Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester
Humphrey of Lancaster, Duke of Gloucester was an English prince, soldier and literary patron. He was "son, brother and uncle of kings", being the fourth and youngest son of Henry IV of England, the brother of Henry V, and the uncle of Henry VI. Gloucester fought in the Hundred Years' War and acted as Lord Protector of England during the minority of his nephew. A controversial figure, he has been characterised as reckless, unprincipled, and fractious, but is also noted for his intellectual activity and for being the first significant English patron of humanism, in the context of the Renaissance.
c. 16th-century drawing based on contemporary portrait (from the Recueil d'Arras)
Gloucester in the frontispiece of the Talbot Shrewsbury Book, 1445
Jacqueline, Countess of Holland and Zeeland, c. 1435
Illuminated miniature of Humphrey and his second wife Eleanor from Thomas Walsingham's Book of Benefactors to St Albans, 1431. Cotton MS Nero D VII, British Library
Henry IV, also known as Henry Bolingbroke, was King of England from 1399 to 1413. Henry was the son of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, himself the son of Edward III.
Illuminated miniature, c. 1402
Henry of Bolingbroke, flanked by the lords spiritual and temporal, claims the throne in 1399. From a contemporary manuscript, British Library, Harleian Collection
The coronation of Henry IV of England, from a 15th-century manuscript of Jean Froissart's Chronicles
Silver half-groat of Henry IV, York Museums Trust
