Magic pack is a term used to describe a special kind of pack that contains magical items or substances. These packs are often associated with magical practices, such as witchcraft or spellcasting. It is believed that the items within the magic pack possess supernatural powers and can be used in various rituals or spells. The contents of a magic pack can vary depending on the purpose and tradition of the practitioner. Some common items found in a magic pack include herbs, crystals, candles, and charms. These items are carefully selected and charged with energy to enhance their magical properties.
Unlike the accused witches who are bound and forced under the surface by the weight of rocks, Quynh's torture device is a prison for one. Over time she would break free from ropes, but an iron coffin cannot be broken by fists alone. For most, this would involve several minutes of agony before succumbing, but for an immortal, it means an endless cycle of pain and terror. What Niles sees and feels in her vision is the pain, rage, and question of sanity caused by 500 years in an underwater cage.
Actual witch Samantha Stephens Elizabeth Montgomery , has to use magic to save her husband from accusations after he uses a match in 1620 Massachusetts in an episode of Bewitched that reflects on the importance of tolerance and diversity. Over the series they conjure a small hurricane that nearly sinks Warwick James Frain and George of Clarence David Oakes , create a fog that covers Edward IV Max Irons as his army approaches Warwick s at the Battle of Barnet in 1471, and produce a storm that prevents Henry Tudor from sailing from Brittany to join Buckingham s Rebellion in 1483.
These items are carefully selected and charged with energy to enhance their magical properties. Herbs are often used in magic for their specific properties and associations. For example, lavender is associated with relaxation and purification, while rosemary is believed to enhance memory and concentration.
The White Queen: Witchcraft
My first post about the BBC series The White Queen took a ‘So Close and Yet So Far’ approach. But a few people thought that it was more close than far. That’s mostly because I decided to save a couple of big things for separate posts. Here’s where we really get into the Far parts.
Throughout the series the Rivers women, including Jacquetta (Janet McTeer), Queen Elizabeth (Rebecca Ferguson) and Elizabeth of York (Freya Mavor) all practice witchcraft. In the first couple episodes it’s entirely about predicting the future, and so I thought that the show was taking the approach that Jacquette was just engaging in a little folk magic that happened to give the right answer about whether her daughter was going to get married.
But no, the women are in fact witches. As the series goes on, not only do they occasionally use magic to predict or shape the future, such as ensuring that Elizabeth gives birth to a boy, but they also go for larger-scale things. Over the series they conjure a small hurricane that nearly sinks Warwick (James Frain) and George of Clarence (David Oakes), create a fog that covers Edward IV (Max Irons) as his army approaches Warwick’s at the Battle of Barnet in 1471, and produce a storm that prevents Henry Tudor from sailing from Brittany to join Buckingham’s Rebellion in 1483. (In all three cases, this weather did actually happen historically.) They also curse Warwick and George to die for killing Queen Elizabeth’s father and brother; that one takes a long time to play out, but the show suggests that the curse really did work. Elizabeth briefly curses Richard with a pain in his hand that he feels. The Elizabeths also curse whoever killed the princes in the Tower; the show suggests that Anne Neville’s death in 1485 was due to that curse. All three women ‘have the sight’ and periodically get visions that correctly predict the future.
And everyone around them knows they are witches. Lord Rivers jokingly asks “what spells are you two weaving this time?” Queen Elizabeth jokes that if they burn a portrait of Margaret of Anjou, she and her mother will both get hanged as witches. Clarence and Anne both repeatedly accuse them of witchcraft, blaming them for everything that goes wrong in their personal lives. Clarence hirers an astrologer to protect himself from Woodville magic, but it gets misunderstood as an attempt to kill Edward. The only person who doesn’t think the Woodville women are witches is Edward.
