Elizabeth Mortimer

Elizabeth Mortimer was an English noblewoman, a granddaughter of Lionel of Antwerp and wife first of Henry Percy, known as Hotspur, and later of Thomas de Camoys. Her Mortimer descent connected her family to competing claims to the English crown during the reign of Henry IV.

Elizabeth Mortimer was born in Usk and died in Trotton with Chithurst. A granddaughter of Lionel of Antwerp, Elizabeth married Henry Percy, known as Hotspur, linking the Mortimer and Percy interests; after Hotspur’s death at Shrewsbury in 1403, her family connections remained entangled in Lancastrian succession politics.

Anne O’Brien’s Queen of the North makes Elizabeth Mortimer’s bloodline central to the politics of 1399: as a Mortimer with a strong hereditary claim, she and her husband Henry Percy stand dangerously close to the succession dispute surrounding Richard II and Henry Bolingbroke. A. W. Boardman’s Hotspur gives the historical counterpart, tracing the Percy family’s power and the importance of Elizabeth’s Mortimer connections to later rebellion. In The Two Horns of the Moon, Boardman uses the same northern and dynastic world to show how marriage, inheritance and family loyalty can turn noble kinship into a political threat to the crown.