Ryche and pore of al this realm
With whole heart and al lowness
Hem recomaunden to that pryncess.1
The year 1437 was a watershed for Lancastrian women. The deaths of Catherine of Valois and Joan of Navarre left the country without a queen, without the feminine influence that offered shelter, nurture, patronage and intercession at the heart of government. The household of a queen or dowager, whether the king’s wife, mother or grandmother, provided a complimentary balance to the male-dominated court and expanded the nature of royal power in a literal and symbolic way. A queen was a model of piety, motherhood and chastity, visible during public ceremonies and enshrined in manuscripts, images, poetry, ritual and effigy. She provided opportunities for the daughters of the nobility to serve the queen, for young nobles to be raised as the king’s wards, and the more passive, gentle power wielded by a queen could be just as significant as that of her husband. While an orphaned minor sat on the throne, representations of rule in England were unbalanced: the previous four kings had understood the significance of royal marriage, so the late 1430s and early 1440s were something of a period in limbo, as Henry VI matured and the prospect of his future marriage was still distant.
The young king turned 16 in December 1437 and although this was later than the usual age of majority, he was declared of age and able to rule in his own right. In practice, though, power at his court still resided in the hands of his uncles Henry Beaufort and Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, who dismissed his tutor Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, who had been his closest councillor during the past decade. There was little tangible change for Henry in terms of feminine influence, as both Catherine and Joan had lived in retirement in their final years; his mother due to her remarriage and his stepgrandmother as a result of her age and retirement following her imprisonment. Just by virtue of their existence they had filled a symbolic and dynastic role: their deaths in 1437 altered the order of precedence in the country, propelling three new women into the limelight. For the next four years, Henry’s controversial aunt, Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester was the highest-ranking lady in the land and until he produced a child of his own, she was potentially England’s next queen. Initially their relationship appears to have been good but neither this nor her position prevented her from suffering a spectacular public fall from grace that made Joan of Navarre’s imprisonment pale in comparison.
Eleanor was born around 1400 at Starborough or Sternborough Castle, in north-east Kent. The original medieval manor house no longer stands, but at its height, it was an imposing quadrangle with corner turrets, surrounded by a moat, similar to that of its near-contemporary Bodiam Castle, just over the border in East Sussex. Reaching her mid-teens, Eleanor would have been a candidate to be placed in the queen’s household, but no such household existed until the arrival of Catherine of Valois five years later and if she had been to Joan of Navarre’s court with her parents, that opportunity was lost in 1419. So Eleanor probably stayed at home at Starborough until another opportunity arose. As a cousin of Mary de Bohun through her grandmother’s second marriage, Eleanor was closely related to the man who would become her husband. When she first met him though, he was already married to someone else.
In the early 1420s, an opportunity arose for Eleanor to become lady in waiting to an important woman whose connections would bring the girl into the heart of English political life. Jacqueline of Hainault was of a similar age to Eleanor, perhaps a little older, but she was already a twice-married exile with a colourful history who had fled to England in March 1421. Jacqueline’s first husband had been John, Duke of Touraine, an elder brother of Catherine of Valois. They were married in The Hague when he was 8 and John was raised by Jacqueline’s father until the death of the Dauphin Louis made John and Jacqueline next in line for the French throne. For a brief two years, as Dauphine, Jacqueline could anticipate the day when she became queen, but at the age of 16, she was left a widow when John died unexpectedly, perhaps as the result of an abscess or poison. At this point in her life she may have met, or become closer to, John’s sister Catherine, who was just a year or so her junior. This would also explain why Jacqueline chose her sister-in-law’s country as a place of refuge following a disastrous second match. Her second husband was John, Duke of Brabant and although she was only slightly older than him, Jacqueline had stood as his godmother, necessitating a papal dispensation for the degree of spiritual affinity.2 This was granted in December 1418 but was revoked the following January. The marriage went ahead anyway that March, but it proved to be unpopular, which contributed to its failure. Lydgate optimistically wrote how ‘that Duchye of Holand by whole affection may be allied with Brutus Albion’. His epithalamium composed in honour of Gloucester and Jacqueline referred to the union of Henry V and Catherine of Valois as a perfect example of matrimony:
And as I hope of hert and mening true
The mortal war cesse shal and fine
Betwene tho bothe and pees againe renew
To make love with cleer beemes shine
By meene of her that highte Katherine,
Joined til oon, his deedes can you tell,
Henry the fifte, of knighthood sours and well.
