The Secret Diary of Eleanor Cobham

by Tony Riches

First published 2014

Amazon

4.0(1,561)

Eleanor Cobham rises from a knight’s daughter and royal mistress to become Duchess of Gloucester, wife of Humphrey of Lancaster and one of the highest-ranking women in England. With the young Henry VI childless, Humphrey’s proximity to the succession makes Eleanor’s interest in astrology politically dangerous. In 1441 her associates are accused of using divination and magic to predict the king’s death, and Eleanor herself is convicted, subjected to public penance and condemned to imprisonment for life.

Riches frames the story as a recovered private diary, allowing Eleanor to narrate the court politics behind the sensational charge of sorcery. The setting is Lancastrian England before the Wars of the Roses, when faction around Henry VI and the Duke of Gloucester could turn household relationships into matters of state security. Eleanor Cobham’s historical fall is therefore treated not simply as a witchcraft story but as the destruction of a politically exposed noblewoman whose husband’s ambitions and her own search for forbidden knowledge gave enemies the means to remove her.