Lady Catherine Gordon

Lady Catherine Gordon was a Scottish noblewoman, probably born in the 1470s, and a daughter of George Gordon, 2nd Earl of Huntly. Her political importance began when James IV of Scotland arranged her marriage to Perkin Warbeck, the claimant who asserted that he was Richard of Shrewsbury, the younger of the missing Princes in the Tower. Catherine accompanied Warbeck during the later stages of his campaign, and Tudor writers used her beauty and noble birth to emphasise the seriousness with which Scottish policy had treated the pretender.

After Warbeck’s failed landing and surrender in 1497, Catherine came into Henry VII’s custody. Unlike her husband, who was executed in 1499 after renewed accusations of conspiracy, she was treated as a noblewoman rather than an enemy and served in the household of Elizabeth of York. Catherine remained at the Tudor court for decades, married three further husbands and accumulated property through those marriages and royal favour. She died in 1537. Her survival illustrates how a woman closely connected to a defeated dynastic claimant could be absorbed into the victorious court rather than punished with him.

In Alison Weir’s The Pretender’s Wife, Lady Catherine Gordon arrives at the Scottish court to marry the claimant recognised by James IV as Richard, Duke of York, one of the princes believed lost in the Tower.