Elizabeth and Jacquetta working a spell
So, to be clear about what the show does, it purports to be a historical narrative about the Wars of the Roses and it shows the Woodville women successfully using magic to manipulate the events. Their magic justifies many of the odd twists and turns the Wars took over the years. It never bothers to address why these magically powerful women didn’t just use their magic to directly kill their enemies like Clarence and Richard, so the narrative is just sort of ham-fisted about it.
There is an increasing trend in the past decade or so of ancient and medieval historical films and show throwing in magical elements. I have no problem with movies and shows depicting ancient and medieval magical practices; nearly all societies have magical practices of some sort, so it’s not unreasonable to show medieval women occasionally resorting to magic in hopes of achieving their ends. But I have a big problem with stories that claim to be historical showing those magical practices as producing real effects. At that point, a film or show crosses the line from history into fantasy.
The Basis for the Claims
Philippa Gregory’s idea that the Woodvilles were actual witches does have a small nugget of fact in it. In 1469, during the period when Warwick had taken control of Edward and was trying to run the government through him, Jacquetta was accused of witchcraft. A man named Thomas Wake gave Warwick “an image of lead made like a man of arms of the length of a man’s finger broken in the middle and made fast with a wire, saying that it was made by [Jacquetta] to use with witchcraft and sorcery.” Wake got a parish priest to support this by claiming that Jacquetta had also made two figures of the king and the queen, presumably some form of love magic to ensure that Edward would marry her daughter.
A drawing of Richard Neville, the earl of Warwick
The charges were obviously political. Wake’s son had died fighting for Warwick against Edward and he may have been involved in the death of Lord Rivers. Warwick had just arranged the execution of Lord Rivers and one of his sons, and was clearly now maneuvering against Jacquetta as part of a sustained attack on the Woodvilles.
Jacquetta pushed back by writing a letter to the mayor and aldermen of London, reminding them that back n 1461, she had saved the city when Margaret of Anjou wanted to destroy it. Jacquetta had been a close friend and lady-in-waiting to Margaret, so her personal influence apparently helped sway the wrathful queen. The citizens of London repaid the favor by sending a letter supporting her to Warwick via George of Clarence.
That didn’t stop the trial, though. Edward was forced to order an examination of the witnesses, but when the time came for the trial before the Great Council (in this case, essentially a session of the House of Lords), Edward was back in charge and the case against Jacquetta collapsed. The witnesses recanted their testimony, and Jacquetta asserted what was, at least in canon law, an entirely valid defense that Wake was a long-time enemy of hers; whether this particular canon law principle was carried over into English Common Law on witchcraft I’m unsure of, but if something similar applied, this would have disqualified Wake as an accuser by establishing that he had an obvious motive to lie. The Council, clearly understanding where the king’s sympathies lay, acquitted Lady Rivers and agreed to her request to include the proceedings in the official records of the Council. Jacquetta was obviously a smart woman, and knew that having an official note of her acquittal might come in useful if the charges were revived later on.
And in fact the charges were revived in 1484 when Richard III asked Parliament to declare that Edward and Elizabeth had never been legally married because Elizabeth and Jacquetta had used magic to procure the marriage. By this point Lady Rivers was already dead, and Richard needed Parliament to make this declaration because it justified his seizure of the throne. Parliament did as it was told and declared the marriage invalid.
These two incidents, which were clearly motivated by politics, comprise the sum total of all the actual evidence that the Woodville women ever practiced witchcraft. It is out of these false charges that Gregory spun this entire subplot for her books. She worked within the framework of the known facts, which is commendable, but by blowing these details up into a major part of the story and inventing a host of facts that are literally impossible, such as controlling the weather, she took her story off into fantasyland. And Gregory has falsely claimed in an interview that Jacquetta was convicted and spared only by Margaret of Anjou’s intervention.
