In the summer of 1441 England was shaken by a scandal that wove astrology into high politics. Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester and wife of the heir presumptive to the throne, had commissioned the scholars Roger Bolingbroke and Thomas Southwell to cast a horoscope of the young King Henry VI. The verdict was explosive: the stars foretold a fatal illness for the sovereign by summer's end.
Predicting the king's death was no academic exercise: it was treason. Between 10 and 12 July the astrologers were arrested; on 24-25 July Eleanor herself was examined at Westminster on charges of treason and sorcery. Bolingbroke died on the scaffold, Southwell in prison; the wise-woman Margery Jourdemayne, drawn into the affair, was burned. Eleanor did public penance through the streets of London and spent the rest of her life in captivity.
When the stars become politics
Shakespeare immortalised the affair in Henry VI. The Cobham case remains medieval England's most famous warning: to ask the stars about a king's fate was, in the eyes of the law, to wish to write it.