Jacqueline was depicted by Lydgate, who must have known her, as the flower of womanhood:
… the floure
Thorough-oute the world called of wommanheed,
True ensaumple and well of al goodenesse,
Benign of port, root of goodlihede,
Sothfast mirror of beautee and fairnesse—
I meene of Holand the goodly fresh duchesse
Called Jaques, whos birth for to termine
Is by descent imperial of line.
His praise of her continued, in perhaps one of the best poetical pen portraits of a woman of her era, and is worth quoting at length:
Ther-to she is discreet and wonder sadde
In her apport, whoso list take heede;
Right avisee and wommanly, also gladde;
And dame Prudence doth ay her bridle leede;
Fortune and Grace, and Raisoun also in deed
In all her workes with her ben allied,
That throughout the world, her name is magnified.
To the poor she is also ful merciable,
Ful of pitee and compassioun,
And of nature list not to be vengeable—
Though it so be she have occasioun—
That I suppose nowe in no regioun
Was never a better at alle assayes founden,
So muche vertu doth in her abounden.
A heven it is to ben in her presence,
Who list consider her governaunce at al,
Whos goodely look in verray existence
So aungelik and so celestial,
So feminine; and in especial
Her eyen sayn ‘Whoso look weel
Foryiven is oure wrath, every deel.’
And her colurs ben black, white, and rede;
The red in trouthe tokeneth stablenesse,
And the black, whoso taketh heede,
Signifeth parfyt sobernesse;
The white also is token of cleennesse,
And eek her word is in verray sooth
‘Ce bien raysoun’ al that ever she dooth.
Jacqueline was welcomed to England in spring 1421 by Catherine and Henry. She lodged with the queen at Windsor Castle, possibly as her companion during the months of her pregnancy, and stood as godmother to her son that December. Eleanor probably became part of Jacqueline’s household around this time and, by extension, part of the queen’s court, enjoying the fine royal apartments, hunting grounds and formal gardens Windsor had to offer. This was a young, exciting world, where the tone was set by the queen and her friends during her husband’s absence, and Eleanor would have encountered Henry V’s youngest brother, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, a cultivated, strong and popular man then in his thirties. The young Eleanor was described by chronicler Waurin as ‘beautiful and marvellously pleasant’ but Humphrey’s initial interest was directed towards Jacqueline and the political advantage of her rich inheritance. Eleanor would have witnessed the process by which he made her mistress his wife two years after her arrival in England.
It proved to be another controversial marriage for Jacqueline. Gloucester’s request for a dispensation was rejected by Vatican Pope Martin V, so the duke sought one instead from Benedict XIII, the Antipope of Avignon, for the Church was still divided between France and Italy. Benedict was willing to grant the necessary paperwork and the marriage was solemnised that February or March 1422 or 1423 at Humphrey’s possession, the imposing Hadleigh Castle overlooking the Thames estuary. The French writer Cocqueau pins the event down to ‘the month of January in this 22nd year’ according to the Gregorian Calendar but in 1427, Jacqueline herself claimed that she was not married until after the death of Henry V. This makes a date of early 1423 more likely, with which R.A. Griffiths, the biographer of Henry VI, agrees.3 John Lydgate wrote celebratory verses in advance of the occasion, in which he extolled the combination of political gain and personal inclination, as the ‘Duchye of Holand by hool affeccoun may be allied with Brutus Albyon’ and praised the soon-to-be duchess as beautiful and virtuous.4 Thus Jacqueline and Catherine became sisters-in-law for the second time.
Whatever the feelings of the bride and groom, the marriage was beneficial to both, affording the exiled Jacqueline protection and a home while Gloucester claimed the titles of Count of Holland, Zeeland and Hainault. Two years later, in the wake of a victory won against the French by his elder brother, John, Duke of Bedford, Gloucester and Jacqueline crossed the Channel in an attempt to defend this possession of the titles which were being disputed by the Duke of Brabant. Gloucester captured Mons and established himself for a while in Hainault before returning to England, forced to conclude that the mission had been nothing less than disastrous. Eleanor accompanied her mistress abroad, and may even have been with her in Ghent when the duke laid siege to the town, but Eleanor appears to have remained at liberty while Ghent imprisoned her mistress. It has been suggested by one historian that having secured his wife’s titles for himself, Gloucester made no attempt to bring about her release5 and simply abandoned her. Gloucester did indeed return to England without Jacqueline, but without knowing the circumstances, this may be an unfair reading of the situation. Instead of his wife, he brought Eleanor back with him, who Waurin claims no longer wanted to remain abroad. By this time, the attraction of remaining with Gloucester may have been as strong as her desire to go home.
