17

Afterlives

Actual memory of Eleanor died in the 1340s, over fifty years after her death. By then, Edward too was long dead: he lived on until 1307. Still celebrated as England’s greatest medieval monarch, Eleanor’s death is seen as a turning point in his reign by many scholars. It was, of course, after 1290 that the issue of Scotland, which was to occupy so much of his time, came to the fore. So too did new problems with France, whose young monarch, Philip IV, bitterly resented the fact that Edward was seen as a greater statesman and knight than he was. The combination of these troubles was essentially to force Edward into his second marriage, to Philip of France’s sister Margaret in 1299; proof, if proof were needed, of his devotion to Eleanor, particularly when the succession hung only on the life of young Edward of Caernarfon.

Aside from these major political issues, some have seen in Edward’s latter reign a loss of the deftness of political touch which marked the years before Eleanor’s death and, given the closeness between the two throughout their marriage, it is hardly too much to see a causative relationship there. The advice of Eleanor, for so long an integral part of Edward’s inner circle, was bound to be felt. In her, more, perhaps, than any of his other advisers, was the voice he knew he could trust – and hers was also the one voice he could not escape. Morris suggests that it is hard to imagine the disastrous 1294 treaty with France – which was negotiated by Edmund of Lancaster, his wife Blanche and her daughter the French queen and resulted in the forfeiture of Gascony to the French Crown – being allowed to proceed if Robert Burnell had been there to stop it. Equally, it is hard to imagine that Eleanor, so exigent in relation to her own administration, would have contemplated a situation where such a treaty was agreed – or even where such a diplomatic team was put forward.

But Edward was gradually deprived of many of his key advisers in this period, and it would be wrong to say that it was Eleanor’s loss alone which caused the change of approach. Since their early years together, Edward and Eleanor had been surrounded by three other key players: Robert Burnell and, when diplomatic duties allowed, John de Vescy and Otho de Grandison. Interestingly, the latter had in fact been sent to help Edmund of Lancaster on the previous occasion when he had been entrusted with solo diplomatic work – and found it too much for his abilities. John de Vescy, of course, had died in Gascony. Otho de Grandison was to head off to the Holy Land to make preparations for the Crusade and was not to return for six years. Robert Burnell in turn died in 1292. Edward was, therefore, left very much alone within a short period of Eleanor’s death, and deprived of most of the wise voices who had earned the right to influence him.¹

There was some consolation to be found in his family. While Eleanor of Provence outlived her daughter-in-law by only a few months, dying in autumn 1291, Edward continued to have the company of a number of his daughters. The unfortunate Eleanora was not long among them. She was never united with her notional husband, Alphonso of Aragon. He died in mid-1291, and in 1293 she married Henry, Comte de Bar, to whom she gave two children before her death in 1297, thereby creating the line which would in due course produce Elizabeth Woodville. She is often credited with a daughter, Eleanor, who was claimed as an ancestor by the Tudor dynasty to thicken their royal blood; sadly, she is entirely mythical.

Joan, of course, was settled in England with Gilbert of Gloucester, though spending much of her time in Gloucester’s Marcher lands. She gave birth to her first child, Gilbert, the future earl of Gloucester and Hertford, the May after Eleanor’s death. In the short years before her widowhood in 1295 she also produced three daughters: Eleanor (later Lady Despenser) Margaret (later Lady Gaveston) and Elizabeth (later Countess de Burgh). Edward’s affection for her and them can be seen in some lavish grants of land to Joan, and arrangements for the children. Characteristically, and one might suggest showing her true descent from the Ponthevin countesses, Joan succeeded in scandalising society by her secret second marriage to the handsome young squire Ralph de Monthermer in 1297. Thereafter, although she succeeded in reconciling Edward to the match, assisted by Monthermer’s very solid abilities, she kept prudently close to him. This was an expensive proximity for Edward, because, although richly dowered, she seems forever to have been in need of loans from her father. She predeceased Edward by a few months.

