Although [Polydore] Vergil’s text also displays this superficially unambiguous movement toward the accession of Henry VII, Hall’s use of additional source material and his adaptations of Vergil to suit his evangelical emphasis lead to self-contradiction within the text. Drawing on the pervasive association between women and political instability, he places queens and aristocratic ladies firmly at the center of conflicts, embedding them into narratives that focus on their own illegitimate desires—adulterous love affairs, inappropriate marriages, and royal ambitions—as fuel for larger factional quarrels. For instance, Hall includes an episode in the life of Humphrey of Gloucester that Vergil deliberately ignores because it does not support his wholly positive portrayal of Gloucester: his affair with and second marriage to Eleanor Cobham, whose imprisonment for witchcraft and treason formed part of his downfall in the 1440s. In fact, John Foxe notes this omission in the 1570 edition of Actes and Monuments though he comes to the opposite conclusion, that Vergil preferred Cardinal Beaufort to Gloucester. Hall contextualizes Gloucester’s unfortunate end as punishment for abandoning his first wife, Jacqueline of Holland, on account of “wanton affeccion” for Eleanor; that “he began his mariage with evill, and ended it with worse.” However, when relating Eleanor’s trial, he does not return to this theme; rather, he frames the accusations as a plot against “noble” Gloucester, who “toke all these thynges paciently, and saied litle.” Of Eleanor herself, he says little, and whether or not she is guilty of the crimes of which she was accused remains ambiguous. It is clear that she is being used here to signify Gloucester’s innocence—which is important in the larger sense that his eventual death will be invoked to punish his murderers—rather than on her own merits. In a sense, Eleanor’s own agency has been subsumed by the men using her to destroy Gloucester, but the fact that her story persists beyond Hall’s attempts to contain it—most notably in the ballad and de casibus traditions that come together in A Mirror for Magistrates— demonstrates the basic problem with that containment.
Kavita Mudan Finn, The Last Plantagenet Consorts: Gender, Genre, and Historiography, 1440-1627 (Palgrave Macmillan 2012)