Noble Blood - Eleanor Cobham, Necromancer Witch

Episode Date: October 31, 2023

After marrying the Duke of Gloucester, Eleanor Cobham became one of the wealthiest and post powerful women in England. She and her husband were a heartbeat away from being King and Queen, and the promise of power tempted Eleanor into making a fatal mistake.Support Noble Blood:— Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Patreon— Merch!— Order Dana's book, 'Anatomy: A Love Story' and its sequel 'Immortality: A Love Story'See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Will Ferrell's Big Money Players and IHart Podcast presents soccer moms. So I'm Leanne. Yeah. This is my best friend, Janet. Hey. And we have been joined at the hips since high school.

Absolutely. A redacted amount of years later, we're still joined at the hip. Just a little bit bigger hips. This is a podcast. We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey. With all the snacks and drinks. Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer? They hit a bogo. Well, then you got them. Listen to soccer moms on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised. The year was 1441, and Eleanor Cobham was one of the wealthiest and most powerful women in England. Her scent had been astonishingly quick. Eleanor had been born the daughter. of a surrey knight, and now she was a duchess, married to Humphrey, the Duke of Gloucester. And Gloucester wasn't just any Duke. He was the brother of the late king Henry V, and the uncle and counselor for the young king Henry VI. And because Henry the 6th was still young and unmarried, obviously with no children of his own, there was something else incredibly important about the Duke of Gloucester in 1441.

His only other surviving older brother had died a few years earlier, which meant that if anything should happen to his nephew, Henry VI, he, Gloucester, was next in line to be king. Eleanor Cobham, daughter of a knight, was a heartbeat away from being Queen of England. It was a medieval Cinderella story. Perhaps Eleanor was reflecting on how far she had come that summer, the afternoon of June 29th, 1441.

Sure, she wasn't necessarily popular among the other nobles, those who rise quickly seldom are, and certainly her husband's position of favor seemed to be temporarily ebbing as jealous rivals sought to undermine his influence, but it was hard to worry about that when Gloucester was quite literally next in line for the throne. When Eleanor had been made a duchess, she had buckets of royal honors bestowed upon her. Young King Henry VI gave her personal gifts. Her position had already brought her family more wealth and prominence than they had ever seen before. She was a duchess. And even better, her astrifice.

Her astrologers had informed her secretly that King Henry would become deathly ill in a matter of months. If they were right, she was practically queen. That afternoon, Eleanor was dining in Cheapside, enjoying a meal outdoors when a messenger crested the horizon with a dazed and nervous look in his eye. He told Eleanor that her astrologers, Thomas Southall and Roger Bolingbrook, had been arrested. The charge? Treasonable necromancy. Consulting with dark spirits and the dead in order to predict the future is one thing, heresy. But to do it in order to predict the death of a king?

Well, that was a charge that meant certain and violent execution. Eleanor ran. She knew that officials would be coming for her next, and so in order to protect herself, she fled to the legal sanctuary of Westminster. The consequences of Eleanor's ambition were now just outside the doors of the chapel, and there was only so long she could keep herself safe.

This Halloween, it's time to tell a story of necromancy, of treason, and magic, because like so many ambitious women, Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester, was accused of being a witch. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. Eleanor Cobham was actually the Duke of Gloucester's second wife, and to understand the full picture of Eleanor's story, we actually need to zoom back a little bit and talk about his first wife for just a moment. Her name was Jacqueline, Countess of Henalt, and she was an incredibly important heiress in France.

Her father died without any sons, and she was legally allowed to inherit one of his territories, Hinald, an area which today covers the border between Belgium and France. But her father's other lands, Holland and Zealand, went instead to the next living male relative, in this case Jacqueline's uncle. Gloucester wasn't her first spouse either. First, Jacqueline had married a man named John IV, the Duke of Brabant,

and they, together as a couple, had tried to fight Jacqueline's uncle for control of those territories. But Jacqueline's husband was a terrible leader and a weasily guy in general, and he basically sold the right to those contested territories to Jacqueline's uncle behind her back. And then when John's financial situation got really bad, he also gave Jacqueline's uncle Hanalt. That was the final straw for Jacqueline who made the perfectly reasonable decision to try to get a formal separation from her terrible husband. Jacqueline's uncle conquered her last loyal city. She was defeated and so she fled to England. The king at this time was Henry V, and he gave Jacqueline a glittering reception at English court.