Mary, too, despite her conventual vows, managed to be frequently at court throughout her father’s life. As with Joan, she appears to have possessed a talent for spending money and a taste for gambling – generally paid for by her father. The scandal of her alleged affair with Earl Warenne was, thankfully, not to arise until after Edward’s death.

Elizabeth, only eight years old on her mother’s death, was reputedly her father’s favourite and was so attached to him that, after her first marriage in 1297 to the Count of Holland, she refused to accompany him to the Netherlands for some time – despite written pleas from her husband to her father. In the circumstances, her husband’s early death in 1299 (fairly shortly after she was finally prevailed on to take up residence with him) provided her with a welcome opportunity to return to England, which she quickly took. In 1302 she married Humphrey de Bohun, the Earl of Hereford, her cousin through the marriage of Mathilde de Fiennes. She bore him ten children, dying aged thirty-four in 1316 while bringing the tenth into the world. Her granddaughter Mary married Henry of Bolingbroke, later Henry IV.²

Otho de Grandison’s story still had forty years to run at the time of Eleanor’s death, but he spent little of that time in England. He led the English forces in Acre at the time of the fall of that city in 1291, and saved the life of Jean de Grailly. After making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, he returned to England briefly in 1296–7 and was present with Edward at the Battle of Dunbar. Thereafter, he campaigned with the Templars and the Hospitallers before returning for the final years of Edward’s reign. He left England after the accession of Edward II, but continued to do some diplomatic work for the Crown. Towards the end of his life he finally settled in his ancestral lands of Grandson, where he died in 1328.³

Enrique of Castile was finally released from prison by Charles of Salerno in 1291 – one would like to think in recognition of the kindness shown him by Eleanor and Edward. Ironically, he did in fact come to exercise power in Castile, some fifty years after he had first challenged Alfonso. In the turbulent minority of King Ferdinand IV, Enrique became regent along with the king’s mother, until his own death in 1204.⁴

The longest survivors among those who had known Eleanor well were among Eleanor’s ladies. Eleanor’s faithful waiting woman Margerie de Haustede was one of the last to die, in 1338, outliving her own sons. She herself was outlived by one of the younger ladies-in-waiting, Clemence de Vescy, who died in 1343.

From this point Eleanor’s story entered the territory of mythmaking – with some surprising results.

The first and most important influence on Eleanor’s post-mortem reputation must be the funeral commemorations. The means by which Edward commemorated her inevitably focussed attention on Eleanor the Queen, standing alone, in a way which she had resolutely avoided in life. And those tombs and monuments are beautiful, gracious items of artistic endeavour, embellished with elegant figures which are almost interchangeable with representations of the Virgin Mary. There are, to the knowledgeable, a number of features which invoke Eleanor’s temporal power and suggest a more assertive person; but to the majority of the viewers the picture is clear – a gentle and gracious lady. This impression is even more likely to communicate itself to anyone viewing a cross or a tomb only in passing, and to later viewers to whom the artistic references of the time are lost. The funerary monuments therefore offer a massive piece of disinformation echoing down the centuries.

Nor was there a contemporaneous verdict of the chroniclers to pass down with the more solid memorials. Aside from the throwaway characterisations which have been mentioned earlier, there is silence on Eleanor’s character until Matthew Paris’ successor in the St Albans Chronicle. This work, known as the Opus Chronicorum, is dated to 1308; that is, eighteen years after Eleanor’s death – and during the reign of the son who quartered Eleanor’s Castilian arms with his own. Its tone as regards Eleanor is adulatory, describing her as surpassing ‘all women of that time in wisdom, prudence and beauty; indeed except that it would appear to be flattery I would say that she was not unequal to a Sybil in wisdom’. Assessing her in connection with the account of her death, he goes on to say that ‘her passing was tearfully mourned by not a few. For she was a pillar of all England, by sex a woman, but in spirit and virtue more like a man … As the dawn scatters the shadows of the darkness, so by the promotion of this most holy woman and queen, throughout England the night of faithlessness was expelled … of anger and discord cast out.’