Eventually Jacqueline managed to escape, and romantic legend describes her dressing in men’s clothing and concealing herself among a group of noblemen. However, she did not return to England, but headed through Holland, where she allied with Philip the Good and continued to defend her lands. Philip was her brother-in-law by his sister Anne’s marriage to John, Duke of Bedford. That winter, Gloucester sent an English army to assist Jacqueline and Philip at the battle of Brouwershaven but after their defeat he made no further commitment to her. In fact, he was looking to dissolve the commitment he had already made. Their marriage may already have been in trouble, or else the failure of its primary purpose prompted both parties to abandon it and, just at the moment the duke wanted out, the opinion of the papacy turned in his favour. John of Brabant had died in 1425 but Pope Martin now ruled that Jacqueline’s second marriage had been valid, meaning that any union she contracted before Brabant’s death was not legal, which sounded the death knell of her match with Gloucester. The ruling left Jacqueline in a state of personal and political limbo, especially since, as some historians suggest, she may have experienced a miscarriage or lost a child the year before.6 There were no surviving children from the union, potential heirs to the English throne, to bind Gloucester to her and it may have been with this factor in mind that he took Eleanor as his lover. Gloucester and Jacqueline did not see each other again.
For Eleanor, the transition from lady in waiting to duchess was considerable. Supplanting her mistress in Gloucester’s bed made her complicit in Jacqueline’s downfall and, later, her divorce, in a way which is unlikely to have made her popular among the former duchess’ peers, or the circle around Queen Catherine. It was not uncommon for a man of the duke’s status to take a mistress from among his wife’s women, as John of Gaunt had done, or even to make her his wife, but Gaunt had waited until his duchess died before marrying Katherine Swynford. Gloucester’s actions, especially his perceived abandonment of Jacqueline, attracted considerable contemporary censure. A petition to Parliament on Jacqueline’s behalf in late 1427, carried by the mayor and aldermen, makes clear that the relationship was not only widespread knowledge, but that it was widely condemned. According to Stowe, a group of London women called for Gloucester to set aside ‘his wanton paramour … another adultresse, contrary to the law of God and honourable estate of matrimony’, in favour of his wife. Having written verses in praise of Jacqueline’s marriage, for which he was probably commissioned by Gloucester, Lydgate may be the author of the 1428 poem ‘Complaint for my Lady of Gloucester’, which describes how the rich and poor of the whole realm ‘with whole heart and all lowness’, recommended themselves to Jacqueline because ‘she is beloved so entierely thorughe all the londe’,7 and widens her support to include more than just the women of London:
Herde in alle citees and alle townes
Howe wymmen made theyre orisons
Desirous that princess to see
And for her coming ransomed to be.8
The poem also describes Eleanor and her ladies as ‘of courage serpentine’ who used ‘all their power and their might’ to turn Gloucester’s heart against ‘right’ and double his love for his mistress. Such a suggestion might foreshadow the later charges of witchcraft that would be brought against Eleanor. Given this and the later patronage Lydgate enjoyed from Gloucester, these verses may well have been penned by another figure close to the ducal household.
Two illegitimate children have been ascribed to Gloucester during this period and many historians suggest that Eleanor was their mother. The existence of Arthur, known as Arteys de Cursey, and Antigone Plantagenet does not answer many questions about Gloucester’s relationship with Eleanor, even though their suggested birthdates of the mid- to late 1420s would fit with the initial phase of their affair. However, in January 1428, when Gloucester finally annulled his marriage to Jacqueline and married Eleanor, it is telling that no attempt was made to legitimise the children. Given Eleanor’s later recorded desire to bear Lancastrian heirs who would have been next in line to the throne after Henry VI, it seems unlikely that Gloucester would have passed up the opportunity to do so, especially given the precedent of the Beaufort family’s retrospective reinstatement. John of Gaunt had legitimised his children by Katherine Swynford in September 1396 and they had only been barred from the royal succession by Henry IV in 1407, although such bars could be overturned by Parliament. Another possibility is that Antigone and Arthur were borne by another mistress of Gloucester while he was in France during the campaign of 1424–25. It also appears that following their marriage, Eleanor either did not conceive again or did not carry a child to term.