In the show, Warwick tries Jacquetta for witchcraft while he has control of Edward. He brings in a witness (not Thomas Wake) to make the same accusations; Jacquetta protests that she has never seen the man before, rather than trying to disqualify him as an enemy. Since Jacquetta is actually a witch, the whole scene represents very serious danger; although the accuser is making things up, what he’s inventing is somehow correct. She is saved by calling a witness of her own, Margaret of Anjou, whom she was close friends with years ago. Her strategy is that Warwick is dependant on Margaret politically and militarily, so he won’t be able to oppose her in this trial. It works and Jacquetta is acquitted. But this all rests on the false assumption that medieval English courts worked like modern ones, a mistake that other tv shows have made as well.
Jacquetta on trial
What is really frustrating to me about this is that the series had a perfect opportunity to explore the way that witchcraft accusations were generally motivated not by actual evidence of witchcraft but by political or personal motives. It was a charge that women were vulnerable to because this culture associated witchcraft with women rather than men. (Men were much more likely to be accused of learned magic, such as the malicious astrology charge brought against George of Clarence’s personal astrologer.)
In the later part of the Middle Ages, English society gradually began using accusations of magic for political reasons. In 1419, Henry V believed that he had been a target of a magical plot. In 1431, witchcraft was one of the charges against Joan of Arc. In 1441, Duchess Eleanor of Gloucester was accused of treasonous astrology when she had an astrologer forecast the death of Henry VI. She was convicted, forced to do public penance, divorce her husband, and suffer life imprisonment. In 1450, Henry VI’s government accused the rebel Jack Cade of using sorcery. As already mentioned, in the 1470s, George of Clarence was implicated in treasonous astrology. Looking forward a generation of so, Anne Boleyn was accused of witchcraft by Catholic propagandists, although contrary to Internet claims, witchcraft was not one of the charges brought against her at her trial (although Henry VIII may have once made an off-hand claim that she had ensnared him through witchcraft).
So Gregory could easily have written a subplot in which the charges of witchcraft were entirely false and used that to explore the way that women were culturally vulnerable to ideas about witchcraft. Instead, she chose to actually reinforce the cultural bias around women as witchcraft by making them genuinely guilty. That really pisses me off, because in a way, it re-victimizes these two women.
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Want to Know More?
The White Queen is available on Starz, and on Amazon. The three novels it is based on are The White Queen, The Red Queen, and The Kingmaker’s Daughter. They are also available as a set with two other novels.
If you’re interested in this issue, you can read this blog post, which digs a bit further into the evidence for the Woodville women as witches (and explodes it). The author of the post, Susan Higgenbotham, is a novelist and author of The Woodvilles: The Wars of the Roses and England’s Most Infamous Family. She’s not a professional historian, but she’s clearly dug into the sources on this.
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6 thoughts on “The White Queen: Witchcraft”
Pingback: The White Queen: So Close, and Yet So Far | An Historian Goes to the Movies Pingback: The White Princess: Whackadoodle-doo! | An Historian Goes to the Movies Stephen LeBlanc said: July 21, 2019 at 6:15 pmOffering different perspectives here, though I agree with your review 80% and appreciate that you wrote it. I watched the entire series twice and took the opportunity to read more widely about the War of the Roses. I find the series shockingly accurate in so many details, as you pointed out. There is little time compression and so far as I could tell, no composite characters or composite events, which struck me as fairly unique in TV historical romance drama. As to the magical elements, I did not interpret any of them as being depictions of actual magic. The women are shown as wishing things to happen and predicting things to happen that appear to have been historically accurate and also to have been the things that naturally happen in the real world but that both then and now are often ascribed to supernatural causes. It is entirely plausible, to me, that some high born individuals of that period performed prayers or magical rituals towards certain ends (death or illness of an enemy, storms, mists, etc.) and truly believed purely natural results to be a result of supernatural powers or intervention. I did not feel that showing Jacquetta actually performing “magic” took away from dramatizing the political nature of her trial, especially where in the context of the show the specific charges against her appear false. Likewise, it is entirely possible that people like Margaret Beaufort