Parsons considers the account to be astonishingly positive – to the point of rewriting the record. So far as the tone is concerned, this may be true. But the account of Eleanor of Provence is equally cloyingly approving, and there was now no call to reinvent Eleanor of Provence, whose retreat to a convent for the last five years of her life had already whitewashed her reputation. The tone is likely simply to be one adopted to gain the approval of the new young king by referring to his family with unqualified approval. But the substance which lurks under the thick veneer of flattery is not without interest. Firstly, consider what is not said. It is not said that Eleanor was a gentle, pacific queen, a reconciler of arguments and a stayer of her husband’s hand – the queen Pecham urged her to be. Secondly, there is interest in what is positively chosen to be said. Three points are made. First, she was wise. Here, we may see some knowledge and recognition of Eleanor’s intellectual attainments. Secondly, she was more like a man in ‘spirit and virtue’ than a woman. Here, we see a tactful allusion to both her active role in business, her implacable tendencies and her rejection of a traditional feminine intercessory role as queen. Thirdly, her role in religious foundations (and possibly also her wider encouragement of prayer chanting) is acknowledged, as it was not at the time of her death. In essence, therefore, the author, while sugar-coating the message thickly, does suggest that some picture of the real Eleanor had permeated England’s premier abbey, which had considerable ties to the royal court. But one might say that, for the readers of this description, ‘if you didn’t know, you wouldn’t know’; a familiar would see the glimpse of the real woman, but a stranger would take a fairly formulaic positive impression away.⁵

The process of movement to that impression can be seen in an updated version of this account written in 1327, also at St Albans, which was repeated in Thomas Walsingham’s Historia Anglicana (after 1392). This starts the transformation of Eleanor into what might be termed the rosewater version:

She was the most pious, modest and merciful woman, a lover of all the English, and was like a pillar of the entire realm. In her time foreign favourites did not afflict England. The people were not troubled by royal officials, if the slightest suggestion of oppression came to her ears in any way. As her rank permitted, she consoled the afflicted everywhere, and wherever she could, she reconciled those in discord.⁶

So by the time that Eleanor’s friends were dying out, the process of development of a myth was well under way. At the same time, the negative publicity in the areas where Eleanor held her lands in the wake of the inquest into her business dealings, and the litigation which sometimes followed, fizzled out into nothing. There may have been a few families for whom the version of the loss of their lands told among themselves involved wrongdoing on Eleanor’s part, but they were few and far between, and frequently proved wrong when put to the test in litigation. The Camvilles, for example, having failed to pursue any claim at the inquest, alleged in 1341 that Eleanor took against Robert de Camville when he refused to sell Westerham to her, trumped up charges of failing to answer a military summons to serve in Wales and imprisoned him until he made the conveyance. Poetically, in this version (his health doubtless shattered by imprisonment) he died nine months later. In fact, as was proved in court, he lost his lands through his debts to the Jewry, conveying them to Eleanor quite voluntarily; and he retained Westerham until his death – some seven years later.

So Eleanor’s memory passed into the unreliable hands of the chroniclers and the loaded images of the crosses and the tombs. Within a few more decades, Eleanor had receded back into near-total obscurity, with one rare mention of her misidentifying her as Alfonso’s daughter rather than his sister.⁷

The decay of the crosses echoes the falling away in recollection of Eleanor. By the 1530s, John Leland could not identify the queen remembered at the Hardingstone cross and other reports in the sixteenth century speak of decay to the crosses at Stony Stratford and elsewhere, with tops in particular showing a tendency to go missing.

As for the historians, no one seems to have paid much mind to Eleanor’s character. Some accounts mention her travels to Palestine and Gascony with Edward, while others confine themselves to her coronation, death and children. With Polydore Vergil came the misapprehension that Eleanor brought Ponthieu as her dowry. Later, in Elizabeth I’s reign, came the translation of Walsingham’s eulogistic description of Eleanor. A highly coloured Spanish version of the Acre legend, which gave full credit for Edward’s recovery to Eleanor’s love, followed in 1579.

