#trying to say anything with certainty about eleanor is itself a failure

[heartofstanding]

Do you think Humphrey would have been a difficult man to be married to on a personal or political level? I guess both those aspects are entwined, but I always thought that he and Eleanor had a very stable marriage for their time :(

On a personal level. He does seem to have been quite a volatile personality, he does seem to have carried grudges and frustrated dreams of self-aggrandizement, and he does seem to have taken everything personally. But this is all drawn from his political career, where he does seem to have been the equivalent of a dumpster fire. He might not have been able to separate the political from the personal, he might have have been taking his "work" problems "home" with him.

On the other hand, he might have been a very different friend and husband than he was politician. His relationship with Eleanor was very different than the relationship he had with someone like Cardinal Beaufort or John, Duke of Bedford. He chose to marry Eleanor, in a decision that had to be motivated by personal reasons. Historians still don't really know why he gained the reputation of "Good Duke Humphrey" when he was a political dumpster fire so it's possible that his public and private selves were very different than his political self.

I do think he loved Eleanor. Everything about their marriage and relationship suggests he felt a strong emotional attachment to her. But we don't know a lot about how their relationship functioned (the least reliable of his biographers suggest he took other lovers during their marriage though I've not found anyone else repeating this idea outside of novelists; Gemma Hollman suggests Eleanor was affected by the ease at which Jacqueline of Hainault had been abandoned), and we have no evidence at all about how Eleanor felt about him (this isn't unusual, given the patriarchal nature of medieval society - we have very little evidence about how women felt about their husbands and/or lovers). Eleanor may have loved him back or her feelings may have been more complicated - I hope it was the former. But I also feel the need to be cautious - Humphrey loving her doesn't necessarily mean he was a good husband to her. I hope he was and indeed, if Frank Millard is right that his "Good Duke Humphrey" rested on the genuineness of his friendship to the people he counted as his friends, he might well have been.