CHAPTER 9
‘Wise, religious, fruitful, meek?’
Of all England’s medieval queens, Eleanor of Castile is celebrated more for her death than for her life. The twelve ‘Eleanor crosses’, three of which survive, built by Edward I to commemorate the staging posts of her body’s last journey from Lincoln to Westminster for burial have enshrined her image as a beloved wife and devoted consort. As time passed, Eleanor’s reputation became bound up with the crosses themselves: they represent her as ‘pillar of all England’, whose death was ‘tearfully mourned’.1 Their magnificence, though, is as much a testament to Edward’s conception of the dignity of his kingship than to Eleanor’s own qualities. Her contemporaries had a more ambivalent attitude to their Spanish queen, who was by no means as revered in life as she became in death. Her reinvention through the propaganda of her husband’s memorials provides an interesting example of the way in which commemoration, traditionally a responsibility of royal women, could be effectively manipulated into an immortalisation of majesty.
Until the outbreak of the civil wars of the 1260s, Eleanor occupies a modest place in the chronicles. After her marriage in 1254, she appears mainly in relation to her mother-in-law’s activities, as when Eleanor of Provence appointed her own clerk John de Loundres, to set up the Princess’s wardrobe in 1255, or at New Year 1259, when she was provided with two sapphire rings to present as a gift to a knight of Gaston de Béarn’s household at Mortlake. It is possible that she crossed to Brittany for the marriage of her sister-in-law Beatrice in 1260, in which case she would have been reunited with her mother, Jeanne, and brother Ferdinand; she was certainly in Aquitaine with her husband from 1260 to 1262, returning to England in June.
During the crisis of 1263, Eleanor of Castile, like Eleanor of Provence, drew on her maternal inheritance to assist her imprisoned husband. She summoned archers from Ponthieu for the garrison at Windsor, where she remained until after the defeat at Lewes. Suspected by Simon de Montfort of trying to raise mercenary troops in Castile, she was obliged on 17 June, along with her first child, Katherine, to rejoin King Henry’s household. The extent to which she was marginalised at this time can be seen in the fact that with Eleanor of Provence in France, Edward imprisoned and the King on forced progress with De Montfort, she was effectively abandoned. When Katherine died that September Eleanor, isolated and grieving, was forced to borrow forty pounds for her expenses from Hugh Despenser. Perhaps it is not going too far to suggest that this period, in which Eleanor herself is barely more than a footnote to broader events, carries the key to some aspects of her future character. Acquisitiveness can be a defence against insecurity, a way of cheating fortune, and Eleanor proved herself determined never again to experience the humiliating poverty and frustrating ineffectuality that had threatened to overturn the status on which her sense of self had been constructed for a decade.
Brightness returned with the victory at Evesham, with which Henry III was restored and Edward and Eleanor reunited. Four more children, Joan, John, Henry and Eleanor, were born in rapid succession, though little Joan did not live out her first year. As the King and Queen worked to consolidate peace with the magnates, Eleanor and Edward were preparing for a real adventure: a crusade to the Holy Land. The crusader states in Outremer were still struggling on, but the ascendance of the Egyptian Mamluk dynasty signified a newly aggressive commitment to jihad, and in 1266 King Louis IX of France, who had already fought one crusade, resolved to embark on another, taking the Cross in March 1267. Ottobuono, the papal legate who had travelled to England with Eleanor of Provence, was promoting the crusade around the country throughout 1266, and in 1268, as Jaffa fell and the kingdom of Antioch collapsed, Edward decided that he, too, should take the Cross, in the face of the objections of both his father and Pope Clement IV. Despite his misgivings, Henry took the precaution of transferring lands and castles to his son for a period of five years which, in the event of the King’s death while the heir was abroad, could be held for him against his return.
Edward’s allegiances during the Lusignan-Savoyard disputes had illustrated the potentially troublesome relationships between royal parents and a new generation keen to establish their own rights, and his preparations for his crusade offer clues to his feelings about the direction of his future. Having chosen to take his wife with him to the Holy Land, he pointedly excluded his mother from the arrangements he made for their absence. Edward and Eleanor gave their children into the care of their great-uncle Richard of Cornwall, rather than their grandmother. In comparison with the instructions of Edward’s younger brother Edmund, who was to accompany Edward on the expedition and made his mother the governor of his affairs for the duration, this plan suggests a residual anxiety about leaving the heirs to the throne in the care of a woman whose ‘foreign’ loyalties had been the cause of so much dispute. The danger of factionalism created by the importation of a queen’s relatives was one Eleanor of Castile treated more prudently than had her mother-in-law. The need for supportive royal kin had to be balanced against the sensitivities of the magnates, sensitivities to which Eleanor of Provence had shown herself imperiously oblivious. Eleanor of Castile had to find a means of promoting royal affinity without imposing her alien status too obviously on the English. She had already seen how easily that status could be negatively manipulated.