By the end of the sixteenth century, Camden, in his 1605 book Remains of a Larger Work Concerning Britain, links the Acre story to the crosses:

This good Queen Eleanor his wife who had accompanied him in that journey endangering her own life, in loving affection saved his life and eternized her own honour. For she daily and nightly sucked out the ranke poison, which love made sweet to her, and thereby effected that which no Arte durst attempt; … so that well worthy was shee to be remembered by those crosses as monuments, which in steade of Statues were erected by her husband to her honour.

Here we find, therefore, the source and the essence of that picture which has transmitted itself – ‘good Queen Eleanor’, the rescue of her husband from the assassin’s poison and her deserved immortalisation through her husband’s loving tribute.⁸

One might imagine that the story of Eleanor’s reputation effectively stops there, and that this view simply became tradition. However, before this was to happen, Eleanor’s reputation was to take one further, rather unexpected turn, scrupulously unearthed by John Parsons and traced out in the latter part of Queen and Society.

At more or less the same time as Camden’s Britannia, a dramatist called George Peele, now best known as the possible author of parts of Titus Andronicus, was penning his play Edward the First. The first version of this, written in the early 1590s, is now effectively lost, later accretions having formed the more popular, and therefore long-lived, version of the play. This first version appears likely to have presented a rather endearing picture of Eleanor and Edward (‘sweet Nell’ and ‘sweet Ned’ between themselves). However, the more popular version is given a very different flavour. This version features a haughty Eleanor, who delays the coronation by a desire for Spanish-made gowns which will need over twenty weeks to make and says she will keep the English in a ‘Spanish yoke’. And these are simply her milder faults; her more appalling crimes include demanding that the women of Britain be ordered to lose their right breasts, the murder (by serpent) of the lady mayoress of London and confession to adultery with Edmund of Lancaster and a French friar.

Why, one may ask, was Eleanor suddenly traduced in this remarkable manner? The answer appears to be partly a question of politics and partly a question of facility. So far as politics are concerned, there seems a real likelihood that, while there may have been a mischievous desire to play flat against the saccharine picture of Camden, the main reason behind the reworking was a serious suggestion in the latter part of Elizabeth I’s reign that her throne might descend to Isabella of Spain, the daughter of Philip of Spain. When looking for candidates to take the English throne after the death of Elizabeth I, there were always bound to be those who would look back into the Plantagenet family tree, in preference to opting for Mary Stuart with her predominantly French descent and training and her poor track record as a monarch. Where the Tudors could claim male descent only through the legitimised line of John of Gaunt (the Beauforts), bolstered by Elizabeth of York, Isabella of Spain was descended from both of John of Gaunt’s legitimate daughters Philippa of Portugal and Katherine of Castile, who were his daughters by Blanche of Lancaster, heir to Edmund of Lancaster (and hence doubly royal). Thus the play appears to have been used as a means of spinning thought against foreign and specifically Spanish queens come to lord it over Englishmen – and also, it will be noted, to suggest that Isabella’s descent through Blanche of Lancaster was not all it was cracked up to be.

The story was facilitated by the existence of two ballads. The first, and source for most of these inventive fabrications, is a ballad called ‘The Lamentable Fall of Queen Elenor who for her Pride and Wickedness by Gods Judgment sunke into the ground at Charing Crosse and rose up again at Queen Hive’. Its origins are obscure, but it seems likely that it dates from the virulent bout of anti-Spanish feeling which accompanied the later reign of Mary Tudor (and her marriage to Philip of Spain). The second is a ballad called ‘Queen Eleanor’s Confession’, which seems to refer (via a confession of the murder of Fair Rosamund) to Eleanor of Aquitaine, but also has references apposite to Eleanor of Provence.⁹

With continued performances of Peele’s play and continued publications of ‘The Lamentable Fall’ in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, this entirely hostile portrait of Eleanor was probably more widely known at the time of the Civil War than the romantic one put together by Camden. Of course, it is likely that the war would in any case have seen the destruction of a number of the crosses, with their obvious Marian overtones, but it seems likely that the absence of a widely disseminated sense of ‘Good Queen Eleanor’ played a part in the loss of most of the crosses, which can be documented or inferred to have been lost in the years 1643–6.

