speare (_Henry VI._ part
ii. act i.) has furnished us with the charms and
incantations employed about the same time in the case of the
Duchess of Gloucester. Mother Jourdain is the representative
witch-hag.

Without detracting from the real merit of the patriotic martyr,
it might be suspected that, besides her inflamed imagination, a
pious and pardonable collusion was resorted to as a last
desperate effort to rouse the energy of the troops or the hopes
of the people--a collusion similar to that of the celebrated
Constantinian Cross, or of the Holy Lance of Antioch. Every
reader is acquainted with the fate of the great personages who in
England were accused, politically or popularly, of the crime; and
the histories of the Duchess of Gloucester and of Jane Shore are
immortalised by Shakspeare. In 1417, Joan, second wife of Henry
IV., had been sentenced to prison, suspected of seeking the
king's death by sorcery; a certain Friar Randolf being her
accomplice and agent. The Duchess of Gloucester, wife of Humphry
and daughter of Lord Cobham, was an accomplice in the witchcraft
of a priest and an old woman. Her associates were Sir Roger
Bolingbroke, priest; Margery Jordan or Guidemar, of Eye, in
Suffolk; Thomas Southwell, and Roger Only. It was asserted 'there
was found in their possession a waxen image of the king, which
they melted in a magical manner before a slow fire, with the
intention of making Henry's force and vigour waste away by like
insensible degrees.' The duchess was sentenced to do penance and
to perpetual imprisonment; Margery was burnt for a witch in
Smithfield; the priest was hanged, declaring his employers had
only desired to know of him how long the king would live; Thomas
Southwell died the night before his execution; Roger Only was
hanged, having first written a book to prove his own innocence,
and against the opinion of the vulgar.[69] Jane Shore (whose
story is familiar to all), the mistress of Edward IV., was
sacrificed to the policy of Richard Duke of Gloucester, more than
to any general suspicion of her guilt. Both the Archbishop of
York and the Bishop of Ely were involved with the citizen's wife
in demoniacal dealings, and imprisoned in the Tower. As for the
'harlot, strumpet Shore,' not being convicted, or at least
condemned, for the worse crime, she was found guilty of adultery,
and sentenced (a milder fate) to do penance in a white sheet
before the assembled populace at St. Paul's.[70