October, the duchess was brought back to Westminster for a second church
court hearing, and was charged with trying to bring about the death of the king
by sorcery. Clerk Roger brought to the court a number of‘magical’objects
and images, possibly made of wax, which he said Eleanor and the others had
been using.
Eleanor’s defence was that although she admitted using witchcraft, it was in
order to bring about her pregnancy, so that she could give her husband an heir.
She denied treason, but her physician and Margery both accused her of being
the instigator of the plot. Margery was found guilty of heresy and witchcraft,
and was burned to death. Within a day, the physician was also dead, possibly
as a result of suicide.
Eleanor was found guilty of sorcery and witchcraft, but acquitted of heresy
and treason. Her marriage was pronounced null and void as she had admitted
using witchcraft to bring it about. Nevertheless, she was given a generous
pension and allowed to live, supervised, in some comfort until her death. Her
husband was never implicated in the plot, but he lost his political power and
position. Roger the clerk was dragged on a hurdle to Tyburn, where he was
hanged, drawn and quartered, and his head was set up on London Bridge, with
the other parts of his body being displayed in various towns as a warning to
wouldbe heretics. The chaplain, John Home, who had a reputation as a
brawler, was arraigned on lesser charges of having known of the conspiracy,
but not of being part of it. He was acquitted after several spells in prison. He is
commemorated by a brass in Hereford Cathedral where he was buried in 1473.
None of the people accused was of poor birth or lacking in education,
which is why this particular affair became such a scandal. Two ambitious
women, one a noblewoman, the other from landed yeoman stock, who were
both intimate with the affairs of court, and three educated men of the cloth,
had all, it appears, taken witchcraft seriously enough to endanger themselves.
But it was not the making of potions or the casting of horoscopes that led to
their downfall–after all, the king himself believed in the stars. Rather it was
the smell of treason and heresy that brought the harsh reaction of the
authorities down on them.^4
The Pendle witches case of 1612 was based on the claim that thirteen
witches had brought about the deaths of some seventeen people in the Pendle
Forest area of Lancashire. They were said to have sold their souls to familiars
and accomplished the deaths by making clay effigies of their victims which
they then burned or crushed. The area was described as lawless and wild in the
early seventeenth century, and people clung to Roman Catholicism, or were, at
best, reluctant churchgoers.
EARLY MODERN CRIME