In the middle of the seventeenth century, England was a land unsettled by civil war, the execution of a king, the rise of Cromwell, and the restoration of Charles II. Oxford, with its cloisters, colleges, and quiet cobbled lanes, had become a place not only of learning but of political intrigue, whispers of plots, and struggles between religion and reason. It is here that the story of Sarah Blundy, a poor young woman accused of murder, unfolds. Her life, though small in the eyes of many, became the thread that wove together the lives of men of science, politics, obsession, and history, each of whom told their version of what happened.
Sarah was the daughter of Anne Blundy, a devout and sometimes fanatical woman who lived on visions and the respect of her neighbors, though that respect was mingled with suspicion. Her father had died long before, leaving Sarah to work as a servant in various homes, and to care for her mother who was often regarded as half-mad. Sarah’s life was shaped by hardship, but she carried herself with a dignity that some mistook for pride. When she entered the service of Robert Grove, a fellow of New College, she could hardly have known how deeply his fate would intertwine with hers. Grove was a man of learning but also of arrogance, stern in his beliefs and quick to judge. He had little kindness in him for servants, and Sarah endured his moods with patience. Yet soon, Grove was dead, and the world around Sarah shifted with terrible force.
The first account of what happened comes from Marco da Cola, a Venetian who had come to England to practice medicine and to study the new sciences that flourished in Oxford’s halls. He presented himself as a man of noble birth, educated and refined, and indeed his manners and knowledge impressed many. He told of how he encountered Sarah when she tended Grove, how he himself treated Grove with his skills, and how he came to admire Sarah’s strength and innocence. When Grove fell suddenly ill and died, suspicion turned at once upon Sarah. The poison that was believed to have killed him was thought to have been placed by her hand, for she had both access and motive, or so the authorities claimed. Marco, however, insisted that Sarah was the victim of prejudice and circumstance. He told of her loyalty to her ailing mother, her devotion even in the face of cruelty, and he painted her not as a murderer but as a wronged woman. Yet da Cola’s account, for all its sympathy, revealed cracks. He spoke of his own lineage, of the noble house from which he came, and yet those who listened wondered if he were truly what he claimed. His defense of Sarah was passionate, but it was also bound to his own need for acceptance in a foreign land, and his own ambition. Still, he insisted that Grove had died not by Sarah’s hand but by the will of fate or the errors of medicine. His story placed the blame anywhere but on her, and he stood almost alone in her defense.
Another man told his story differently. Jack Prestcott, a young and troubled soul, had lived all his life under the shadow of disgrace. His father, once a man of standing, had been executed as a traitor, and Jack’s every thought turned toward clearing his father’s name and restoring honor to his family. His obsession burned like fire, consuming his mind and twisting his judgment. He became entangled with rumors of conspiracies, of Catholic plots to overthrow the crown, of Protestant resistance, of hidden hands that shaped England’s destiny. For Jack, Sarah was not merely a servant accused of murder. In his tale, she became something darker, a figure drawn into the web of conspiracies that haunted his imagination. He claimed she was connected to those who moved in secret, that her mother’s visions were part of hidden schemes, that Grove’s death was tied not to household malice but to great affairs of state. His story was fevered, full of shadows and suspicions, but to him it was the truth. He spoke with wild intensity, and in his words Sarah became a conspirator, willingly or not, in a plot that reached beyond Oxford to the heart of England itself. His telling was colored by paranoia and by his desperate need to redeem his father. Whether he lied or merely saw ghosts where none existed, Jack’s words spread unease and suspicion further, drawing Sarah deeper into danger.
Then came John Wallis, a man of mathematics, cryptography, and cold logic, who served the state with a mind sharp enough to break codes and uncover secrets. Wallis viewed the world as numbers and puzzles, things to be solved and exploited. His loyalty was to his masters in London, not to truth for its own sake. In his story, Sarah was part of a pattern, a piece of a game in which men like him moved the pieces to secure advantage. He spoke of codes hidden in letters, of conspiracies tracked through numbers and ciphers, of the endless struggle between crown and dissenters, Catholic and Protestant, England and foreign powers. For Wallis, Grove’s death was less a tragedy than an opportunity. He believed that Sarah’s conviction and execution would serve as a warning, would strengthen the hold of order, would please those in power. He had no sympathy for her. She was to him a pawn, and he used his skills to bend evidence, to shape testimony, to ensure the outcome he desired. His tale was not clouded with passion like Jack’s, nor softened with compassion like Marco’s. It was precise, cold, and ruthless. He described Sarah as guilty because it was useful for her to be guilty, and in his story truth was measured only by whether it served the state.
At last, Anthony Wood, the antiquarian and historian, offered his account. Wood was a man devoted to facts, to recording faithfully the events of his time for posterity. His telling was quieter, less dramatic, but it sought above all to find what was real amid the conflicting voices. He acknowledged the contradictions, the lies, the distortions that had been spun by the others, and he tried to sift through them. In his account, Sarah emerged not as the sainted victim of da Cola, nor the conspirator of Jack, nor the pawn of Wallis, but as a flesh-and-blood woman caught in the merciless machinery of her world. Grove’s death, when stripped of rumor and invention, seemed less a matter of deliberate murder than of accident and circumstance, perhaps even of illness. Yet once suspicion had fallen on Sarah, there was no turning back. The courts were eager for a scapegoat, the powerful were eager for control, and the people were eager for a spectacle. Wood described her trial with sorrow, the evidence twisted against her, the voices raised in condemnation, and the inevitability of her sentence.
Sarah was hanged, her body swinging before the crowd, her life cut short for a crime she may never have committed. Her mother’s visions did not save her, nor did Marco’s passionate defense, nor Jack’s wild protests, nor even Wood’s careful words. Her death closed her story but left questions behind, questions about truth, about justice, about the way men in power use and discard the weak. To some she was a martyr, to others a criminal, but to history she became a figure forever debated, remembered not for what she truly was but for what others made of her.
The four accounts, when taken together, form not a single clear truth but a tapestry of contradictions. Marco revealed his own concealed identity as much as he defended Sarah. Jack exposed his obsessions and madness more than he uncovered plots. Wallis laid bare the ruthless machinery of state power. Wood showed the struggle of a man who sought truth in a world where truth was twisted at every turn. From them all, a picture emerged, but it was a picture with gaps, with shadows, with edges blurred. Sarah’s life, so small in the scale of nations, became the battlefield on which these larger struggles played out.
Oxford remained, with its towers and chapels, its debates and discoveries, its students and spies. The Restoration continued, kings and parliaments played their games, and men of science pursued knowledge that would reshape the world. But in the quiet corners of history, the story of Sarah Blundy lived on, retold in whispers, reshaped by pens, remembered not for certainty but for the lesson it carried. It showed how the truth is never simple, how justice can be bent, how the lives of the powerless can be consumed by the schemes of the powerful. It showed how history is made not of facts alone, but of the stories men choose to tell.
And so Sarah’s life and death, caught between faith and reason, between loyalty and betrayal, between innocence and guilt, became more than just the tale of a servant accused of poisoning her master. It became a mirror of her age, an age where certainty was elusive, where every truth was shadowed by lies, and where the instance of the fingerpost—the sign pointing to the truth—was always seen only in hindsight, when it was too late to save the living.