Eleanor Cobham

Eleanor Cobham was Duchess of Gloucester and was convicted in 1441 of employing astrologers to predict the king's death, made to walk barefoot through London carrying a taper on three separate days, and imprisoned for the remaining eleven years of her life. She was a knight's daughter who served as lady-in-waiting to Jacqueline of Hainaut, the wife Humphrey of Gloucester had married to claim her lands; when that marriage was annulled in 1428 he married Eleanor, who had been his mistress. As the wife of the heir presumptive to a childless king she was the first lady of the court for a decade. The charge came from two scholars, Roger Bolingbroke and Thomas Southwell, who cast the horoscope of Henry VI and found illness and death in it. Predicting a king's death was treason regardless of intent, because it was held to invite the event. Eleanor admitted consulting the cunning woman Margery Jourdemayne for potions to help her conceive and denied the rest. Bolingbroke was hanged, drawn and quartered, Jourdemayne was burned at Smithfield as a witch, Southwell died in the Tower. Eleanor's marriage was dissolved and she was moved between castles until she died at Beaumaris. The prosecution was understood at the time as a political attack on Humphrey by Cardinal Beaufort's party, and it worked. Shakespeare puts her penance on stage in Henry VI Part 2. She was held at Chester, Kenilworth, the Isle of Man and finally Beaumaris, moved whenever a rescue was feared. Her name survives in a Welsh poem about her captivity. Humphrey never saw her again after 1441.

• Lived: 1400 CE – 1452 CE
• Nationality: English
• Roles: royalty