and Elizabeth could believe that a birth attendant brought a new-born (like Prince Richard) to life, through prayer or magic, even if in reality that is not what happened. Even today, a majority of people believe in the reality of supernatural forces affecting their lives, from luck to prayer. Capturing this genuine belief of the supernatural in fiction while not actually showing anything supernatural I thought was a good trick to spice up the storytelling without drifting into actual magical fiction. On a different note, adding some historically implausible character motivations, like those of Margaret Beaufort, seems to me entirely forgivable in this type of drama. Even showing Edward IV smothering Henry VI does not seem too far from historically possible, whether by his hands or a closely trusted servant. My biggest quibble was the survival of Prince Richard. Though pretenders appeared years later, what I read of the known history does indicates that no one in the center of the action, including Elizabeth, believed either of the princes survived. In the TV show version of the story, it is also irrelevant to any other plot point, so why is it in there. Also, I have seen enough aging makeup to last my lifetime, the lack did not bother me at all. It was awful and distracting to my eyes at the end of The Tudors. Further, seeing Edward’s mother in full head dress was quite enough. To modern eyes, she always looked the clown in that get up. The expense of both aging makeup an all those hats, was not worth the story. I do agree that most of the women’s costumes were a bit too drab. That is the one part of the production that I would fault. Like Like Reply
aelarsen said: July 21, 2019 at 6:18 pmThe reason I read the show the way they do (and the White Princess as well) is that everything they ‘wish for’ comes true. They are never shown attempting magic and having it fail. Since their success rate is far above random chance, I don’t think there is any way to read it than that the show is saying they actually have magic powers. Like Like Reply
Jay said: May 22, 2021 at 3:41 pmI agree with the above poster – these “spells” were either coincidental on the show, or took such a long and roundabout way to “work” that they become post-facto “magic.” This is not at all like Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings where it is for sure magic. Any more than Margaret’s prayers on the two shows show God’s magic helping Henry Tudor. Like Like Reply
Mary said: December 2, 2021 at 6:03 ami agree with Stephen. witchcraft have their own history in the british isles. it is ignorant, witchcraft is not superpower…. but it can conjure something that may or may not change the course of history. for example making rain and water is pretty common in many culture, even during heavy rain their enemy still could win… just like when elizabeth woodville conjure storm so earl of warwick died.. but he didn’t died from the insane storm Like Like Reply
The witch is, after all, the original “nasty woman” and it is no coincidence that she is back now, a black-clad, pointy hat inverse of Gilead’s crimson-decked, bonnet-bound handmaids. “Minority and oppressed people in the west have discovered that there is no liberation to be found in traditional patriarchal, capitalist or religious systems,” says academic, author and chaos magic practitioner Patricia MacCormack.
Crystals, on the other hand, are believed to have unique energies that can be harnessed for different purposes. For example, amethyst is often used for spiritual protection, while quartz is believed to amplify energy. Candles are commonly used in spellcasting to represent the element of fire and to focus intent. Different colored candles are associated with different intentions, such as red for passion or love, or green for abundance and prosperity. Charms, on the other hand, are small objects that are believed to carry protective or lucky energies. These can include symbols, talismans, or personal items that hold significance for the practitioner. In addition to these physical items, a magic pack may also contain spellbooks, tarot cards, or other divination tools. Spellbooks contain instructions for various rituals and spells, while tarot cards are used for divination and gaining insight into future events. These tools serve as guides and aids in the magical practice. It is important to note that the effectiveness of a magic pack depends on the belief and intention of the practitioner. The items within the pack are seen as tools for focusing and directing energy, rather than possessing inherent power. In this way, magic packs are used as a means to connect with the energetic forces of the universe and to manifest desired outcomes. Overall, magic packs are seen as a personal and sacred tool for those who practice magic. They are used to enhance rituals, spells, and divination, and to connect with the spiritual realm. The contents of a magic pack are carefully selected and charged with energy, and are seen as symbols of the practitioner's intentions and beliefs..
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