'The scandal of the century': The English duchess charged with treason and witchcraft

Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester, seemed destined to become queen of England. Then she was convicted of necromancy, heresy and witchcraft, a scandal that led to the Wars of the Roses. Was she a scheming satanist or a political pawn? A new novel tells her story.

In 1441, Eleanor Cobham was the wife of Humphrey of Lancaster, Duke of Gloucester, the heir presumptive of the weak and childless King Henry VI. The prospect of becoming queen was tantalisingly close. But as Humphrey's influence at court waned, allegations surfaced that Eleanor had turned to the dark arts in order to shore up his succession. These led to a conviction of treasonable witchcraft that became the scandal of the century and created space for rival claims to the throne.

Now, Philippa Gregory's fictional re-telling of Eleanor Cobham's story, Royal Witch, is putting a spotlight on a woman who is remembered for her ambition and beauty but who became a divisive figure. Some believe the evidence against England's first and only convicted royal witch was falsified and that she was a pawn in a political game, but Gregory depicts a more ruthless figure who was the author of her own destiny.

"She succumbed to the temptation to use witchcraft to kill the king and to get herself, via her husband, on the throne of England," says the author. "She's one of the very, very unusual women accused of witchcraft who actually did practise witchcraft."

For some, this former lady-in-waiting who poached the husband of her mistress, Jacqueline, Countess of Hainault, while still in her service, was a suspicious figure from the start – an unscrupulous interloper whose ostentatious lifestyle caused additional resentment. She needed to be put in her place.

Eleanor and Humphrey's interest in the supernatural was visible from the couple's extensive library. But rumours reached the King's Council that Eleanor, eager to become queen, had conspired to prophesise the king's death − with, among others, the wise woman Margery Jourdemayne, known as the "Witch of Eye", and the esteemed scholar and astrologer Roger Bolingbroke. A case for treason was formed.

Led by Humphrey's half-uncle and arch-rival, Cardinal Henry Beaufort, 18 charges of necromancy (summoning dead spirits to gain hidden knowledge), heresy, and witchcraft were levelled against Eleanor. These included procuring magical potions, commissioning an astrological chart to predict the king's death and creating a wax figure of the king to cause him fatal harm. Perhaps to fend off the allegations of treason and to suggest that the magic was purely domestic, Eleanor admitted to procuring love and fertility potions from Margery Jourdemayne.

For many historians, these were trumped-up charges that were politically motivated. As Gemma Hollman notes in her book Royal Witches: From Joan of Navarre to Elizabeth Woodville (2019), astrological prediction to inform important decisions "was no unusual activity, even among royalty". She continues: "If she did try love potions to produce a child, she can hardly have been too different from many other women in her predicament at the time."

Some commentators feel Eleanor deserves our pity. "I think there's something quite sad about this," Dr Euan Roger, a historian of late medieval and Tudor England, and the principal records specialist at the National Archives, tells the BBC. "I think what is actually going on here, the reason she actually admits guilt to some of the charges brought against her on the witchcraft front, is that she's been trying to conceive a child and resorting to perceived witchcraft in order to do that."

The charge of using a love potion gave the royal council the perfect pretext to dissolve her marriage to the heir to the throne, while the accusations of treason made her husband a persona non grata. "I think they [the allegations] are a smear campaign," says Roger. "Eleanor is very much a weak spot for her husband. She's known to have these occult interests and the members of the council see this as a means of targeting her husband."

The evidence against her, he argues, is unreliable. "Most of it comes from Bolingbroke's confession, which is almost certainly made public to implicate Eleanor… [and] he's almost certainly being tortured behind the scenes."

By contrast, in the novel Royal Witch, Eleanor is not just the instigator but at the heart of the action, scratching the king's likeness into the wax effigy and laying it among clippings of his dark curly hair. Written in the first person, the book depicts her using magic "not just to get a baby… but to get a king, to save the country, to save the royal family… to make myself great."