Jacqueline’s feelings about being so easily set aside by Gloucester have gone unrecorded. The resulting changes in her status and wealth were significant, though. After Queen Catherine and the dowager queen Joan, she had been the most high-ranking woman in the land but her financial situation descended into desperation after the failure of her marriage to Gloucester. An entry made in the Close Rolls at Westminster on 18 May 1428, referring to Jacqueline by the Dutch name ‘Jacoba’, grants safe conduct to Arnold de Gent, a merchant who was transporting certain items from England to the ex-countess. She is likely to have been staying at the Binnenhof complex in The Hague at this point, weeks before signing the Treaty of Delft, which allowed her to retain her titles. Among the goods intended for her were 34yd of grey material from Monstrevilliers in France and 13yd of a different shade of grey, 7.5yd of ‘moray’ or murray cloth, dyed in grain with a kind of red-purple, 10.5yd of red, 22yd of green, 18yd of white, 2.5yd of ‘brunet’ or brown, 12yd of red satin and what may have been clothing for her servants: two white kerseys, which were made from coarse saye and three mantles furred with rabbit skin, although Jacqueline’s status permitted her to wear ermine. The shipment also contained tuns of rye, grain and flour for her kitchens.9 Jacqueline married for a fourth time in 1434 and died two years later at Teylingen Castle in the Netherlands.
Gloucester had no intention of returning to Jacqueline, and married Eleanor soon after the annulment of his first match. This may have taken place at Hadleigh again, where the couple probably lived before Gloucester began work on transforming his manor of Bella Court at Greenwich, or at Hornsey Manor, then in Middlesex. The following year, Gloucester oversaw arrangements for Henry VI’s formal coronation, so it is certain that Eleanor would have attended. Once again, John Lydgate was called upon to record the occasion, producing one of the most detailed accounts of the menu and subtleties served at a royal feast. Seated in Westminster Hall as the new Duchess of Gloucester, Eleanor would have enjoyed boars’ heads set in pastry castles of gold, slices of red jelly with white lions carved into them, fritters like suns with fleurs-de-lys set in them, roast peacock in its plumage, pork pies decorated with leopards and gold, and a cold meat pie in the shape of a shield, quartered red and white and set with lozenges, gilt and borage flowers. Adorning the table were three carved subtleties: one of the young king himself, carried by St Edward and St Louis; another of Henry VI kneeling before his father and the Holy Roman Emperor; and a third of the figures of St George and St Denis presenting the king to the Virgin Mary.
Gloucester had recovered some of the respect he had lost as a result of his personal life by 1431, when Lydgate began writing his Fall of Princes, which depicted the duke as an able governor and soldier who was pious and cultured. In the same year, Gloucester and Eleanor were received into the confraternity of St Albans. It was a long-standing affiliation for the two, who may have first visited it together back in 1423, when Gloucester celebrated Christmas there with Jacqueline. An illustration from around 1460 depicting their reception at St Albans can be found in the Cotton Nero D. vii manuscript in the British Library, with a generic Eleanor dressed in a long dark robe, what might be an ‘S’ shaped collar and coronet atop her black headdress. On 6 March 1437, Gloucester and Eleanor were granted a licence to ‘impark’, or create a park of 200 acres on the north Kent bank of the Thames, to crenellate their manor house and build and crenellate a tower within the park. Their existing Bella Court became a fitting home for two of the most important people in the realm. On the death of his elder brother John in 1435, Humphrey had become heir to the throne, with only the teenaged king standing between Eleanor and queenship. Gloucester was also the sole surviving legitimate adult male member of the Lancastrian dynasty. This made him and his wife easy targets for rivals who hoped to gain control over the young king.
In June 1441, a number of members of Eleanor’s household were arrested, including her clerk Roger Bolingbroke, her chaplain John Home and her astrologer Thomas Southwell, and accused of using black magic and imagining the king’s death. Understanding the danger she was in, Eleanor fled to sanctuary at Westminster. An investigation was begun under the aegis of Gloucester’s main rival, Henry VI’s steward of the household, William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, who was also a close ally of Henry Beaufort. According to Gloucester’s biographer K.H. Vickers, Eleanor made an attempt to escape, fleeing downriver perhaps in an attempt to reach the open sea and sanctuary abroad, but was captured and returned to London in order to stand trial.10 On 23 July, Bolingbroke was questioned and made a public declaration of his guilt at St Paul’s Cross, surrounded by the instruments of his art. Two days later, Henry Chichele, Archbishop of Canterbury made a statement in St Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster’s political centre, regarding ‘certain crimes wherein she was detected proceeding’, and ordered that Eleanor should be detained ‘in the company of persons sworn to keep her’ at Leeds Castle. The following day Eleanor was questioned by Chichele, John Kemp, Bishop of London and Henry Beaufort. It was put to her that she and her associates had invoked evil spirits and demons and created a waxen image of the king in an attempt to predict the future; specifically, how long Henry VI would live and whether Eleanor would become queen.11 She admitted certain charges, but denied treason and insisted she had only turned to sympathetic magic in order to help her conceive a child by Gloucester. A woman named Margery Jourdemayne, the ‘witch of Eye’, had reputedly furnished her with certain potions for the purpose.
