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‘Alionor Cobhame conspyryd the kynges deth’: The Magic Trial of Eleanor Cobham, 1441

My clerks called up and down

All was but mischief that they meant;

Our sovereign lord and king with crown

Him to destroy was our attempt.

Almighty God omnipotent,

He knew full well our cruelty;

Look, for such harms I am now ruined –

All women may be warned by me.1

For Eleanor Cobham—Duchess of Gloucester and wife of King Henry VI’s brother—the accusation of magic against her in July 1441 came as a complete surprise. Four of her personal astrologers and nigromancers (magicians who perform magic with the help of demons) and the witch Margery Jourdemayne were also imprisoned for practising magic against the king. At this point, the duchess was aware of her perilous situation. After taking refuge in Westminster Abbey, she was brought before the royal council. The charges were: using harmful magic against the king with the help of Roger Bolingbroke, Thomas Southwell, and other clerics; and ordering a love potion to be made by Margery Jourdemayne so that she could marry the king’s brother Humphrey. Hilary Carey argues that the harmful magic ordered by the duchess was a horoscope predicting the king’s death.2 Contemporaries often regarded astrology as a demonic art, and calculating the date of the king’s death was treason. The duchess’ interest in such a horoscope could be explained by the fact that her husband was next in line to the throne.

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  1. John Lydgate, ‘The Lament of the Duchess of Gloucester, 1441’, in Rossell H. Robbins (ed.), Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries (New York, 1959), 178. I have edited the Middle English text into Modern English with the help of Jozef van der Voort (GHIL). []
  2. Hilary M. Carey, Courting Disaster: Astrology at the English Court and University in the Later Middle Ages (New York, 1992), 144–7. []