At the time of her marriage, the young Eleanor’s brother Sancho had advised Henry on how he could make her feel welcome, and the King, rather as he had done for his own wife, had kindly tried to make her apartments comfortably familiar, decorating them in Castilian style with rich carpets on the floors. This immediately led to accusations of extravagance, if not oriental depravity, and Eleanor showed herself attuned to English suspicions of Spanish ways in both her choice of attendants, nearly all of whom came from relatively modest, gentle families, and in her match-making strategies. She did not involve herself in importing husbands for English heiresses, and though she did promote her Picard connections, finding English husbands for cousins from Ponthieu, she avoided provoking criticism among the chroniclers as Eleanor of Provence had done.
Eleanor did, however, remain close to her natal family; indeed, one of the reasons for her presence on the crusade was a plan to travel via Gascony to join Alfonso of Castile, but the project was prevented by the death of Boniface of Savoy. Instead, when she and Edward set off for France on 20 August 1270, their month-long journey south took them to Louis IX’s beautiful crusader port of Aigue-Mortes, where they embarked to rendezvous with the French forces who had mustered in Sardinia. En route Louis decided on an attack on Tunis, which he thought would be a strategic loss to the Mamluks, but five days after the English ships put out, the French King died, and Edward’s Uncle Charles of Anjou replaced him as commander. Much to Edward’s disgust, when he arrived a week later, Charles quickly came to an accommodation with the Tunisian emir, and the French turned round and went home. Edward refused to make any treaty with a ruler he saw first and foremost as an infidel, and defiantly set off for Sicily, where he and Eleanor remained until the following May. With a small flotilla of thirteen ships they then sailed to Cyprus and on to Acre.
The crusade, which lasted a year, was a largely fruitless exercise that achieved very little beyond a small English garrison at Acre. What it did produce was a legend that contributed to Eleanor’s posthumous reputation. A fifteenth-century Spanish chronicler, Rodrigo de Arevalo, recorded an incident (retold in English by Robert le Bel in 1579), in which a Muslim assassin lurking in Edward’s tent managed to stab him with a poisoned dagger. Edward killed his assailant, but the wound rotted and Edward’s life was despaired of until ‘Queen Eleanor, who had accompanied him on that journey, endangering her own life, in loving affection saved him and eternalised her own honour. For she daily and nightly sucked out that rank poison, which love made sweet to her . . . to his safety, her joy, and the comfort of all England.’2 What, asks Le Bel, ‘can be more rare than this woman’s expression of love?’ The whole story is more than likely to be apocryphal. One version casts the assassin as a turncoat spy whom Edward himself had employed, while The Guisborough Chronicle has Eleanor led sobbing from Edward’s tent by Edmund so as not to see the doctor cut out the putrefying flesh, though Edmund had in fact left the crusade by the time the incident supposedly took place. The preference of later writers for the Spanish version, which gives it as fact, rather than those of other chronicles, which mention it as a legend, is an example of the way Eleanor’s memory was consciously manipulated to her posthumous advantage.
The reference to Eleanor’s having endangered her life does contain some truth, however: she had become pregnant in the summer of 1271 and gave birth to a daughter, another Joan, at Acre in spring 1272. Childbirth was perilous in the best of circumstances, but in the ramshackle conditions of crusader quarters, hot and disease-ridden, it was terrifying. After Joan’s birth, Eleanor and Edward stayed on in Acre until September, when the baby was deemed strong enough to travel. Pausing at Trapani on Sicily on their return, they received the news that their son John had died and, shortly afterwards, that Henry III, too, was gone.
