Lady Catherine Gordon

Lady Catherine Gordon was the daughter of the Scottish Earl of Huntly and was married to Perkin Warbeck, the pretender who claimed to be Richard, Duke of York. After Warbeck’s capture by Henry VII, Catherine was treated honourably and entered the household of Queen Elizabeth of York. She remained at the Tudor court, married three more times and managed estates, surviving the political destruction of her first husband.

Catherine appears in Philippa Gregory’s The White Princess and in historical novels about Perkin Warbeck and the insecurity of Henry VII’s throne. Fiction often presents her as torn between belief in her husband’s claim and the need to survive after his defeat. Her long later career at court complicates any simple image of her as merely the tragic wife of a failed pretender.

In Alison Weir’s The Pretender’s Wife, Lady Catherine Gordon arrives at the Scottish court to marry a charismatic stranger who claims to be Richard, Duke of York, the younger of the princes believed to have disappeared in the Tower.