Jourdemayne was a controversial figure whose history exposes the fragility of women’s reputations in the field of medicine and its overlap with such ill-defined areas as astrology, ritual and magic. She was married to William, who came from a prosperous yeoman family and was acting as a manorial official on the Westminster Abbey estate in Ebury, or Eye, around the current Bayswater Road and Oxford Street areas of London. Margery had previously come to the attention of the authorities in 1430, when she had been arrested along with other sorcerers and accused of plotting the king’s death by magic. She spent the period from November that year until May 1432 in prison, and was then released on condition that she eschew witchcraft and that her future behaviour be good. At some point in the 1430s she was consulted by Edmund Beaufort, to whom she imparted the legend that he would die in a castle. After Jourdemayne’s death, the prophecy was fulfilled to a degree when Beaufort met his end on the threshold of the Castle Inn during the first Battle of St Albans.
Two likely explanations emerge for Jourdemayne’s association with Eleanor: that of the art of prediction and that of problems associated with women’s health. Astrology, horoscopes and other methods of divination were commonly practised at the time, having especial resonance in an era which had witnessed the sudden, devastating effects of plague, as well as the early deaths of two Lancastrian kings from illness. The positions of the planets, astrological symbols, dust, dreams and even the colour of urine were used as diagnostic tools for a range of events from the small-scale to the fall of monarchs. In particular, the phenomena of the natural world were examined, and the appearance of comets, storms, freak weather conditions and eclipses were analysed and interpreted. There was nothing harmful in this. It was believed that divine power was manifest in such ways, so they could be warnings or signs of disapproval which needed to be read correctly. The behaviour of animals could be portentous too and remained within the Church’s remit. Thirteenth-century Thomas of Chobham, the subdean of Salisbury Cathedral believed that a dog howling in the house would be soon followed by a death and, a century later, a monk from Chester, Ranulph Higden, believed that the call of a crow indicated the impending arrival of a visitor.12 This was a far less expensive method of seeking reassurance about the future than consulting with a trained astrologer. However, those who could afford to do so would call upon an elite of university-educated men to draw up specific charts according to the positions of the stars and planets. At her trial Eleanor confessed to having a long association with such men, as well as with Margery: she had also given Gloucester a book of medicinal magic, so he was certainly at the very least aware of her interest.
Margery’s reputation was likely to have been built upon medical knowledge. Although the profession would not be formally regulated until the reign of Henry VIII, there was a strong oral tradition of women practitioners: older women who had learned which herbs cured certain complaints and passed this on through the generations, and others who attended births or tended the sick on the battlefield. A proliferation of herbals dating from Anglo-Saxon times through to John Gerard and Nicholas Culpeper shows the strength and accessibility of this tradition, when women would have been able to find ingredients in their gardens and growing in the wild. Often the processes of preparing, consuming and applying such remedies were accompanied by chants, rituals or the wearing of charms. Even this was considered acceptable, as fifteenth-century Benedictine monk Robert Rypon clarified, ‘as long as nothing is intended other than the honour of God and the health of the sick person’.13 No doubt some of their remedies did make a difference, when we consider just how far simple herbs like peppermint and fennel are still in use to cure ailments today, along with ingredients such as willow bark, honey and garlic. It is easy to see how such women, achieving some degree of success, could attract accusations of witchcraft.
In terms of the two charges made against Eleanor, the outcome of Southwell and Bolingbroke’s divination was considered treasonous. Eleanor herself may or may not have intended it to be, as drawing up the king’s horoscope was not in itself a crime and, had the prediction been for a long and happy life, Eleanor’s position may never have been questioned. It was the nature of the future identified by Bolingbroke which caused the problem, coupled with the use of a black mass and the presence of a wax figurine, which was considered a method of causing bodily harm rather like a modern voodoo doll. By illustrating a possible threat to the health of Henry VI through serious illness in the summer of 1441, Bolingbroke and Southwell highlighted Gloucester’s status as heir and Eleanor’s potential succession as queen. Just how much Eleanor was hoping for this outcome as an indicator of her own rise to power cannot be known.