Edward returned to England as the only living king in Europe who had made the pilgrimage to the Holy Land, a distinction that hugely augmented his international standing. The expedition had cost a fortune which, as ever, the English crown didn’t have, but compared to the unrest of the 1260s, it represented a certain political advancement. The subsidy of 30,000 pounds granted to Edward for the crusade, the first such since 1237, was an acknowledgement of the new authority obtained by Parliament in relation to the economy. Though Edward’s force had been small, about 1,000 men in total, 225 of them were knights, all drawn from families closely associated with the court, and the expedition served as a means of unifying the aristocracy after the divisions of the wars. And although Edward was no Lionheart, he could identify himself afterwards as that glorious figure, a crusading king, and proclaimed his eagerness to return to the Holy Land until his dying day.
Returning through Rome, Orvieto – where they met Pope Gregory X – Lombardy and Milan, Edward and Eleanor reached Savoy. Here they stayed at the castle of St Georges d’Esperande in the Isère with Edward’s great-uncle Philip, ruler since 1268.By July they were in Paris, where Edward performed homage for his French holdings to the new king, Philip III, and in August 1274 they finally arrived back in England after an absence of four years. It was a sad homecoming. Edward was deeply affected by his father’s death - he had rather callously remarked to Charles of Anjou that he mourned less for his son John than for Henry, as sons could be replaced. There was also a quarrel with Edmund about precedence rights at the coronation, which took place on 19 August. Edmund was so offended by the rebuttal of his claim to carry the Curtana, the ceremonial sword, that he stayed away. At least, Edward wrote to his uncle Charles, he felt a greater closeness to his mother since losing his father.
Eleanor had given birth to another son, named for her brother Alfonso, in 1273. Her three eldest children had died, but four were living at her coronation (Henry would be lost shortly afterwards). She would go on to have six more: Margaret in 1275, Berengaria (1276), an unnamed child who died in infancy in 1278, Mary (1279), Elizabeth (1282) and Edward (1284). Another baby whose name is not recorded had died in 1271 and there may have been a further daughter, born soon after Eleanor’s marriage, whom some sources name as Blanche. Eleanor’s fertility attests to a consistent sexual relationship with Edward, which confirms the closeness of their relationship. A family tradition was the ‘kidnapping’ of the King in his bed by seven of Eleanor’s ladies on Easter Monday morning. Sexual intercourse was forbidden during the period of Lenten abstinence, and Edward had to pay a fine of two pounds to his captors before he was released to indulge himself with the Queen. But if she was fortunate in her marriage Eleanor was very unlucky with her children, even in an age of high infant mortality. Eleanor, the second Joan, Margaret, Mary and Elizabeth survived to adulthood, but of the boys only Edward reached his majority.
In the past, one of the commonplace assumptions about medieval childhood was that parents were less attached to their offspring because the prospect of losing them was so great, and though as a generalisation this was manifestly untrue, Eleanor does seem tohave had a cooler relationship with her children than several of her predecessors. Six-year-old Henry died at Guildford in 1274 while the King and Queen were in London, no great distance away, yet there is no evidence that they visited him. Great hope was held out for Alfonso, who survived until he was ten, but there is no mention in the household accounts of a Mass for his death in 1284, or of anniversary Masses for his lost brothers and sisters. The quarrel with her mother-in-law about Mary’s early enclosure at Amesbury demonstrates that Eleanor was not indifferent to her children’s welfare, but what little evidence there is presents a broad picture of a dutiful rather than a loving mother.
Early matrimony was one area where Eleanor did show exceptional concern. As has been noted, she lobbied with Eleanor of Provence to postpone the marriage of her eldest daughter, Eleanor, and Joan of Acre, who became the wife of Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, and Elizabeth, who married Count John of Holland, did so at the relatively late ages of eighteen and fifteen respectively (Elizabeth remained at court for a further nine months after her wedding). Eleanor’s children were brought up with all the privileges of their rank, yet their father and mother were thoroughly occupied elsewhere, which is entirely typical of the period, if not an especially sympathetic approach to child-rearing. Some evidence of parental interest is shown in the miniature castles and siege engines ordered for Alfonso and Edward, and the King indulged the girls in the matter of dresses, carriages and jewels, but the Queen’s emotional priority was very much the King.