And when Henry's son, the future King Henry VI, was born, Jacqueline was actually made godmother. In the meantime, she got a sort of legally gray zone divorce from her weasily husband that was kind of only legal in England. Jacqueline tried to get that marriage officially annulled, adorably appealing to both Pope Martin V in Rome and the anti-Pope Benedict X in Avignon. But before she was able to do that officially, in a move that shocked the world, in 1423, Jacqueline remarried, into an incredibly controversial alliance. She married Humphrey, the Duke of Gloucester.

Gloucester, of course, was brother to King Hens. Henry V. And once Henry died, Gloucester was the uncle and Lord Protector to the baby King Henry the 6th. At this point, Gloucester was one of the most powerful princes in Europe, and the alliance between him and Jacqueline did not make France very happy at all. Because Jacqueline and her new incredibly powerful husband were going to try to fight for her lands back. Ultimately, the This is going to have some real ramifications for the Hundred Years' War, because at this point, the Duke of Burgundy is the regent of those lands, and England and Burgundy had an alliance.

But that is not relevant to our story. What is relevant to our story is that when Jacqueline and Gloucester land in Calais, high on new love and the potential for lands to be reconquered, in Jacqueline's retinue, she had a young lady in waiting named Eleanor, Cobham. Gloucester was gallant in his attempt to try to get Hinalt back for his wife, and he did get some of it back, but then the Duke of Burgundy advanced, and the locals turned against the strange English interloper and sided with Burgundy. To make a long story short, Gloucester's invasion was ultimately a failure, and he returned to England in April 1425,

without his wife, but conveniently enough, with her lady-in-waiting, Eleanor Cobham. Eleanor was described by a contemporary French chronicler as, quote, beautiful and marvelously pleasant. She was attractive, smart, and charming. So it wasn't really any surprise that while Gloucester's wife was back in France waiting to hear if the Pope would grant an annulment from her first marriage, Gloucester began to have an affair with Eleanor Cobham. Three years later in 1428, Pope Martin V made his determination

and ruled that Jacqueline's marriage to Humphrey Duke of Bloster was entirely invalid because she was still legally married to her first weasily husband, John. The convenient thing for Jacqueline was that her first, her terrible first husband, died the year before. So in theory, Gloucester could have just swept back to France and remarried Jacqueline legally. The English public certainly wanted him to do that, at least the women. You see, when Gloucester retreated back to England, the Duke of Burgundy had swept in and conquered every territory that Jacqueline had ever held. The Duke forced her to

concede her administrative rights, and he put her under an incredibly confining legal situation. Jacqueline became something of a pre-modern Princess Diana figure, a scorned aristocratic wife disposed of by her husband in favor of his mistress. Early in 1428, a well-dressed and well-to-do group of London women came to Parliament to send letters, quote, containing matter of rebuke and sharp reprehension of the Duke of Gloucester, because he would not deliver his wife Jacqueline out of her grievous imprisonment, being then held prisoner by the Duke of Burgundy, suffering her to remain so unkindly, and for his public keeping by him, another adulteress, contrary to the law of God and the

honorable estate of matrimony, end quote. But whatever the will-to-do women of England thought, Gloucester did not care. He did not go back to France, and he did not remarry Jacqueline. Instead, he married that adulteress, Eleanor Cobham. Imagine the scandal. Gloucester's marriage to Jacqueline had come at tremendous diplomatic cost. It had sent shockwomen. It had sent shock throughout Europe. And now, just a few years later, Gloucester had cast her off, a Duchess, in favor of a lowly lady-in-waiting. But it was easy for the new Duke and Duchess of Gloucester to tune out the malicious gossip. The two of them moved into a gorgeous renovated manor called the Palace of Placentia, a veritable castle with stone towers, on the Thames surrounded by hundreds of acres,

and a pleasure garden. The residents would later become known as Greenwich Palace, and it was there that Eleanor and her husband invited their glamorous friends to pass the time, dining and drinking with the most brilliant scholars and most dazzling musicians and poets of the day. Regardless of what the public thought about Eleanor, she was enjoying a meteoric rise in the world of nobility. She was admitted to the fraternity of the monastery of St. Albans and the Order of the Garter, and young King Henry VI gifted her incredibly luxurious New Year's gifts, a garter of gold with diamonds and pearls and rubies, more exotic gems and jewelry.

