She was taken from the Tower of London to Smithfield. A duchess had named her as the woman she consulted for help having a child. The duchess would survive the scandal. She would not.

On 27 October 1441, Margery Jourdemayne was burned at Smithfield. She had been caught up in the prosecution of Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester, and of two learned men accused of plotting against Henry VI through magic.

Margery was married. Her husband, William, worked on Westminster Abbey's manor of Eye, also called Ebury, near Westminster, and came from an established family of Middlesex yeomen. There was land and livestock behind the name Jourdemayne. Less than two years before her death, four of William's oxen had been stolen from a field he leased. These were people with property worth stealing, and business that brought them into the courts for ordinary reasons as well as extraordinary ones.

Eleanor belonged to another world. She was the daughter of a knight and had served Jacqueline of Hainault, Humphrey of Gloucester's first wife, before becoming Humphrey's mistress and then his wife herself. She had risen from a place in a duchess's household to being the duchess. Margery's services had brought the two women into contact across that distance.

By 1441, Eleanor's husband was heir presumptive to the English throne. Henry VI was his nephew, unmarried and without a child. If Henry died without an heir, Humphrey stood next in line, and Eleanor could become queen. A child born to their marriage would therefore belong to a family whose future concerned rather more people than its parents.

Eleanor said she had sought Margery's help to conceive.

She would make that admission while denying something much larger. Two learned men associated with the Gloucester household, Roger Bolingbroke and Thomas Southwell, had become involved in predictions about Henry's future. They were accused of foretelling his death and of conspiring to bring it about through forbidden magic. A question about how long the king would live could lead very quickly to a question about who wanted him dead.

Margery already knew what it meant to be held on suspicion of sorcery. In November 1430 she had been imprisoned at Windsor Castle, and she was not brought before the king's council until May 1432. She had spent about eighteen months in custody before she was allowed out. William stood security for her release. Her freedom came with conditions about her future behaviour and an undertaking to practise no further witchcraft.

Nine years later, that earlier release would count against her.

In July 1441, the case against the Gloucester household was made into a public spectacle. Bolingbroke was displayed on a platform at St Paul's Cross with the objects used in his magical practices around him. He confessed and renounced those practices before a large gathering of lords and churchmen. He also implicated Eleanor, saying she had set him to discover what her future position would be. She sought sanctuary at Westminster Abbey, but sanctuary did not put her beyond examination by the Church.

The king's side had an answer to the alarming predictions. Another horoscope was prepared, offering Henry a more favourable future. The stars could apparently be consulted again when the first answer was unwelcome. That did nothing to make the first astrologers, or the women drawn into their case, any safer.

By autumn, Margery was a prisoner in the Tower. Eleanor, who had been held at Leeds Castle in Kent, was brought back to Westminster for further examination in October. Margery is reported to have given evidence against her. Before the bishops, Eleanor denied a plot against the king. The help she admitted seeking was for a child by her husband. That explanation placed Margery inside the case even while Eleanor resisted the accusation of treason.

For Margery, the danger lay partly in what had happened before. Her earlier undertaking to abandon witchcraft made the new allegations a matter of relapse. The Church treated her as a relapsed heretic. The woman William had helped bring home from Windsor would not be released into his keeping a second time. She was handed over to the London sheriffs.

Thomas Southwell died in the Tower around this time, before he could be brought to trial. On 27 October, the eve of the feast of Saints Simon and Jude, Margery was burned at Smithfield.

Eleanor's punishment followed in November. Her marriage was dissolved, and she was condemned to imprisonment for life. The woman who had sought help to bear Humphrey a child was no longer permitted to be his wife.

Before she was removed from London, she had to perform public penance on three days in the same week, carrying a taper of a pound of wax each time. On Monday 13 November she came by water from Westminster to the Temple and walked along Fleet Street to St Paul's, where she offered the first taper. On Wednesday she made another journey through the city to Christchurch at Aldgate. On Friday she carried her third taper to St Michael's in Cornhill. London had already seen Bolingbroke displayed with his magical instruments. Now it saw the duchess walking with her candle.

After the offerings, Eleanor remained a prisoner. Her journeys through London had been ordered as a punishment, and completing them did not restore her marriage or her freedom. She would live the rest of her life in custody. Margery's journey from the Tower had ended at Smithfield seventeen days before the duchess offered her first candle.