Both duty and inclination meant Eleanor was often away from her children as she accompanied Edward on his travels. Indeed, with the exception of his military campaigns and her lyings-in, they were rarely separated. Royal excursions were no more comfortable than they had been in Eleanor of Aquitaine’s time, and Eleanor, who was almost permanently pregnant, was beset by overturning carts, lost baggage and accidents such as the fire that nearly killed the royal couple at Hope Castle in 1283. She was renowned for her Castilian addiction to comfort, which might be better figured as an objection to freezing. Where the Queen went, glazed windows and lead roofs quickly followed. She stayed loyal to her carpets, buying seven in 1278, paying five pounds to the carpet-maker John de Winton in 1286 and ordering 26s 8d-worth of painted cloths from Cologne in 1290. Eleanor tried to make her lodgings cheerful with colourful candles, Venetian glass, ivory mirrors and brightly painted walls, and she shared a southern love of scented gardens with Eleanor of Provence. Food was another connection to her native culture. Most eccentrically, the Queen ate lots of fresh fruit: English pears, apples and quinces and exotic pomegranates, figs, raisins and dates. Her cooks used olive oil and citrus fruit, and cheeses were ordered from Brie and Champagne. It is tempting to suggest, though impossible to prove, that the distinctly Arabic flavour that characterised grand English cookery in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries may have been influenced by Eleanor’s household, as she had grown up with the flavours of Moorish cuisine. Keeping up standards in the travelling circus of the court, she ate from silver or gold plate using knives with gold and jasper handles.
Like her mother-in-law, Eleanor loved gardens. Just as she was true to the flavours of her childhood, she may also have tried to recreate the sophisticated, Islamic-influenced gardens she had known in Castile. At Westminster, a system of pipes from the Thames filled the Queen’s pond, surrounded by a lawn set with vines and roses, while a herb garden wafted scents through the window of her chapel. At Langley, which she bought in 1275, Eleanor employed Aragonese gardeners to create wells, perhaps for fountains. Her partiality to fragrant blossom and fruit led her to send for French apple cuttings to be spliced by her vine-tender, the aptly named James Frangipane.
Eleanor and Edward had several interests in common. Both were keen hunters, though Eleanor preferred hounds, keeping her own pack, while Edward’s passion was falconry. The King’s hawks had a marvellous mews in London, with a garden and a bath fed by a fountain. For Eleanor, there was an aviary with nightingales and Sicilian parrots. They were also avid chess players, and Edward, certainly, played for money. A gift to Eleanor of jasper and crystal chessmen was eventually inherited by her daughter-in-law Isabella of France. Eleanor’s brother Alfonso was an enthusiast who commissioned a chess manual; Eleanor borrowed one from Cerne Abbey and became competent enough to manage ‘Four Kings’, the four-player version of the game.
Eleanor’s queenship was not a political one, and this may have been in part a reaction to Eleanor of Provence’s talent for interfering. However, as a product of the ‘aggressively literary’ court of Castile,3 one area in which she did make her mark was the creation and dissemination of books. Henry III’s interests had inclined more to architecture than literature, and his son was no great reader. The only evidence of his literary patronage is the commission of Rustichello de Pisa’s Meliadus, the source for which was a book of Arthurian legends Edward lent the writer while passing through Sicily on crusade. Eleanor sent the Meliadus to her brother Alfonso, and thus the book in turn influenced Tristan de Leonis, the first Arthurian romance written in Castilian. Alfonso followed his father in his love of vernacular literature and he and Eleanor exchanged books, including a French translation from the Arabic of The Ladder of Mohammed (the subject suggests that Eleanor, with her Moorish-influenced childhood, took a more sophisticated view of ‘infidels’ than did her husband).
Books were a matter for the women of the family, and Eleanor of Castile and Eleanor of Provence were associated in two valuable texts which connected them with the traditions of English queenship. La Estoire de Seint Aedward le Rei, a history of Edward the Confessor, was dedicated to Eleanor of Provence in recognition of Henry III’s rebuilding of the Confessor’s foundation of Westminster Abbey. The text is based on Aelred’s twelfth-century Vita Sancti Edwardi, itself based on Osbert of Clare’s Vita Beati Eadwardi Regis Anglorum, which is derived from a late eleventh-century Vita Aedwardi Regis dedicated to the Confessor’s Queen, Edith. The first text thus envisions a line of female patronage fulfilled by the version made for Eleanor of Provence in the thirteenth century. The dedication of the Estoire is another symbol of the special protection the Confessor afforded to the King and Queen, represented also in the coronation Mass, in which the wine was drunk from the saint’s chalice. Eleanor of Castile is shown on the first page of the 1270 Douce Apocalypse, an illustrated treatment of the Revelation of St John, next to her husband, for whom it was made. Eleanor’s centrality to the production of Douce and the dedication of the Estoire to her mother-in-law link them both to the holy queens of the Anglo-Saxon tradition and, in their didactic purpose, illustrate the special relationship between patron queens and pious education.