The Lincoln cross disappears without any documentary record, leaving behind just one relic – a part of one of the statues of Eleanor which was found doing duty as a footbridge in the mid-nineteenth century and now stands in a flowerbed in the grounds of Lincoln Castle. The cross was definitely in place as late as 1542, when it is mentioned by John Leland, one of the first English antiquaries. Prior to that, it had acted as a meeting point for pilgrims and also a rallying point for Henry VI’s forces in 1445–6.

As for the Grantham cross, there is powerful evidence that the cross was thrown down in the Civil War. The minutes of 1646–7 meetings record the collection of stones from the cross and another cross known as the Apple cross for the Corporation of Grantham’s use and a prosecution of someone for involvement in the destruction of the cross, and using stones from it to repair a wall. It seems likely that some stones from this cross, and the other cross in the town (known as the Apple cross) now form part of the current Grantham Market cross, parts of which have been dated to 1290.

The fate of the Stamford cross is mysterious. It was reported as being in need of repair in the Stamford administrative records of 1621, and was noted in situ by the Royalist Captain Richard Symonds in 1645. But in 1646 a survey by the town clerk reported it to be in a parlous state, with the only discernable decorations being those of Castile and León, the rest defaced by ‘envious time’. By 1745, however, it had long fallen, with its remains being discovered in a tumulus, enabling Stukeley, who attended its rediscovery, to carry off numerous fragments, including a ‘stone adorned with roses’ – probably part of the pyramidal top storey which he sketched – to decorate his garden.

The Stony Stratford cross, described by Camden as ‘not very splendid’, has left practically no record of itself behind. It appears that it was long since gone when, in 1697, a distinguished traveller and chronicler of English historical remains, passing the cross site, makes no mention of it. That it would have rated a mention is demonstrated by the description given by the same traveller of the Hardingstone cross. That distinguished traveller was one Celia Fiennes, a descendant of Eleanor’s favoured relatives. Poignantly, she appears to have had no knowledge of the relationship which existed between the two of them, for when she does encounter the Hardingstone cross, she merely remarks on the statues of ‘some queen’. All that we do know of the Stony Stratford cross is that, in 1735, William Hartley, who was then nearly eighty, could recall the time when the base of the cross was still discernible. This strongly suggests destruction in or around the time of the Civil War.

Woburn cross disappears from sight without even a mention after its initial construction; and that of Dunstable, attracts only one brief mention, by Camden. It is reputed to have been demolished by troops under the Earl of Essex in 1643.

St Albans cross has no clear fate. It was described as ‘verie stately’ in 1596. Stukeley shows its location on a plan dated 1721, but it seems likely that all but the base, demolished to make way for the Market Cross in 1701, had been destroyed in the seventeenth century, probably in 1643.¹⁰

It is the London crosses whose fate can be most easily traced. The Cheapside cross in particular had become quite a controversial site. A key landmark in the later medieval period, it saw the start of races under Edward III and the start of Henry V’s victory procession in 1415. In 1441, the city denizens had considered the Cheapside cross to be in need of works, having been ‘by length of time decayed’ – possibly not assisted by the fact that it was apparently re-gilded for every event of note in the city. Henry VI gave the Mayor of London licence to ‘re-edify the same in a more beautiful manner’ and a committee was formed to decide how it should be smartened up. No precise record of their decision remains, but the later depictions of the cross, together with Stow’sSurvey of London, which contains a description of the ‘improved’ cross, indicate that it had been very considerably changed and possibly entirely rebuilt. In its second incarnation, the lower layer incorporated much more religious imagery – the resurrection of Christ, the Virgin Mary with the Christ child in her arms and St Edward the Confessor. Following attacks on such ‘popish’ images the statues were replaced, with one replacement being a rather indelicate fountain of Diana the Huntress spouting river water. A cupola appears to have been added between the main body of the monument and the cross, drawing attention to the statuary.

