Thomas Southwell
Thomas Southwell cast a king's horoscope and died in the Tower before they could hang him for it. He was a canon of St Stephen's chapel at Westminster and a physician-astrologer of the sort every great household kept, in a century when astrology was a university subject and a routine part of medicine. The offence was a matter of whose horoscope. With the scholar Roger Bolingbroke he cast the nativity of Henry VI at the request of Eleanor Cobham, wife of Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, who was heir presumptive to a childless king, and the reading found illness and death. Predicting the death of a king was treason regardless of intent, on the doctrine that foretelling the event was a way of procuring it. The charge surfaced in 1441, when Gloucester's enemies at court had every reason to want it, and the prosecution was understood at the time as an attack on him through his wife. Eleanor admitted only that she had bought potions from the cunning woman Margery Jourdemayne to help her conceive. The sentences fell by rank and sex. Bolingbroke was hanged, drawn and quartered; Jourdemayne was burned at Smithfield as a witch; Eleanor did public penance through London and was imprisoned in castles until she died at Beaumaris. He was condemned and died in the Tower the night before the execution, which contemporaries attributed to grief and later writers have generally read as a convenient death. Shakespeare put the conjuring on stage in Henry VI Part 2, which is how most people have met the case, and the play follows the prosecution's version of it.
- Nationality: English
- Roles: cleric