Eleanor of Castile was concerned with literacy and education on a personal scale as well as a symbolic one. She bought writing tablets for her daughters to practise on and sponsored the production of her own texts. Her unique contribution was her scriptorium, an innovation she introduced which did not survive her. Eleanor’s artist, Godfrey, and her clerk of the scriptorium, Roger, bought the vellum, ink, quills, colours, gold leaf and glue needed to create the Queen’s books, and her accounts show that they travelled as part of Eleanor’s household, even venturing as far as Aquitaine in 1286. Roger and Godfrey were permanent staff,but other artisans were hired for specific commissions. Richard du Marche, for example, made a psalter for Eleanor in 1289. Her interest in vernacular literature connects Eleanor with a tradition of women’s patronage in which her predecessors had participated, and with one of the more positive aspects of ‘foreign’ queenship, whereby ‘migratory brides could act as unique and powerful conduits for cultural exchange’.4
Sadly, none of the fruits of Eleanor’s scriptorium have survived, but other books known to have been associated with her are a history of military kings, produced for her at Acre by a royal clerk, Mr Richard, and a redaction by Archbishop Pecham of ‘De Celesti Hierarchia’, the primate’s only vernacular work of theology. Though her own interests were more varied and cosmopolitan, she encouraged Edward’s enthusiasm for all things Arthurian, accompanying him in 1278 to the ‘tomb’ of Arthur and Guinevere at Glastonbury, which had been luring the tourist trade since 1190. Edward has, however, been over-identified with Arthur. While he was not slow to profit from comparisons with the mythical king, he was less obsessed with them than his grandson Edward III. Eleanor may have benefited from her mother-in-law’s penchant for French romance. The Dowager Queen, whose chambers were still adorned with scenes from Geste d’Antioc, was a collector of French books, some of which she could have exchanged with her daughter-in-law. Multilingual and multicultural, Eleanor of Castile was truly extraordinary in that her scriptorium was the only personal institution of its type known to have existed in northern Europe at the time. She was a highly active participant in the cultural change, ‘at once gradual and revolutionary’5 that women’s patronage was bringing about in literature.
As a religious patron, Eleanor’s activities were equally impressive, making her ‘the most active royal foundress since the twelfth century’.6 She especially favoured the Dominican order, which admitted the Queen and her children to the benefits of their charity at Oxford in 1280, and from whose friars the children’s tutors were chosen. She founded Dominican priories at Chichester and London and contributed to the foundations of Rhuddlan, Salisbury and Northampton. She also donated gold for statues of two saints particularly venerated by her husband, St George and the Confessor, and made gifts of vestments from her chapel to Bath and Lichfield cathedrals. The chaotic lifestyle of the travelling court is illustrated by her successful application for a dispensation for a portable altar in 1278. The Queen’s intellectual bent encouraged the private devotions advocated by the Dominicans, such as the saying of the rosary and the use of books of hours, and there is none of the evangelical immediacy of a Matilda of Scotland in Eleanor’s piety. She preferred her charity to be dispensed by her priests and almoners rather than in person.
This picture of Eleanor as a respected wife and capable mother, surrounded by beautiful things and quietly cultivating her intellect and her gardens, suggests a serene, benign lady graciously fulfilling her duties. It appears, though, that Eleanor of Castile was really rather a horrible woman. She had a notoriously vile temper and in her relations with those with whom she did business, she seems to have been regarded as a ‘grasping harpy’, vengeful and vindictive. Edward may have actively sheltered his wife from any political controversy, but his insistence on her prerogative was something Eleanor knew she could twist to her own advantage, and she made sure that others knew it, too. Archbishop Pecham wrote letters of warning to the nuns of Hedingham and the church of Crondall, advising that they had better accept the Queen’s nominations for positions, or risk her wrath. The prior of Deerhurst was obliged to sack a newly appointed chaplain and replace him with Eleanor’s man on the advice of the bishop of Worcester, who had received threatening letters from her. She threatened to prosecute the bishop himself over a debt of 350 marks which he claimed he had never owed her. The advice given by the chancellor, who had experience of Eleanor’s rages, was that he should pay up and shut up.