Eleanor’s association with Jourdemayne may have been a completely separate matter. At her trial, the duchess admitted she had used the woman’s services for years, having sought assistance in conceiving a child, and that other women in her circle had also sought her advice. Apparently, Jourdemayne had given Eleanor drinks and medicines to make Gloucester fall in love with her and, later, she prescribed Eleanor certain remedies which were intended to help her conceive a child. A number of recipes to aid fertility were included in texts like Bald’s Leechbook, such as agrimony boiled in ewe’s milk, along with other popular methods such as drinking rabbit’s blood and mare’s milk or boiling chestnuts, pistachios and pine nuts in sugar and ragwort. Jourdemayne may have been supplying Eleanor with these or similar concoctions with a view to her future child inheriting the throne from the then unmarried Henry VI. The 1560 Mirror of Magistrates may have exaggerated Margery’s powers for dramatic effect when it claimed she could charm fiends and fairies alike, ‘and dead corpses from grave she could uprear, such an enchantress as that time had no peer’. If nothing else, Jourdemayne’s herbs might have had a placebo effect that allowed Eleanor to believe she was exercising a degree of control over her fertility. Besides Eleanor’s proximity to the throne, the pressure on women in general to conceive and bear healthy children was great and the fear of failure must have been profound, especially when Gloucester was the last of Henry IV’s surviving sons. The future of the Lancastrian dynasty, which had seemed secure given the large family borne by Mary de Bohun, had only succeeded in producing one grandson, Henry VI. There was much riding on Eleanor’s shoulders.
The attack on Eleanor is likely to have been politically motivated, a way of discrediting Gloucester and removing his influence from the throne. It highlights the vulnerability of women even at the top, offering clear parallels to the charges levelled at Joan of Navarre in 1419, with whom Eleanor had enjoyed a friendly relationship. According to Vickers, Gloucester was tainted by association with Joan’s case for back then he had defended Friar John Randolf, the man accused of invoking the black arts in Joan’s service. This connection would make it all the easier to believe that the duke was guilty or implicit in his wife’s guilt. The attack on a woman’s character, on the notion of good fame which was central to her reputation, was serious and permanent. Once a good reputation was tarnished, it was lost forever and could have ramifications for her family that affected the line of succession and the careers of those close to her. Some writers of the fifteenth century certainly saw Eleanor’s fall, or rather the exploitation of her weakness, to be a cynical attack upon a woman in order to damage a man. The London-based chronicler Robert Fabyan would have still heard stories about Eleanor’s disgrace when he was apprenticed to a draper in 1470. When he came to write an account of the city’s history, he was certain that the attack on the duchess was part of a larger plan to remove Gloucester’s influence over the young king. Some went so far as the point the finger at Gloucester’s own family, at his cousins in the Beaufort line. The Beauforts benefitted from the scandal. In the aftermath, Gaunt’s grandson and namesake John was awarded an annuity of 600 marks and elevated in precedence over the Duke of Norfolk in acknowledgement of his royal blood, while his younger brother Edmund was made second Duke of Somerset.
Eleanor was sent to Leeds Castle on 11 August, under the guardianship of two valets of the crown, Sir John Stiward and Sir John Stanley.14 There is no question of her being unaware of the nature of Joan of Navarre’s incarceration and, additionally, she may have known that it was Leeds Castle where the former queen had been kept. The parallels were all too clear, but Eleanor was no undefended widow. She was a married woman, the highest-ranking woman in the land, and may have hoped that her position would cushion her and that her husband would come to her defence. Perhaps she thought of Jacqueline abandoned in Mons. Alternatively, she may have understood just how comprehensively her disgrace had robbed Gloucester of his influence. Historian Susanne Saygin suggests that the duke’s gift to Oxford University of a number of books on divination, including Appuleius’ De Magia, was an attempt to save himself and Eleanor by impressing councillors with their scholarly worth, but this was a very indirect effort and had little or no effect.15 It is just as possible that the gift, which represented a proportion of a very considerable library of English and Italian humanists and was part of a sequence of gifts Gloucester made to the university, had nothing to do with Eleanor’s arrest at all.
Eleanor was brought before an ecclesiastical court on 21 October and questioned by the Archbishop of Canterbury. She admitted using astrology and procuring remedies from Margery Jourdemayne in order to conceive, but denied treasonous intent. Bolingbroke admitted that he had practised the art of divination, or attempting to predict the future at Eleanor’s request, naming a specific incident which took place at Hornsey Park, where he used certain instruments to foretell the future and Thomas Southwell had recited a black mass.16 Hornsey Lodge, a residence of the dukes of Gloucester, was no stranger to controversy and potential threats to kings: in 1386, it had been the place where Thomas of Woodstock gathered the Lords Appellant to launch their challenge to Richard II. Norden’s Speculum Britanniae of 1593 recorded the remains of the Lodge, which appeared to be more like a castle: ‘the hill is trenched with two deep ditches, now old and overgrown with bushes; the rubble thereof, as brick, tile, and Cornish slate, are in heaps yet to be seen.’ Writing at the end of the eighteenth century, Daniel Lysons identified the remains of the moat in the neighbouring field. This property would no doubt have been Eleanor’s home for a significant portion of her married life, alongside La Plesaunce, and no doubt she chose it as the scene of her activities for its convenience and privacy: this is not an indicator that she was guilty of treason, but that she was aware that the use of the black arts involved a ‘perversion of holy things’17 which could damage Gloucester’s reputation for piety.
