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Historical person
c. 1400–1452
Eleanor Cobham became a lady in the household of Jacqueline of Hainaut and later the mistress and second wife of Humphrey of Lancaster, Duke of Gloucester, the youngest brother of Henry V. As Duchess of Gloucester she occupied an exceptionally prominent position because her husband was close to the throne during the childless years of Henry VI’s early reign.
In 1441 Eleanor and members of her circle were accused of using astrology and magical practices to predict the king’s death. Her associates suffered severe punishments, while Eleanor was convicted, required to perform public penance in London and imprisoned for the remainder of her life. The affair destroyed her political position and badly damaged Humphrey’s standing.
Eleanor Cobham is the central historical figure in Tony Riches’s The Secret Diary of Eleanor Cobham, which imagines her rise, marriage to Humphrey of Gloucester and downfall through the perspective of a private diary. Philippa Gregory’s Royal Witch makes Eleanor Cobham its central figure, tracing her rise beside Humphrey of Gloucester and the way her interest in astrology and divination becomes politically lethal under Henry VI. Joanna Hickson’s The Tudor Bride presents Eleanor Cobham as the beautiful protégée of Humphrey of Gloucester whom Catherine of Valois’s companion Mette suspects of spying for the duke amid the struggles surrounding the widowed queen and the infant Henry VI.
Series
The Catherine de Valois sequence follows the French princess from childhood at the unstable court of Charles VI to her marriage to Henry V and her later relationship with Owen Tudor. Both novels are narrated principally through Mette, a fictional servant and lifelong companion. The Agincourt Bride covers…
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The Plantagenet and Tudor novels form a chronological sequence of connected but independently readable stories about women near the English throne. They move from the Lancastrian court and the Wars of the Roses through the rise of the Tudors, Henry VIII’s marriages, the mid-Tudor religious crisis and the…
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