If she could make herself personally unpleasant, it was nothing compared to the ‘outcry and gossip’ she provoked in her relentless pursuit of wealth. In 1283, she was rebuked by Archbishop Pecham: ‘For God’s sake, Lady, when you receive land or manor acquired by usury of Jews, take heed that usury is a mortal sin to those who take the usury and those who support it . . . you must therefore return the things thus acquired to the Christians who have lost them . . . My Lady, know that I am telling you the lawful truth and if anyone gives you to understand anything else he is a heretic.’
And three years later, the archbishop wrote to Eleanor’s clerk of the wardrobe: ‘A rumour is waxing strong throughout the Kingdom of England and much scandal is thereby generated because it is said that the illustrious Lady Queen of England . . . is occupying many manors, lands and other possessions of nobles . . . lands which the Jews extorted with usury under the protection of the royal court.’ This was exactly what Eleanor was doing. The archbishop continued: ‘There is public outcry and gossip about this in every part of England. Wherefore, as gain of this sort is illicit and damnable, we beg you and firmly command and enjoin you as our clerk that when you see an opportunity you will be pleased humbly to beseech the said Lady on our behalf that she bid her people entirely to abstain from the aforesaid practices . . .’
A snippet of popular doggerel put the case more succinctly:
The king would like to get our gold,
The queen our manors fair to hold.7
In twenty-five years as Queen, Eleanor of Castile acquired lands worth 2,500 pounds, more than half the value again of her dower assignment as fixed in 1275. Her avarice provoked public outrage as well as the archbishop’s concern for her immortal soul. Sheattracted claims of eviction and ruthless dispossession – one charge, later proved, was that her men had thrown a household into prison and left the family’s baby abandoned in the road. From her deathbed, Eleanor requested that all the wrongs done in her name be righted and the subsequent evidence from the king’s council that investigated her acquisitions found ample evidence of the oppression, injustice and extortion that pertained on her lands.
What Eleanor was doing might have been ethically unsavoury, but it was perfectly legal; indeed, the responsibility she bore in her own lifetime for the actions of her officials was unfair, since the augmentation of her estates was encouraged and guided by Edward as part of a policy to increase the crown lands after the Angevin losses under King John. When Henry III died, Eleanor could not come into her dower estates as they were already in the possession of her mother-in-law, and prerogatives such as queens-gold, which Eleanor of Provence made over to her, and debts granted by the King were unreliable and inadequate. Edward needed to provide for his queen and he found a way of doing so that allowed her to acquire lands which would then revert to the crown on her death.
Between 1269 and 1275, Edward exploited the relationship between the Jews and the crown to provide a means of channelling Jewish wealth to Eleanor. The receipt of Jewish debt was forbidden except with a royal grant or licence. Jewish families had to pay a tax on a deceased Jew’s possessions at a third of their value and Jews were also liable for tallage, effectively random taxation. When they were unable to pay, they could transfer their debts to be exacted by the receiver, who would also pocket the interest paid by the original debtor. The Statute of Jewry of 1275 outlawed the practice of usury and permitted Jews to enter trade or farming, but the crown retained exclusive control over such exchange of debt. Between this date and 1290, when they were expelled from England, the Jews were Eleanor’s moneybox.
The Queen took advantage of her monopoly principally to fund the purchase of lands, and although, in fairness, the number of ‘Christians’ she dispossessed through Jewish debt was misunderstood by the archbishop, it may certainly be inferred that there was a painful human cost to her hunger for real estate. Edward’s sanction of this policy is evident in the fact that he created it, but it may have been that he was also giving her an occupation which would distract her from meddling in politics. The alacrity with which Eleanor took to business was offensive not only to the Church but to the magnates, too. There was something rather middle-class about her efficiency in grabbing at wealth, and the briskness of her administration had a whiff of the parvenue.