Three objections seem to have been taken to the cross. The first was practical. Standing, as it did, in the middle of Cheapside, it was seen as a traffic hazard, and various citizens sought to have it removed on this ground. Anyone driving along Cheapside today can readily appreciate the force of this objection. Secondly, its timber cross, covered in lead – and itself repeatedly gilded for special occasions – apparently rotted and was considered dangerous. Thirdly, as the Reformation gained ground, its imagery was regarded as objectionable, and was defaced repeatedly in the late sixteenth century. To the Parliamentarian forces it became a focus of anti-Catholic and anti-Royalist feeling, and was the subject of vandalism and an active pamphlet campaign, during which it was even described as the Antichrist. It was therefore pulled down on 2 May 1643 by the local citizens, with the approval of Parliament and an accompaniment of celebratory bells from St Peter’s Wood Street, songs from the city waits, volleys of musketry and acclamations of joy. The great event was witnessed by John Evelyn and recorded for posterity in pictures and pamphlets, including the delightfully named ‘The Down-fall of Dagon, or the taking down of the Cheapside Cross’. One of these says that ‘a troop of horse and two companies of foot waited to guard it and at the fall of the top cross drums beat, trumpets blew, multitudes of capes were thrown in the air and with a great shout of people with joy’.

The Charing cross, which had survived in its original, unimproved form, did not attract the same level of odium, though it was apparently looking rather weather-beaten and down on its luck by 1590, when it was described as being ‘defaced by antiquitie’. It was condemned by the same vote of Parliament, but its destruction was not actioned until 1647, and was greeted with something of regret by Londoners, who joked that the lawyers would never be able to find the courts at Westminster now that the cross was no longer there to guide them.¹¹

It is ironic that it was just at this point, when the majority of the crosses were torn down, that the tide for Eleanor’s reputation began to turn again. Sir Richard Baker’s A History of the Kings of England of 1643, which went on over the next years to become a bestseller – indeed, the front-running manual of English history of its day – brought Eleanor back into the light of popularity with its telling of the romanticised version of the Acre story. This was reinforced in 1695 by a new edition of Camden’s Britannia.

By early in the eighteenth century, sketches and prints of the remaining crosses begin to appear, and a first attempt was made to restore the Hardingstone cross. By 1720, Good Queen Eleanor’s reputation was firmly established; the last publication of ‘The Lamentable Fall’ features a disclaimer from the printer excusing himself from publishing a version so much at variance with what was ‘known’ to be the truth.

The remaining crosses were gifts to the cult of the picturesque emerging in the eighteenth century, and romanticised renditions of the survivors appeared in some numbers. By the end of the eighteenth century, the crosses were considered important historic monuments and featured on the Society of Antiquaries’ Vetusta Monumenta of 1780 and 1791. This round-up of notable and endangered items involved scrupulous drawings of each, accompanied by renditions of notable points of detail; by the end of the century, Cruikshank was mocking antiquaries admiring the Hardingstone cross.

Some hint of the frantic attentions of those antiquarians can be traced in the history of the Hardingstone cross. The first recorded restoration was in 1713, when the justices of the county, ‘seeing its dilapidated condition’, made an order for its repair. A cross three feet high was erected on the summit (to replace that which had been lost before 1460), four sundials with mottoes were placed on the third stage, and on the west side of the bottom stage was placed a white marble tablet surmounted by the royal arms, with a long Latin inscription. More repairs were performed in 1762. A further extensive ‘restoration’ in 1840 under the direction of Edward Blore undid the ‘improvements’ of the 1713 restoration. However, he made his own additions: the picturesque broken shaft which is still visible today was substituted for the cross, and one of the gables was completely rebuilt.¹²

Meanwhile, in 1739 Eleanor appeared on the London stage again – in a very different guise to her earlier appearance. James Thomson wrote a play based on Baker’s saccharine and inaccurate version of the Acre myth. Edward and Eleonora: A Tragedy was intended to support the campaign of his patron Frederick Louis, George II’s son, to be given a greater role in public affairs. The by-product of Thomson’s intent was that Eleanor was explicitly presented as ‘a Princess distinguish’d for all the Virtues that render Greatness aimiable’ as well as her ‘endearing goodness’. For those who are wondering where the tragedy comes into the play, in this version the price for saving Edward’s life is for a willing victim (Eleanor of course) to suck the poison from the wound in certain knowledge that he or she will be poisoned instead. Those of delicate sensibilities will be relieved to hear that, his heart wrung by such devotion, the evil sultan supplies an antidote in the last few minutes of the play.