Eleanor’s denials fell on deaf ears. On 23 October she was found guilty of all charges levelled against her. Thomas Southwell had died in the Tower, though it is not clear whether this was from natural causes or the result of torture. Historian Michael Miller states that Henry VI had given instructions that Eleanor should be spared torture, which rather implies the men were not.18 John Home was released but Bolingbroke and Jourdemayne were sentenced to death for their role in the affair. Bolingbroke was hung, drawn and quartered and his head was displayed on London Bridge. Jourdemayne was burned at the stake.
Eleanor had to wait two weeks to learn her fate. On 6 November, in an extraordinary move, she was pronounced formally divorced from Gloucester and, three days later, sentenced to the public penance of walking barefoot through the streets of London accompanied by the mayor and sheriffs. On 13 November 1441, she walked from Temple Stairs to St Paul’s ‘openly barehede with a Keverchef on her hede’, and ‘with a meke and a demure countenance’, carrying a 2lb taper which she left at the high altar. That Wednesday she performed the same actions from the Swan Stairs in Thames Street to Christchurch in Aldgate and on Friday from Queenhithe to St Michael’s in Cornhill.19 It must have been doubly humiliating for Eleanor to be so publicly punished, especially as she was forced to walk through the crowded streets she may have hoped to one day pass along to her coronation. Shakespeare described the onlookers in Henry VI, Part Two: ‘Look! how they gaze. See! how the giddy multitude do point, And nod their heads, and throw their eyes on thee.’
One version of the anonymous poem ‘The Lament of the Duchess of Gloucester’ written in 1441 has Eleanor lamenting her actions, her ‘mysgovernance’, in a way that absolves Gloucester from any blame and stresses her humble origins. It also turns her into a figure with didactic importance, a warning to womankind in general against the sins of pride and ambition:
As I that was browght up of nowght
A prince has chosen me to his make.
My sofferen [sovereign] lord so to for-sake
Yt was a dulfull destenye
Alas! for to sorow how shuld I slake
All women may be ware by me.
Eleanor Cobhams’s trial had an impact upon the treatment of women under English law. In 1442, the existing right for a peer of the realm to be tried by his equals in cases of treason and felony was extended to his wife. For a significant moment, the female narrative punctuated that of the masculine world.
Eleanor was to remain incarcerated for the rest of her life. Like Joan, her private allowance of 100 marks a year was generous enough, but her political significance was far too great to allow her any degree of freedom. She had been sent to Leeds Castle under the guardianship of its constable, Sir John Steward, the King’s Master of the Horse, but after her sentencing she was handed over to Sir Thomas Stanley, controller of the royal household. Stanley was then in his late thirties and came from a family with long associations with the governance of Ireland, a tradition which he had continued on his appointment to the lieutenancy between 1431 and 1436. His career would also become particularly bound up with the Lancastrian dynasty as a chief steward of the duchy, and as a result of his birth in Lancashire, he would later represent the county in Parliament.
In June 1442, Stanley moved Eleanor from Leeds to Chester Castle, another property of which he was constable. The original Norman castle had been significantly developed under Henry III and Edward I, but Eleanor was housed in the crypt of the twelfth-century stone gateway to the inner bailey, now known as the Agricola Tower. In October 1443 custody of Eleanor was handed over to Ralph Boteler, Lord Sudeley, constable of the Lancastrian stronghold of Kenilworth Castle. She remained there for almost three years but then rumours arose of a possible rescue bid20 and she was returned to her former gaoler’s custody. In 1446, Stanley took her to the isolation of the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea, of which he had been declared king by Henry IV in 1405. Eleanor was probably lodged in Castle Rushen, an imposing limestone bastion with outer walls 7ft thick. The isle was remote enough to preclude rescue attempts, and had a reputation for witchcraft, folklore and fairies.
Michael Drayton’s England’s Heroic Epistles of 1603 contains a fictional letter written in rhyming couplets by Eleanor to Gloucester during the time of her exile on the Isle of Man. The fictional Eleanor admits using magic in the past but protests that she never won Gloucester’s love by foul means, before lamenting her fate:
Where’s Greenewich now, thy Elnors Court of late?
where she with Humfrey held a princely state.