In this light, Edward’s burial and commemoration of his wife may be read as something of a public-relations campaign. Eleanor died aged forty-nine at Harby, in Nottinghamshire, en route to Lincoln, on 28 November 1290. She was suffering from marsh fever, or quartain, which she had contracted on her last visit to Gascony with Edward in 1287. Her body, stuffed with barley, bound, then embalmed in linen, travelled in twelve solemn stages to Westminster. Her heart was buried with that of her son Alfonso at the Dominican church in London, while her viscera were splendidly entombed at Lincoln. Her body lay at Westminster, but though her tomb there is impressive, it is the crosses Edward erected to mark the stages of her final journey that were most influential in creating her eventual reputation. Two others were put up after 1291 in memory of Edward’s sister Beatrice and his mother, but stylistically, Eleanor’s represent a complete innovation: nothing like them had been seen before in England. Inspired by the montjoie crosses built for the funeral of Louis IX, they share a three-tiered structure with a closed first storey, an open second storey and a spire, originally surmounted with a cross. Within the open section, Eleanor’s statue gazes out calmly, her hair loose as she had worn it at her coronation, her right hand holding a sceptre. She is aloof, yet not haughty, her countenance gracious, her sceptre invoking the intercession of Mary, Queen of Heaven as well as her earthly power. In addition to her three tombs, the presence of the Eleanor crosses throughout England replaced in local memory the nasty remnants of her reputation with an image of authoritative feminine spirituality and benevolence.
Commemorative arrangements for Eleanor were exhaustively elaborate, and exhausting for the weary chaplains to carry out. On the anniversary of her death, the office was sung on the hour for twenty-four hours, while less than six months after her funeral the archbishop of York proudly reported to the King that over 47,000 Masses had already been said for her. Positive associations were encouraged by indulgences, as at York in 1290, where forty days’ exemption from penance was given to anyone who said the Pater Noster and Ave Maria for the Queen, a measure repeated at Lincoln in 1291. At Westminster, according to the rules Edward set out in a statute of 1292, Eleanor’s tomb was to be surrounded by thirty candles, two of them constantly burning and all thirty on feast days. Monday, the day of her death, was marked with high Mass and the tolling of bells, and after Mass on Tuesday 140 paupers were each to receive a silver penny, reciting the Pater Noster, the Credo and the Ave Maria for the Queen’s soul before and afterwards. Edward personally founded three chantries for Eleanor and services were held for her at St Albans, Bath and Coventry. Licences and land grants to support foundations for the Queen’s soul continued until well into the reign of her son Edward II.
Later characterisations of Edward I’s reign show just how effective his magnification of Eleanor had become, in that the nature of his rule is judged to have changed after 1290 as a consequence of the loss of her benign influence. In fact, Eleanor was blamed for the King’s harshness in his lifetime. Edward did love Eleanor: his most famous comment about her was made in a letter to the abbot of Cluny in 1291, in which he referred to his wife as she ‘whom living we dearly cherished and in death we cannot cease to love’. The year after she died he glumly went through the motions of paying his Easter ‘ransom’, even though there was no warm, welcoming bed for him to jump into. Yet Edward did recover from the loss, despite later affirmations that he never ceased to mourn her, and in a sense his commemoration of Eleanor serves to subsume the woman she truly was, first in terms of the remaking of her reputation and secondly in fashioning it into a representation of the might and spiritual dignity of the Plantagenet kings. Edward took a woman whom no one except himself had much liked and made her into a virtual saint, exquisitely celebrated in a novel fusion of sculpture and symbolism that attested far more to his own glory than to her achievements as a queen.
The success of the crosses in reinventing Eleanor is most poignantly evoked in the continuation of The St Albans Chronicle of Matthew Paris in 1408. Edward II, Eleanor’s last child, barely knew his mother - she had left England for three years when he was two, remaining in Gascony between May 1286 and August 1289, and in the final months of her life she hardly saw him. Brought up mainly at Langley, which was his favourite residence as King, Edward would often have seen his mother’s cross at nearby St Albans, and would probably have attended her annual commemorative Mass there. In 1305, he asked the abbot of St Albans to take in John le Parker, a former servant of Eleanor’s who had worked at Langley, who wished to spend his last days in prayer for the late Queen’s soul. The continuation of The St Albans Chronicle, in essence a history of the reign of Edward I, would have been seen by Edward (if it was not intended specifically for him), and the writer may have hoped to please him by idealising the mother he had never really known. According to the continuation, Eleanor’s influence was one of a transcendental purity: ‘As the dawn scatters the shadows of the waning night with its rays of light, so by the promotion of this most holy woman and Queen, throughout England the night of faithlessness was expelled.’
One might suspect the chronicler of a little sarcasm at the royal expense. The ‘faithless’ Jews had indeed been expelled from England in the year of Eleanor’s death, but only, as her subjects were well aware, after she and Edward had bled them dry.