Roger Bolingbroke

Roger Bolingbroke was an Oxford scholar hanged, drawn and quartered in 1441 for casting the horoscope of Henry VI at the request of the Duchess of Gloucester. He was a clerk and a principal of a hall at Oxford, with a reputation in astronomy and astrology - which in the fifteenth century were the same subject, taught in universities and used by physicians and princes alike. Eleanor Cobham, whose husband Humphrey of Gloucester was heir presumptive to a childless king, asked him and the canon Thomas Southwell what the king's horoscope showed. The answer was illness and the danger of death, and that answer was treason regardless of intent: predicting a king's death was held to invite it, and to imply a wish for it. He was arrested in June 1441 and made to stand on a scaffold at Paul's Cross before a large crowd, surrounded by his instruments - a painted chair, wax images, swords with copper gilt ends - in a display designed to present learned astronomy as necromancy. He implicated the duchess, whether under torture or not is unrecorded. Southwell died in the Tower before sentence, Margery Jourdemayne was burned at Smithfield, Eleanor did public penance and was imprisoned for life, and Bolingbroke was executed at Tyburn in November. He recanted the charge of treason on the scaffold. The case is a standard example of a political prosecution using a witchcraft frame, and of the risk of practising a respectable science for the wrong client. A drawing of the Paul s Cross scaffold survives in a contemporary chronicle. His instruments were described in detail at the time and none of them are necromantic by any technical definition. Oxford quietly removed his name from its records.

• Lived: 1390 CE – 1441 CE
• Nationality: English
• Roles: scientist