That pleasant Kent, when I abroade should ride,
That to my pleasure, layd forth all her pride;
The Thames, by water when I tooke the ayre,
Daunc’d with my Barge in lanching from the stayre,
The anchoring ships, that when I pass’d the roade
were wont to hang their chequered tops abroad;
How could it be, those that were wont to stand,
To see my pompe, so goddesse-like on land,
Should after see mee mayld vp in a sheete,
Doe shamefull penance, three times in the streete?
Rung with a bell, a Taper in my hand,
Bare-foote to trudge before a Beedles wand;
That little babes, not hauing vse of tongue,
Stoode poynting at me as I came along.
Wher’s Humfreys power, where was his great command,
Wast thou not Lord-protector of the Land?
Or for thy iustice, who can thee denie,
The title of the good Duke Humfrey?
The equally fictional Gloucester offers consolation in a return letter, promising their union has not been lessened and that they will be reunited after death:
Thou art a Princesse, not a whit the lesse.
Whilst in these breasts we beare about this life,
I am thy husband, and thou art my wife;
Cast not thine eye on such as mounted be,
But looke on those cast downe as low as we;
For some of them which proudly pearch so hie,
Ere long shall come as low as thou or I.
They weepe for ioy, and let vs laugh in woe,
We shall exchange when heauen will haue it so.
But the real duke and duchess were never to have their happy ending and probably did not see each other after 1441. Were they even allowed to write to each other? It seems unlikely. Although at least one later chronicler suggested that Gloucester was plotting to release his wife, there is no contemporary evidence to support this. Less than a year after Eleanor had been taken to the Isle of Man, the tensions underlying her arrest erupted and a plot was launched against Gloucester by the Beauforts. In February 1447, Gloucester was invited to a meeting of Parliament at Bury St Edmunds and, perhaps suspecting a plot, arrived with an armed guard. He was intercepted by Sir Thomas Stanley and placed under arrest in his lodgings at St Salvator’s, where he died in his bed five days later, reputedly of natural causes brought about by the shock. No rumours circulated at the time that he had been murdered, and it would have been impolitic to do so in the climate of the moment. Gloucester’s body was openly displayed to the public in Bury St Edmunds’ Abbey church the day after his death to dispel any rumours that his death had been the result of violence. Within a couple of years though, the myth of the ‘Good Duke Humphrey’ was being harnessed by enemies of the Lancastrian dynasty who saw Humphrey as the victim of his own family, and the rebels of 1450 accused the unpopular minister William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk of drowning Gloucester. A Yorkist sympathiser, writing in the 1460s claimed that the duke had fallen victim to a plot of malicious slander21 orchestrated by Suffolk and Lord Saye, both of whom were killed by the mob during Jack Cade’s rebellion in 1450.
It is not known whether Eleanor’s guardian, Sir William Beauchamp, informed her of Gloucester’s death. Parliament was keen to establish that the duke’s marriage to Eleanor Cobham had been fully dissolved in 1441, legislating to ensure that she was unable to claim dower or jointure from her former husband’s estates. Two years later, in March 1449, Eleanor was moved to another remote location at Beaumaris Castle, Anglesey, still under the care of Sir William Beauchamp. It was there that she died on 7 July 1452. Unlike her friend Joan of Navarre, she never regained her freedom. By this point, Henry VI had been married for seven years and not produced an heir. The Lancastrian dynasty was threatened with a very real possibility of extinction, especially given the fecundity of their closest rival, Richard, Duke of York, who was preparing to welcome his twelfth child. Between Gloucester’s death in February 1447 and the eventual arrival of a prince in December 1453, two main figures vied for the position of king’s heir. They were Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, the eldest of Gaunt’s grandchildren, who was reputed to have had an affair with Catherine of Valois, and Richard, Duke of York, who was descended from both Edmund of Langley and Gaunt’s older brother, Lionel of Antwerp. The question of birth order, inheritance and precedence would become significant in the coming years. For almost seven years, this made their wives Eleanor, Duchess of Somerset and Cecily, Duchess of York, the most powerful women in the land. A third important woman during this period was the widow of Gloucester’s brother John, Duke of Bedford, who had died in 1435. The young and beautiful Jacquetta of Luxembourg quickly remarried to a Lancastrian knight, but she and her children were to find themselves at the heart of the approaching conflict.
1 Craik.
2 Ibid.
3 Griffiths.
4 Scattergood.
5 Nijsten.
6 Weir.
7 Scattergood.
8 Ibid.
9 Close Rolls, Henry VI, May 1428.
10 Vickers.
11 Saygin.
12 Rider.
13 Ibid.
14 Vickers.
15 Saygin.
16 Newall.
17 Ibid.
18 Miller.
19 Vickers.
20 Griffiths.
21 Ibid.