warrant, on a charge of having caused her mistress's death by ‘a venymous drynke of ale myxt with poyson.’ She was hurried off to Warwick, her native county, and summarily tried, condemned, and executed by the justices in petty sessions, apparently in the presence of Clarence. A writ of certiorari was issued too late to save the unfortunate victim of this judicial murder. Nor was she the only one. John Thuresby suffered on a charge of poisoning Clarence's infant son Richard (d. 1 Jan. 1477), though Sir Roger Tocotes obtained an acquittal (Rot. Parl. vi. 173–4; Deputy-Keeper Publ. Records, 3rd Rep. ii. 214). The court party turned Clarence's weapon against himself by extracting from John Stacy, a reputed wizard, under torture, a denunciation of Thomas Burdet of Arrow in Warwickshire, one of Clarence's confidants. A special commission met (19 May) at Westminster, before which Burdet was vaguely charged with having compassed the death of the king in April 1474; with instigating Stacy and another necromancer to calculate the nativities of the king and Prince of Wales; with predicting the king's speedy death on the eve of his departure for France in 1475; and with circulating just before the trial seditious and treasonable rhymes against the king. Sir James Ramsay suggests that this last may have been the well-known prophecy that the king should be succeeded by one the first letter of whose name should be G. Despite their plea of not guilty, Burdet and Stacy were condemned, and hanged at Tyburn on 20 May. Next day Clarence brought the Franciscan Dr. William Goddard before the privy council to testify to their dying protestations of innocence—an unfortunate choice, for Goddard had preached the restoration sermon of Henry VI in 1470. Clarence's enemies no doubt took care to connect this with the evidence which had been laid before Edward to prove that his brother was once again conspiring to make himself king. Summoning Clarence to meet him in the presence of the mayor and aldermen, he committed him to the Tower. We may suppose that Edward's distrust had been heightened by the recent Scottish proposal for a double marriage—one between the ambitious Albany, brother of James III, and the other between Clarence and their sister Margaret. Contemporary chroniclers, both in this country and abroad, traced Clarence's death to his intrigues with Burgundy (Ramsay, ii. 422).
But they were graver offences of which Edward personally accused his brother in the parliament of January 1478. Ungrateful for the oblivion extended to his former treason, he had slandered him to his subjects as having had Burdet unjustly put to death, and as working by necromancy to poison any who stood in his way; had spread rumours that he was a bastard, and no rightful king; had secretly received oaths of allegiance from a number of the king's subjects to himself and his heirs, exhibiting an exemplification, under the seal of Henry VI, of the act of 1470, securing to him the reversion of the crown on the failure of Henry's issue; and, lastly, had made actual preparations for a new rebellion, and for secretly sending his son to Ireland or Flanders, substituting another child to personate him at Warwick Castle. Edward concluded by declaring his brother incorrigible, and that he could not answer for the peace of the realm if such ‘loathly offences’ were pardoned. The scene is described by the Croyland chronicler (p. 562) as a most painful one no one but Clarence himself venturing to reply to the king, and the few witnesses behaving more like prosecutors than witnesses. What proofs were adduced does not appear. The disturbed state of certain districts in the early months of this year seems to have lent the charges some colour and the repeal in the same session of the succession act in Clarence's favour (1470) was doubtless due to a suspicion that he was ready to take advantage of its terms (Ramsay, ii. 424; Rot. Parl. vi. 191). The imprisonment, shortly before 6 March 1478, of Bishop Robert Stillington [q. v.] of Bath, who, under Richard, claimed to have married Edward to an English lady previous to his alliance with Elizabeth Wydeville, possibly suggests that Clarence had already spread this story abroad (Excerpta Historica, p. 354; Commines, ii. 157). Disregarding the duke's vigorous denials, which he offered to support by personal combat, both houses passed the bill of attainder, and a court of chivalry, presided over by the Duke of Buckingham, passed sentence of death (8 Feb.; Rot. Parl. vi. 195). Edward's own reluctance, or the remonstrances of some of those about him, delayed its execution for more than a week. Sir Thomas More reports that Gloucester opposed his brother's death, though, ‘as men deemed, somewhat more faintly than he that were heartily minded to his wealth.’ This surmise, described by More himself as devoid of certainty, is the only positive foundation for Shakespeare's ascription of Clarence's death to Gloucester. Richard, it is true, benefited considerably by his brother's fall, and the religious foundations he made immediately after have been interpreted as possible marks of remorse (Gaird-
