Forgotten Royal Women by Erin Lawless

Author:Erin Lawless [Lawless, Erin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Biography
ISBN: 9781473898462
Google: U04IEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B07QLDYNSQ
Barnesnoble: B07QLDYNSQ
Goodreads: 45182330
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2019-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

Eleanor Cobham

Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester (c.1400–7 July 1452), was first the mistress and then the second wife of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, the youngest son of Henry IV. Eleanor was convicted and imprisoned for ‘sorcery’ and ‘treasonable necromancy’ in 1441 and forced to make a public penance in the streets of London – all this for a woman who came within a breath of being the Queen of England..!

The daughter of a minor noble, Eleanor was brought to court in 1422 to become a lady-in-waiting to the newly arrived Dutch noble Jacqueline, Countless of Hainaut – an illustrious woman whose impressive array of titles also included Duchess of Bavaria-Straubing, and Countess of Holland and Zeeland. Jacqueline was fleeing a disastrous marriage and was hoping that the English might help her wrest control of her territories back from her useless husband.

After the sudden death of Henry V and ascension of the infant Henry VI, Jacqueline fudged a divorce from her husband on the grounds of consanguinity and married the new king’s uncle and Lord Protector, Humphrey – the Duke of Gloucester – and so it was that her lady-inwaiting, Eleanor Cobham, came into his sphere. A well-matched pair, the Duke and the lady became lovers around 1425.

Both attractive, pleasure-loving and ambitious people, they openly flaunted their relationship whilst poor abandoned Jacqueline languished on the continent. Humphrey was known to have had two illegitimate children – the wonderfully romantically named Arthur and Antigone Plantagenet – Eleanor could well have been their mother, but if she was, it is likely that Humphrey would have retrospectively legitimised them after their legal marriage took place.

In 1428 the Pope ruled that Jacqueline and Humphrey’s marriage was invalid – she hadn’t exactly dotted her i-s and crossed her t-s when it came to her ‘annulment’ from her first husband. Luckily for Jacqueline, her ex was by then dead, and so there was absolutely nothing stopping Humphrey from marrying her again and making everything square and legit. Except that instead, Humphrey married Eleanor Cobham.

The new Duchess wasted absolutely no time making sure everybody understood her new status. She rode through the streets of London dressed up to the nines and accompanied by so many men at arms you would have been forgiven for assuming she was someone far more important than she actually was. Her contemporaries remembered her as proud and prickly – although the young Henry VI seems to have been fond of his aunt and gave her many presents.

In 1435, Humphrey’s elder brother the Duke of Bedford died, which made Humphrey the heir presumptive to the still-young and childless Henry VI. Now this knight’s daughter made good was heir to the Queenship of England! But the house of cards came tumbling down in 1441. A group of men were arrested for using ‘astrological predictions’ to forecast that Henry VI was soon to suffer a life-threatening illness. The men admitted their treason, but swore they had only done what they did on the instigation of the

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