his friends. And he gave great signs that he was possessed by a wicked spirit…
But the local mayor and aldermen had heard about a man who could help: the famed exorcist.
This man was local to the area, although he’d gone off to be educated at Cambridge University in the 1570s and studied law in London for a time. He then returned to his home town of Mansfield to take up farming, before his next career change as a freelance Puritan preacher. With demonic possession having a cultural moment, he developed a reputation as “a man of hope, for the relieving of those that were distressed in this sort” (and these words came from his enemy, who we’ll meet later).
His first known case was Katherine Wright of Derby in 1586, a 17-year-old said to be possessed by demons thanks to the work of a witch. Our man, whose name was John Darrell (or Darrel), tried ‘dispossessing’ her, mainly through making her fast, but a few months later, the demon returned. Her stepfather, John Mekin, was not impressed:
M. Darrell continued making of a wonder and a din to and with her, (when he pretended to cast out eight devils of her) but what good he did her thereby, I could not perceive, neither could I find that she received any ease thereby.
Mekin, it should be said, was known for beating Katherine – so might well have been a real cause of her distress, which was never ultimately relieved.
But ten years later, now based in Leicestershire, Darrell (born c.1562) was still practising, and then came his breakthrough case, that of 13-year-old Thomas Darling of Burton upon Trent. The events were written up in great celebratory detail by one Jesse Bee, a friend of Darrell who claimed to have been present when the exorcisms took place. Bee wrote that the boy
grew to be very sick, vomiting & casting up what he had eaten at dinner: and so was got to bed. The next morning he had sore fits, with extreme vomitings, that all which saw him, judged it to be some strange ague. In the time of this extremity in these his fits, he would many times point with his hand, saying; Look where green Angels stand in the window, and not long after would often complain, that a green Cat troubled him: which thing was judged by his friends to proceed of lightness in his head…1
The story goes that Thomas – born into a very religious family – then overheard the grown-ups discussing possible witchcraft, and he provided a story to fit: that it all started because he had farted at an old woman called Alice Gooderidge (already suspected of being a witch by the community) and she then cursed him. Oddly enough she admitted to this (under pressure from the local justices, anyway), and Thomas’s demon obligingly corroborated her account of the Devil – in the form of “a little partie-coloured dog” – making her do it.
Things soon got worse. Before long then boy was narrating the words of the demon that possessed him for the benefit of listeners and, while still in a trance, he would fight back against it, effectively arguing with himself in different voices, Gollum-like.
Three months after all this began, and other priests had tried and failed to cast out these demons, enter John Darrell, who diagnosed “an unclean spirit” and “that the only way for his deliverance was to resist Satan”. Bee recounts Darrell’s prescription:
[he] exhorted his Parents and the whole Family to prepare themselves against the next day to that holy exercise of Prayer and Fasting… Whereto they being very willing importuned John Darell for his presence and assistance. To which he answered, his assistance in Prayer and Fasting they should have, but not his presence, as well to avoid note of vainglory, as also for he saw no such necessity by reason of the Child’s strong faith: nevertheless giving them order for their Exercise…
So, erm, the exorcist was basically doing this over Zoom.
But after Thomas going through an intense, very physical experience (“his countenance was strangely disfigured, his mouth set wide open, & sometime drawn awry, his face turned backward, and his arms and shoulders thrust out of joint”), the forces of good prevailed. Bee recounts:
After a while he fell into a trance, and at length a small voice came from him saying; Brother Glassop, we cannot prevail, his faith is so strong, and they fast and pray, and a Preacher prayeth as fast as they.
And John Darrell got the credit (Alice Gooderidge, meanwhile, died in Derby jail). His star then went firmly into the ascendant with his involvement in another case, in 1597, the ‘Lancashire Seven’. Briefly, two children in the family of Nicholas Starkey began having fits. The desperate family asked a travelling magician called Edmund Hartley for help. He provided some relief, but his bills kept going up and up, eventually demanding a house and land. Five more women and children in the household became affected, and Starkey suspected Hartley of being the cause rather than the cure. He turned to one Dr John Dee, Queen Elizabeth’s famous astrologer (now leading a quieter life as a college warden in Manchester), who didn’t want to get involved but recommended John Darrell and his colleague George More. Hartley meanwhile was accused of witchcraft and executed. Darrell and More did well out of the case, successfully exorcising the demons in the Starkey household.