Appalling as the play sounds, it was considered perfectly reasonable at the time – at least by those on one side of the political argument. Better still, the play was a succès de scandale, achieving the accolade of being the second play banned from performance by the Lord Chamberlain under the Licensing Act of 1737 – and accordingly selling very well indeed in hard copy and being performed frequently in the latter years of the eighteenth century, when its political overtones were no longer audible. Its reflection can be seen in the repeated depictions of the Acre myth in the art of the late eighteenth century, with Blake and Kaufmann, among many others, giving us touching depictions of Eleanor’s heroics.¹³

It was against this background that, in 1842, Joseph Hunter, the Assistant Keeper of Records at the then Records Commission (precursor to the Public Records Office), wrote a scholarly article on Edward’s commemorations of Eleanor. He did highlight the falsity of the Acre myth, but simply repeated the character sketches of Eleanor provided by Walsingham, et al., which effectively served to authorise those accounts.

But of course the most prominent and influential author to deal with Eleanor’s life was Agnes Strickland, in her 1840–48 publication Lives of the Queens of England, a work which was hailed as a sine qua non for all those pretending to an accurate knowledge of English history. The huge success of this publication has made it the source material for depictions of medieval queens well into the twentieth century, and sometimes even to date.

In fact, the earlier queens’ lives (including that of Eleanor) were probably the work of Agnes’ sister Elizabeth. Her account, although occasionally referencing some of the medieval chronicles, is substantially based on the Tudor historians and later antiquarians and, putting it with the utmost of charity, evidences little evaluation of the materials available. A starting point in the now accepted vision of Eleanor the dutiful wife and mother having been adopted, what was added was only that material which was conformable with this picture. Thus, the picture of Eleanor is fleshed out with references to her literary interests, her wardrobe and her taste in items of personal refinement. Interestingly, references exist in some of the sources used (such as Botfield and Turner’s edition of Eleanor’s executors’ accounts) to the more hard-edged aspects of Eleanor’s personality, and yet these were ignored. Parsons concludes, and it is hard not to agree, that the case for deliberate suppression of this evidence is compelling. However, to be entirely fair to Strickland, Botfield and Turner themselves had introduced their work with a pen portrait which was still more emphatic in its assertion of Eleanor the sweet peacemaker. One suspects that the picture of the fertile and compliant consort queen was so very much in tune with Victorian sensibilities that it seemed a pity to ‘spoil’ it by painting a picture of a much more complex personality, particularly when the materials were very fragmentary.¹⁴

There was also a degree of synchronicity in the ‘setting’ of Eleanor’s image. At the same time as the Strickland image disseminated itself, in the wake of the fantastic success of the Lives of the Queens of England publications, the artistic style which characterised the Eleanor crosses entered again into vogue, bringing a new round of appreciation for the surviving monuments. Thus the use by Gilbert Scott of the crosses as models for the Martyr’s Memorial in Oxford and the Albert Memorial in London focussed attention back on Eleanor, as the inspiration for this medium of artistic and emotional expression. So too did the parallel between Queen Victoria’s overpowering grief for the premature loss of a beloved consort and that of Edward’s mourning for Eleanor.

This revival of interest in Eleanor and her crosses is what gave rise to the erection of the modern Charing cross, intended as a replica of the destroyed Charing/Whitehall cross in 1864. Ironically, although a fake, and put in place as an advertisement for a the newly built Charing Cross Hotel, it has served the purpose of the original perhaps better than all the others put together, through the accident of its location outside one of London’s busiest railway stations.

Illustrating the strength of the fashion for the crosses, in 1840 Jesse Watts Russell raised a replica of an Eleanor cross at his home town of Ilam in Staffordshire in commemoration of his wife Mary, and another was raised in 1869 in Walken in honour of Lady Ellesmere. There are other local crosses which are plainly inspired by the Eleanor cross model at Sledmere in East Yorkshire and Glastonbury.

