Hope Cooke (born June 24, 1940) was the Gyalmo (Tibetan: རྒྱལ་མོ་, Wylie: rgyal mo; Queen Consort) of the 12th and last Chogyal (King) of Sikkim, Palden Thondup Namgyal.

[3] In 1975 Namgyal was deposed and Sikkim merged into India as a result of internal turmoil, Indian military intervention and a referendum.

Five months later, Cooke returned to the United States[citation needed] with her two children and stepdaughter to enroll them in schools in New York City.

[4] Cooke wrote an autobiography, Time Change (Simon & Schuster 1981) and began a career as a lecturer, book critic, and magazine contributor, later becoming an urban historian.

Cooke became the ward of her aunt and uncle, Mary Paul (Noyes) and Selden Chapin, a former US Ambassador to Iran and Peru.

[10] In 1959, Cooke was a freshman majoring in Asian Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and sharing an apartment with actress Jane Alexander.

[24][25][26][27][28] With child support from Namgyal and an inheritance from her grandparents, Cooke rented an apartment in the Yorkville area of New York City.

[29] She studied Dutch journals, old church sermons, and newspaper articles to acquaint herself with the city and lectured on the social history of New York.

[10] Cooke remarried in 1983 to Mike Wallace, a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and Distinguished Professor of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Cooke's daughter, Princess Hope, graduated from Milton Academy and Georgetown University, and married (and later divorced) Thomas Gwyn Reich, Jr., a US Foreign Service officer; she later remarried, to Yep Wangyal Tobden.

[citation needed] Cooke faced controversy during her tenure as queen due to allegations of being an agent of the CIA, purportedly promoting American interests and opposing Sikkim's merger with India.