I should add that all of these events were narrated in lavish detail in pamphlets of the time, many published by Darrell himself and his friends. In fact, in modern terms they were clearly PR-savvy, because these gushing media reports cemented his reputation as the go-to guy for demon trouble.
And so to William Somers in Nottingham. Darrell initially declined to get involved, supposedly through modesty but… alright then, I’ll help – on 5th November 1597, he agreed to come over. A strange feature of William’s possession was a lump that moved around his body. William Langford, the local surgeon, described it thus:
he saw a rising or swelling in the bottom of [William’s] belly which, to his knowledge, moved the clothes. And his chest and stomach being bare, he visibly saw the same rising or swelling, the size of a goose egg or a halfpenny white loaf, ascend up to his chest, and so to his throat, at which he acted as though he would have vomited…
On 7th November, Darrell got 150 people together for a day of prayer and fasting according to his usual method. Darrell himself left an account:
All this day he was continually vexed and tormented by Satan, having little or no rest at all, so the same for vexation by the spirit far exceeded any of the days before. His torments in his fits were most grievous and fearful to behold, wherein his body, being twelve, was tossed up and down. In these fits, his strength was very great, so as being held down with six strong men, he did, notwithstanding all their strength against their wills, rise and stand upright on his feet.
He was also continually torn in a very fearful manner and disfigured in his face: wherein sometimes his lips were drawn away, now to one side, now to the other… Now he gnashed with his teeth, now he foamed like a horse or boar… not to say anything of his fearful staring with his eyes and incredible gaping.
The boy was eventually cured, it seemed, but Nottingham was a divided community, with many doubters: had William Somers ever been possessed to start with?
By the end of the month, William’s demon had come back. Darrell fixed it. Back and forth it went, then Darrell had 13 people arrested after they were named by the demon as witches. Most were released, but one of the two who weren’t had friends in high places – specifically, local magistrate William Freeman, who had Somers himself arrested for witchcraft. And then the young man said the whole thing had been faked, even demonstrating some of his methods to the mayor and aldermen.2 (Though this confession was said by Darrell and others to be a clever play by the demons, and Somers supposedly retracted it!)
And so things unravelled for Darrell too. The archbishop of York set up a commission to investigate the whole business, although his reputation as an upright Puritan meant that Darrell was cleared of wrongdoing. However, there was a growing band of complainants – the most vocal perhaps being Samuel Harsnett, the enemy I quoted earlier, who wrote multiple pamphlets denouncing Darrell. They moaned to the archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift, and eventually Darrell and More were imprisoned and found guilty of fraud.
The tos and fros of the trial and the pamphlets around it are complex, and at the heart of it is the ongoing dispute between Catholicism and Protestantism of the era, as well as internal Puritan disputes over the supernatural – in 1604, the Church of England ultimately outlawed exorcisms.
The presses were kept hot printing diatribes from both sides of the Somers case for several years. Darrell was released from prison in 1599, but his glory days were over. Little is known of his fate thereafter – he kept a low profile for a decade or two, and there are no accounts of further exorcisms. Where the truth lay, we can never really know – some said Darrell had trained the victims in pretending to be possessed; others continued to stick up for him, and perhaps he was the dupe all along. Let’s let Darrell have the last word:
If these things, most strange and admirable, can be done by any human skill, I deny not but that he may be a counterfeit: but until that shall appear, I must needs subscribe them to some supernatural power, that is the Devil: for some cause of these rare effects must be had, that must be either natural or supernatural, but a natural cause hereof can not be given.3
You can read more about supernatural goings-on and strange voices in previous pieces:
Bee’s 1597 account is called The most wonderfull and true storie, of a certaine witch named Alse Gooderige of Stapen hill, who was arraigned and conuicted at Darbie at the Assises there as also a true report of the strange torments of Thomas Darling, a boy of thirteene yeres of age, that was possessed by the deuill, with his horrible fittes and apparitions by him vttered at Burton vpon Trent in the countie of Stafford, and of his maruellous deliuerance, which is a bit of a mouthful.
According to some accounts, Somers and Darrell had also met a decade earlier when Somers had boyhood fits.
Works consulted: Philip C. Almond, Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern England, 2004; Harman Bhogal, ‘Rethinking Demonic Possession’ (thesis), 2013; Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A cultural history of ventriloquism, 2000; John Darrell, A True Narration of the Strange and Grevous Vexation by the Devil of 7 Persons in Lancashire, and William Somers of Nottingham…, 1600; D.P. Walker, Unclean Spirits, 1981; Brendan C. Walsh, The English Exorcist, 2021.