Most recently, in 2008 a reinterpretation or homage to the lost Eleanor cross of Stamford was erected in the town’s sheep market as part of Stamford’s Gateway project. Based on the one verified survival from that cross, the cross is essentially a tapered spike or needle composed of bands carved with a repeating spiral pattern of roses which tapers into a bronze point.

As for Eleanor’s reputation, while the early part of the twentieth century saw her famed in Hutchinson’s History of the Nations as one of the ‘Famous Women in History’, along with Mary, Queen of Scots, and Lady Jane Grey, her fame soon began to fade. As the century progressed, scholarship around her land acquisitions, the inquest into their management and Pecham’s letters provoked a somewhat revisionist attitude in historians. So, recently, Lisa Hilton’s precis of Eleanor saw her as a horrible woman with a vile temper. Yet in the absence of a full work on Eleanor, most scholars have stopped somewhat short of wholesale condemnation, tending to echo the Dunstable annalist and simply categorise her as being somewhat rapacious in her land acquisitions. John Carmi Parsons, who set out to produce that full work, seems to have been troubled by the binary nature of the images which emerge from the details. He at once sees in the household record a gracious and generous spirit and also, from the business records, a person whose admirable resolve and tenacity displayed itself in some very unpleasant ways.

At the same time as scholars have grappled with the difficulties of the fragmentary nature of the sources, and the ambivalent picture which emerges, the accepted portrait has continued to exist in the popular mind. Of that portrait, one facet stands clear. Aided by the crosses, and most of all the replica at Charing Cross railway station, now boosted by a 100-metre mural depicting the cross’s construction on the Northern Line platform and a cocktail bar named after Eleanor, her story has become set in romance. If Eleanor exists at all in the consciousness of most people, she is seen as Edward’s chère reine. It is perhaps appropriate that, through all the twists and turns of Eleanor’s afterlives, the deep love of Edward for Eleanor is the one point at which the historical record and popular myth actually do now coincide.

Oddly enough, it may be that Eleanor, trained to regard her greatest glory as coming to her from her husband, would not object to this being her immortality. But surely, having considered Eleanor’s life fully, she deserves rather more than this. Certainly, she should at least be remembered as a queen who lived a most remarkable life. Eleanor of Aquitaine is often identified as having led an exceptional life, by dint of her travels and her captivity. But Eleanor of Castile had experience of far more countries, both to live in (Castile, Gascony, England, Wales, Sicily, the Holy Land) and to visit (Scotland, Aragon, France, Italy, Tunisia). She too faced a rather more real, though shorter, captivity and far greater want of resources. But Eleanor was so much more than even this allows. She should be celebrated for her truly remarkable abilities. She was a woman who was highly intellectual and who promoted intellectual and artistic endeavour; England would not see another queen of similar abilities until the Tudors sat on the throne. She was a woman who ran a massively demanding property business alongside discharging her job as both queen and mother of sixteen children. She was also a woman who advanced the cause of civilised life in the rather unpromising ground of medieval England. As the champion of decent bathrooms, forks, culinary variety, well-decorated rooms and exquisitely designed gardens, she was a woman much in tune with modern sensibilities.

But finally, Eleanor should now be given credit for her role as Edward’s consort/adviser. Those who have concluded that she had no political role were surely wide of the mark. Close examination of the record shows again and again the traces of her subtle touch in directing his political and even his military endeavours. While it would be wrong to suggest that she was in any sense the sole power behind the throne, or a dominating force over her husband, the material gives grounds to believe that she was a highly influential adviser to Edward throughout their marriage, that she helped to develop in him the abilities which he had and that she assisted him with much relevant knowledge as his career progressed. Indeed, one cannot help but wonder whether, without Eleanor, Edward would have become such an outstanding king that the accolade of greatness is often bestowed on him.

Eleanor thus deserves to be remembered in the modern world as a remarkable woman and an exceptional consort. Truly, she was a queen who fully deserved the unique and beautiful series of monuments which have kept her in the public eye in the many years in which almost all detailed memory of her life and abilities was buried.