The room at Hertford Castle is small and stale, and a bee is knocking against the window. Duke Humphrey sits in the big chair like a judge, takes Eleanor Cobham’s hand and holds it out towards the man she has spent the night with, offering him a wife, a dowry and English citizenship in one generous sentence. The man does not move. Outside, the boy king’s companions shout at their games. Inside, the hand stays in the air, and the silence stretches until it becomes an answer. Royal Witch by Philippa Gregory turns on that moment of public refusal, and everything its heroine does for the next twenty years is a reply to it.
A Bee Against the Glass
The scene works because the novel has spent two hundred pages making Eleanor’s hopes concrete. She arrives at the court of Henry V in 1420 as a maid-of-honour with no dowry and a face she treats as her only capital. She falls, against all her own rules, for a squire with no land, and she tells herself it is a flirtation even as she practises writing her married name and throws the page into the fire. When the refusal comes, Gregory gives her three days of grief, then a bath, and then a decision. Love has failed, so she will try power.
What makes Royal Witch by Philippa Gregory more than a revenge story is how reasonable Eleanor sounds while making it. Her first-person present tense is gleeful and observant; she notes who curtseys to whom, whose lace is better, which men look at her twice. She is snobbish and spiteful and often hilarious, and the novel trusts readers to see around her. The reader understands, long before she does, why the squire laughs when she sweeps in to announce her new title, and why the young widowed queen blushes. Anyone who knows where the Tudor name came from will guess the secret at once; the pleasure is in watching Eleanor miss it.
What the Wise Woman Knows
Her one honest friend is Margery Jourdemayne, a midwife and herbalist who keeps a small room at Westminster and reads fortunes for anyone with a coin. The real Margery Jourdemayne, known as the Witch of Eye, left almost no record but her trial, and Gregory builds her from that silence into the book’s moral centre. Her foretelling is mostly common sense: people repeat their patterns, and a woman who hardens her heart ends cold. She says so plainly, more than once, and Eleanor never listens. Their scenes together are the warmest in Royal Witch by Philippa Gregory: two clever women from nowhere, one content with a stool and a brazier, the other wanting everything, trading barbs over a clipped coin. The friendship is real, which is exactly why its fate hurts.
Around Margery, Gregory sets the scholars of Humphrey’s household, men of the new learning who move without friction from horoscopes to medicine to the question of how long a sickly boy king might live. The novel is good on how forbidden knowledge becomes thinkable inside a clever, flattering circle. By the time a ritual is staged in a tower room, it feels like the next item on an agenda, and the dread comes from how calmly everyone prepares.
That scene is also where the book is most uneasy. Eleanor believes something supernatural happens to her body in the fumes; a careful reader may suspect a drugged woman and a man taking advantage. Gregory leaves both readings open, which suits the novel’s larger refusal to confirm any magic. It is a bold choice, but the possible assault is never acknowledged by anyone, Eleanor included, and the ambiguity sits awkwardly with how much weight the plot then puts on it.
Royal Witch and Its Long Middle
The real problem with Royal Witch by Philippa Gregory is structure. Between Eleanor’s marriage and the ritual lie roughly ten years, and the novel spends them circling. The same pattern recurs: the grudge flares, Humphrey is pushed to act against her old lover, the attempt fails, the lover slips free, and Eleanor seethes again. A few episodes cut deep, including a cold calculated cruelty towards the young king that stands among the darkest things Gregory has written. But the repetition drains the menace, and Eleanor’s obsession starts to look less tragic than stuck. A reader can admire each chapter and still feel the book marking time, waiting for its heroine to run out of lesser targets.
Elsewhere, the faults are smaller:
- Much of the high politics, from Joan of Arc to the loss of France, arrives as reported news, so the wider world feels distant.
- The widowed queen is drawn almost entirely in soft light, a saintly contrast rather than a person.
- Eleanor’s late reckoning with herself is compressed into a few paragraphs after hundreds of pages of self-justification.
Royal Witch Turns Into a Ghost Story
Then the last act arrives and the novel finds a different register. The trial is procedural and sharp, with Eleanor arguing points of jurisdiction like a lawyer while the people who served her are destroyed. The final chapters, set in captivity on the Isle of Man among barrows and tides and stories of the Old Ones, turn into a genuinely frightening ghost story. A black dog that has padded at the edges of the book since its early chapters finally steps forward, and the ending lands quietly and well. Taken with its strong first third, the finale shows what Royal Witch by Philippa Gregory could have been at four-fifths of the length. Readers should know it carries executions, a suicide, pregnancy loss, sexual coercion and sustained cruelty, with moderate heat.
In story order this is the first of the author’s Plantagenet and Tudor novels, set before The Lady of the Rivers, whose heroine Jacquetta of Luxembourg appears here as a young bride Eleanor envies for outranking her. No earlier book is needed.
The Writer Behind the Book
Philippa Gregory has been publishing since Wideacre in 1987, after a doctorate in eighteenth-century fiction at Edinburgh, and her reputation rests on putting royal women back into stories told about their husbands. In 2023 she widened that project with Normal Women, a history of nine centuries of ordinary Englishwomen, and she was appointed CBE in 2021 for services to literature and to charity.
Her Author’s Note explains that she was drawn to Eleanor by a couplet in Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays and kept going because nobody had written her life. She is frank that Royal Witch by Philippa Gregory is among her most freely invented novels, with a central love affair made up to explain a real feud, and that the Isle of Man legend of a black dog haunting Peel Castle belongs to a later century; she borrowed its spirit anyway.
Readers who want more women judged for what they knew should try A Time of Witches by Madeline Martin, which splits its time between the present and a Suffolk widow accused during the witch hunts of 1645, or The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis, where a village decides five sisters are something other than human. The Familiars by Stacey Halls covers the Pendle trials with a gentler heroine.
What It Leaves Behind
Royal Witch by Philippa Gregory is uneven, overlong and sometimes content to tell rather than dramatise. It is also a fearless portrait of a woman who wanted more than her century allowed and chose the worst possible way to get it, written with enough wit that her company is a pleasure even when her plans are monstrous.
The bee at Hertford never found the open window. Eleanor spent her life convinced she had.