When Queen Joan of Navarre died in 1439, who was the Dowager second wife of the late King Henry IV, Eleanor was made a prominent mourner. But the more important royal death in Eleanor and her husband's life had been a few years earlier in 1435 when Gloucester's older brother died, which made him, Humphrey the Duke of Gloucester, next in line for the throne, because the king, Henry VI, was 14 years old with no children. It was an incredibly powerful position for the Duke.

Duke and Duchess, and Eleanor wasn't modest about her new status. According to one chronicle, she rode through the streets of London, glitteringly dressed and suitably escorted by men of noble birth. Her star had risen astronomically high, but Eleanor Cobham was soaring on wings, held together with meltable wax. A few years after Eleanor and Gloucester got married, the Duke created a jointure for his wife from his estate, which basically meant that Eleanor would get full rights to his properties for life. It would be almost impossible to undo and take that wealth from her. Of course, one of the only circumstances where it could be removed from her was if she was charged with treason. Swift as Eleanor's rise to prominence had been, her husband Gloucester was also having a

great decade. In addition to becoming next in line for the throne, in 1436 he returned from a battle in Calais as a hero, given a vote of thanks from the Commons. Even better, his main rival in the King's Council, Cardinal Beaufort, was conveniently abroad at a peace conference on the continent, which meant that he, Gloucester, had full control over the King's ear. But status at court, like any sort of fame or popularity, ebbs and flows. By 1441, Gloucester's star was beginning to fade. Cardinal Beaufort had returned to England and with his small cadre of supporters began elbowing Gloucester out of the King's Council. Politically, too, Gloucester was losing influence. As the Hundred Years' War continued to rage on,

Gloucester's position of no surrender was becoming less and less popular. His rivals on the council and among the nobility were looking for a way to take him down. And as it so happened, that way would be his wife, Eleanor. On June 29, 1441, Eleanor was dining at the king's head in Cheapside when she heard about the arrest of three men. The first was Roger Bolingbrook, who was an Oxford priest and Eleanor's personal clerk. The second man was Thomas Southwell, a canon and rector. The third was John Holm, Eleanor's chaplain and secretary.

The charge was conspiring to bring about the king's death, and it was an incredibly serious accusation. Bolingbrook and Southwell were indicted for sorcery and treason, with Bolingbrook accused of necromancy or communicating with the dead or spirit world in order to predict the future. The future they were trying to predict in this case was allegedly if and when King Henry VI would die, making the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester the new king and queen. And according to Bolingbrook, it was Eleanor who had commissioned them to do it. Eleanor fled to the sanctuary of Westminster, St. Stephen's Chapel, and though she was told to await her hearings at Leeds Castle,

she was, as you can probably imagine, reluctant to leave religious sanctuary. Eleanor even pretended to be ill to try to escape in August, but in the end, members of the king's household captured her and escorted her to Leeds, where she stayed for two months before facing a tribunal. As it happened, Eleanor would appear before an ecclesiastical council and not the secular authorities, which had the benefit for her of not using the death penalty. One peculiarity about Eleanor's trial was that she was a peeress of the realm, and there was a blind spot in the law about what would happen if a peeress was charged for felony and treason.

That oversight would be corrected, but fortunately for Eleanor, only after her trial. In the end, she was charged on five counts, and she confessed to one. She denied the necromancy and the plotting about bringing about the king's death, but she did admit to witchcraft, or at least to using witchcraft. Eleanor confessed to soliciting the services of a woman named Marjorie Jordamine, also known as the witch of the eye. That nickname is only slightly less cool than it sounds because the eye was a name for a geographical area in Westminster,

but Marjorie was a known witch, who had actually been imprisoned for it already and released on good behavior. She was particularly well known among a certain group of women looking for love potions. Eleanor confessed that she had used Marjorie's services back before she and Gloucester had gotten married to get him to love her, and that she had also used Marjorie's witchcraft to try to get pregnant. The two still did not have a child together.