For Gregory, the case against Eleanor is compelling. "There's a lot of evidence of stuff going on which would be regarded at the time as witchcraft and probably satanism," she tells the BBC. She notes that Roger Bolingbroke "never withdrew his confession" and believes it's telling that the accused did not protest their innocence "more energetically".

She also stresses that Eleanor's is no ordinary witch trial. "She's at the peak of her success. She's a royal duchess. She's very much in the king's favour and she's in line to inherit the throne. She's in a position of extraordinary power and influence and I don't think anybody would have moved against her without really, really convincing evidence."

Gregory gives Eleanor great agency in her novel. "This is a tremendously ambitious woman who really makes her own life," she explains. Eleanor says in the novel: "I want to win something for myself. Win my own title, win my own fortune, win my own lands. I'd like to do it with a man I loved but not have him do it for me."

In Royal Witch, this striking woman, described by one 15th-Century chronicler as "marvellously fair and pleasing", manipulates men to advance her position, often by concealing her worldliness and wit in line with their low expectations. Hoping to catch the eye of Duke Humphrey on a ride, she feigns vulnerability. "I am a competent rider," she discloses to the reader, "… but it's best to seem fragile, to inspire men to chivalry."

It's a tactic she later adopts at trial, pretending to be "a frightened woman, innocent as a maid". In Gregory's telling, she is also the one who stokes her husband's ambition. The characterisation is reminiscent of Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part II, in which Eleanor urges Humphrey to "put forth thy hand, reach at the glorious gold."

Yet Eleanor's drive and success, suggest some historians, make her no less a victim in the trial. "It was Eleanor's ambition which inveigled her to destruction," wrote medievalist Ralph Griffiths in his seminal 1969 essay The Trial of Eleanor Cobham. "Eleanor Cobham's vulnerable point was her interest in witchcraft and necromancy; when she combined this with political ambition, her indulgences were transformed by some into treason."

 "A lot of it is bringing down an ambitious woman," agrees Roger. "If you look later on at Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville, you see similar rumours floating around [of witchcraft] and I think it is, particularly by then, a real way of attacking noble women."

If this was indeed a show trial, the punishments were certainly humiliating and lurid. For Roger Bolingbroke's part in the scandal, he was conveyed to a stage, where, dressed in a paper crown, and seated on his conjuring chair surrounded by magical instruments, he was made to recant his heresies. A few months later, he was hung, drawn and quartered and his head displayed on London Bridge. Margery Jourdemayne was burned at the stake.

The Church, who tried Eleanor alongside the King's Council, made an example of her. A sentence of life imprisonment was preceded by three days of public penance. Barefoot, dressed in just a chemise and carrying a heavy wax taper (candle), she was made to walk through London on its busiest market days.

Yet, despite the cruelty shown to Eleanor, Gregory refuses to paint her as a victim and, even in captivity, her wit and bravery astound the reader. "I think the passive victim trope is historically invalid," she says. "We've taken the Victorians' view of women… and transferred it back through all time, completely ignoring the majority of women who are active, determined, effective, even in quite oppressive circumstances such as a medieval marriage."

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Whether wilful or maliciously exaggerated, Eleanor's engagement with witchcraft helped change the course of history. The unprecedented trial of a noble necessitated new legislation which would later be used against Anne Boleyn, clearing the way for Henry VIII to remarry. The charges against Eleanor − and Humphrey's disgrace by association − weakened the House of Lancaster, making room for rival faction, the House of York, and paving the way for the Wars of the Roses: three decades of bitter civil conflict over the throne.

It's not surprising, then, that Gregory seems almost disappointed that Eleanor's political ambitions were crushed. "I think she would have been a good queen," she says, pointing to her astute PR skills and her experience of foreign conflict. Eleanor might be "egotistical" and "narcissistic", says the novelist, but "that's what you need to be as a medieval queen".

As she confides in the afterword of Royal Witch: "I rather like a woman who can look into her own darkness and be neither afraid nor apologetic."

Royal Witch by Philippa Gregory is published by HarperCollins.

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