with his mistress, Eleanor
Cobham, and in 1441 it was all but destroyed by an incident which paints
the temper of the time. The restless love of knowledge which was the one
redeeming feature in Duke Humphrey's character drew to him not only
scholars but a horde of the astrologers and claimants of magical powers,
who were the natural product of an age in which the faith of the Middle
Ages was dying out before the double attack of scepticism and heresy.
Amongst these was a priest named Roger Bolinbroke. Bolinbroke was seized
on a charge of compassing the king's death by sorcery; and the sudden
flight of Eleanor Cobham to the sanctuary at Westminster was soon
explained by a like accusation. Her judges found that she had made a waxen
image of the king and slowly melted it at a fire, a process which was held
to account for Henry's growing weakness both of body and mind. The Duchess
was doomed to penance for her crime; she was led bareheaded and barefooted
in a white penance-sheet through the streets of London, and then thrown
into prison for life. Humphrey never rallied from the blow. But his
retirement from public affairs was soon followed by that of his rival,
Cardinal Beaufort. Age forced Beaufort to withdraw to Winchester; and the
Council was from that time swayed mainly by the Earl of Suffolk, William
de la Pole, a grandson of the minister of Richard the Second.

[Sidenote: The Beauforts]

Few houses had served the Crown more faithfully than that of De la Pole.
His father fell at the siege of Harfleur; his brother had been slain at
Agincourt; William himself had served and been taken prisoner in the war
with France. But as a statesman he was powerless in the hands of the
Beauforts, and from this moment the policy of the Beauforts drew England
nearer and nearer to the chaos of civil war. John Beaufort, Duke of
Somerset, and his brother, Edmund, Earl of Dorset, were now the
representatives of this house. They were grandsons of John of Gaunt by his
mistress, Catharine Swynford. In later days Catharine became John's wife,
and his uncle's influence over Richard at the close of that king's reign
was shown in a royal ordinance which legitimated those of his children by
her who had been born before marriage. The ordinance was confirmed by an
Act of Parliament, which as it passed the Houses was expressed in the
widest and most general terms; but before issuing this as a statute Henry
the Fourth inserted provisions which left