As for the charge that she had instructed Bolingbrook and Southwell to try to predict King Henry the 6th death, well, she denied it, but I will say, it's not entirely unreasonable. There are actually, actually no contemporary sources that speculate that the trial was a complete fabrication in order to politically undermine Gloucester. It's plausible that Eleanor, with a few men closest to her, let the possibility of power go to her head a little bit, and tried to engage in a little secret prognostication with the assumption that no one would ever find out. There had actually been another incredibly powerful woman who had also been accused of treasonable witchcraft in living memory while Eleanor's trial was going on. Do you remember that Dowager Queen Joan of Navarre,

who Eleanor had been a prominent mourner for? Well, back in 1419, when Joan's stepson, Henry V, was king, she, Joan, was accused of witchcraft, but never actually tried. She was imprisoned, but comfortably and temporarily, and her massive dowry was significantly reduced, which was very convenient for Henry V as he was waging the expensive Hundred Years' War. But now, 22 years later, another noble woman was being accused of witchcraft, and whether or not she was guilty, there was no denying that it was all very convenient for her husband's political rivals. Marjorie, Gordaigne, was burned at the stake.

Bowlingbrook was hanged, drawn, and quarters. Southwilt died in the Tower of London, allegedly, quote, of sorrow, but more likely of poison, because he knew it would be more pleasant than the alternative. The third man involved, Homme, was actually only indicted for being aware of the treasonous activities and not doing anything about them, and he was pardoned. Eleanor Cobham was found guilty,

and though she wouldn't be executed, she would be punished. On November 6, 1441, a commission of bishops ordered that Eleanor of Gloucester would be forcibly divorced from her husband. Had her husband tried to free her, or had he just been so shocked and outraged by the charges leveled against him, his wife, that he cast her out of his heart entirely. We don't know. After their divorce, the two would never see each other again. And then Eleanor's penance began. On November 14th, she was forced to walk through London, from Westminster to the Temple Landing stage,

dressed in black with no cap covering her hair, holding a taper in her hand that she would offer at the high altar at St. Paul's Cathedral. Two days after that, she had to do another walk of public shame, holding another taper and walking from Swan Pier on Tame Street to Christ Church. Two days after that, from Queen Hill to St. Michael's, Eleanor, who had once ridden through the streets, glittering and magnificent as one of the most powerful women in England, was now on foot. with hordes of citizens lining the streets on both sides to witness her shame and humiliation. In January, with her three walks complete, Eleanor was sent to Cheshire, with the king making a special note that even if she were sick, she was not to be delayed.

Perhaps he speculated that she might be faking it. She was transferred from there to Kenilworth and then to Peelcastle on the Isle of Man, Eventually, she was sent to Beaumarie in Wales, where she died, July 7, 1452. Eleanor Cobham was all but forgotten by history at this point. No chroniclers wrote about her. We only rediscovered the date and place of her death in the 20th century, in 1977. Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth is one of the most famous and enduring female character. in all of English literature.

If it's been a while since you are AP English class or since you dove into Shakespeare, let me quickly refresh your memory. In the play Macbeth, the titular Scottish General is given a prophecy from three witches telling him that he will become King of Scotland. When his wife hears about the prophecy, she becomes consumed with ambition

and goads her husband into murdering the current King of Scotland so that he can take his place. I'll avoid spoiling a play about 415 years old and merely say that it doesn't end well for either Macbeth or for Lady Macbeth. Even though Shakespeare was loosely inspired by a real 11th century Scottish monarch, his play is pretty much all fiction.

In fact, given that just a few years before it was performed, King James I and 6th became King, of England, it could be argued that the play itself is one of the best historical examples of sucking up, given that it's set in King James' home country of Scotland, and that it features a scene in which King James' real-life ancestor Banquo is told how his descendants will nobly rule for generations. But 200 years before Shakespeare wrote his tragedy, a real-life woman was cast in that metaphorical Lady Macbeth role. She was decried by contemporaries for her ambition, and in the end it would be her faith in witchcraft that caused the downfall of both her and her

noble husband. But why is Eleanor Cobham the seductive and powerful vixen that we so often imagine Lady Macbeth to be? Or was she an unfortunate victim in a man's war of shifting alliances and opportunism. If there's ambition to be criticized here, I would say from a moral standpoint, there's certainly more blame to be had in the actions of Gloucester's ambitious enemies who began this whole, well, witch hunt in the first place.

