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Historical person
1390–1447
Humphrey of Lancaster, Duke of Gloucester, was the youngest son of Henry IV and served as protector of England during the minority of Henry VI. An energetic patron of learning, he also pursued a costly and unsuccessful claim in the Low Countries through his marriage to Jacqueline of Hainault.
Humphrey quarrelled with Cardinal Beaufort and other councillors over the conduct of government and war. Arrested in 1447, he died suddenly before trial, prompting rumours of murder. Humphrey of Lancaster, 1st Duke of Gloucester was born in London and died in Bury St Edmunds.
In Mette Holm’s Deeds of Deceit, after five years of imprisonment and torture for a crime he did not commit, Thom Mowbray expects death rather than release. Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, instead brings the former spymaster back into service near the end of Henry V’s reign. Thom enters a court transformed by war, patronage and the approaching uncertainty of a royal succession, but his injuries have stripped away much of the authority and confidence on which his old methods depended. Humphrey’s schemes and rival factions force Thom to trade secrets whose value is rapidly changing. In Joanna Hickson’s The Tudor Bride, Catherine of Valois arrives in England as Henry V’s French queen and gives birth to the future Henry VI, but her husband’s early death leaves her politically vulnerable. Mette, still serving as her companion, watches Humphrey of Gloucester and other magnates struggle for control of the infant king and the widowed queen’s household. Away from court, Catherine forms a relationship with the Welsh courtier Owen Tudor. Humphrey of Lancaster, 1st Duke of Gloucester is treated fictionally in Georgette Heyer’s My Lord John. Tony Riches’s The Secret Diary of Eleanor Cobham portrays Humphrey of Lancaster through his marriage to Eleanor and his proximity to the childless Henry VI, showing how the Duke of Gloucester’s political position turns his household into a focus of faction and suspicion.
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 Mowbray Chronicles follow a fictional branch of the English Mowbray family from the later Hundred Years’ War through the reigns of Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V. Argyle Mowbray’s murder inquiry begins the numbered sequence at Richard’s divided court, but the dynasty’s concealed origins are established…
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This collection brings together Georgette Heyer’s historical novels set outside her main Regency-romance sequence. The settings range from medieval England and France to the Norman Conquest, Elizabethan maritime conflict, the escape of Charles II and the Peninsular War. The list follows the ordering supplied by the Fantastic Fiction…
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Standalone books