In their efforts to undermine Gloucester to bolster to bolster their own positions, they led to the deaths of three people and the lifelong imprisonment of another. Sure, using love potions and, quote, necromancy to try to predict the future is bad. But it's also not real. Even if Eleanor and her advisors were secretly speculating on the death of the king, yes, treason, yes, bad, but they didn't actually hurt anyone.

Shakespeare actually wrote about Eleanor Cobham. She's a character in his play, Henry the Six. Part 2. In the play, Eleanor pushes her husband into asserting his claim to the throne, and she is manipulated by one of her husband's rivals into performing the necromancy that ultimately leads to her and her good husband's downfall. Gloucester is the good and noble man who tried his best to resist his wife, but who ultimately was outmaneuvered by political opponents. Eleanor is just a piece in Gloucester's tragedy. The real Eleanor Cobham, whoever she may have been, spent a decade in prison, alone and in the cold and dark.

She was a woman who had done everything she physically could do in the 15th century to secure her own position to reach a state of comfort and power, but in the end she was a woman. She would spend, the rest of her life imprisoned, with no agency or freedom, her destiny entirely controlled by the ambitions of the men around her. Like her husband's enemies had predicted, Eleanor's scandal ruined Gloucester's political career. He retired from public life, and he himself was actually arrested a few years later in 1447 on his way to a meeting of parliament, on charges of treason, possibly for trying to free his former wife, Eleanor Cobham. He died just a few days later.

One detail about this entire tragic ordeal that I find a little charming in spite of myself is that back after Eleanor was arrested, when the details of her alleged necromancy were coming to light, it was told that her astronomers had predicted that King Henry VI would die later that very summer, August 1441. Poor young Henry the 6th, probably very nervous hearing that, hired his own astronomers who were able to correct that prediction and tell the king that he would actually live a very long life. If those astronomers saw that Henry would die before he turned 50, in a prison cell after losing his wits as a prisoner to the Yorks, they very very very, very smartly didn't mention anything.

That's the story of Eleanor Cobham and her dalliance with witchcraft, but keep listening after a brief sponsor break for a spooky little Halloween haunting. Readers, Katie's finalists, publicists. We have an incredible new episode this week for you guys. We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode. They put on Lizzie McGuire 2 a.m. Video on Demand. This guy's boon-a-m-m-m-Wy-Mawyer. Whatever time it is, Lizzie McGuire.

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For Eleanor Cobham's decade-long imprisonment, she was moved. between several castles. In the summer of 1446, she was moved to the Isle of Man, where she was kept on a small islet on the west coast of the main aisle in a place called Peel Castle. By this point, years into her captivity, the former Duchess was reportedly stormy and anxious. Eleanor was irritable and angry, constantly under the watchful eyes of guards preventing her from both escaping, and taking her own life. It's in those dark, cold halls, in the castle on the Irish Sea

that Eleanor's spirit allegedly still roams. They say if you listen closely and if you're very, very quiet, the sound of the sea can transform into the sound of lonely footsteps, walking up the stairs leading up from the dungeon. The ghost of a woman who became a casualty in the political aspirations of a man, a woman who dared for a moment to dream that she might control her own life.

Noble Blood is a production of IHeart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky. Noble Blood is created and hosted by me, Dana Schwartz, with additional writing and researching by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The show is edited and produced by Noamie Griffin and Rima Il Kali, with supervising producer Josh Thane and executive producers Aaron Manke, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio,

visit the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Will Ferrell's Big Money Players and IHart Podcasts, presents soccer moms. So I'm Leanne. Yeah. This is my best friend, Janet. Hey.

And we have been joined at the hips since high school. Absolutely. A redacted amount of years later, we're still joined at the hip. Just a little bit bigger hips. This is a podcast. We're recording it as we tailgate

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