CHAPTER 1

The Eleanor Crosses

Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross

To see a fine lady upon a white horse,

With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,

She shall have music wherever she goes.

Traditional nursery rhyme

IN CENTRAL LONDON, only yards from the great square with the Spanish name, are a hotel, a station and a road that bear the name of Charing Cross. An imaginative reconstruction of the original thirteenth-century cross stands in the hotel and station forecourt. The original was the final of twelve crosses marking the night stops of the funeral cortège that carried the body of Queen Eleanor, the Spanish wife of Edward I, from Harby in Nottinghamshire to Westminster in 1290. The others were set up at Lincoln, Grantham, Stamford, Geddington, Hardingstone, Stony Stratford, Woburn, Dunstable, St Albans, Waltham and Cheapside. In time such crosses came to be seen as symbols marking the centres of villages and market towns, and places never visited by the cortège sprouted them. One of these, Banbury, is immortalised in the old nursery rhyme. The cross at Sledmere in Yorkshire was built only in 1895, then converted to a war memorial in 1919. Of the originals, only three remain: at Geddington (the best example), Hardingstone and Waltham.

So who was this Spanish queen whose loss was so mourned that her warrior husband strove to ensure she would never be forgotten?

Eleanor was born in northern Spain in 1244 to King Ferdinand III of Castile and Joan of Ponthieu. Her father was a great crusader who united Castile and León and accelerated the pace of reconquest from the Moors. Soon after her birth she would have been taken south as her father moved his base to Andalusia. When he died in 1252, he was succeeded by Eleanor’s half-brother Alfonso X. It would have been expedient for Eleanor to marry the English Edward, eldest son of Henry III. The English king’s lands in Gascony were adjacent to Castile so marriage would secure the borders for both parties. It would also deal with her brother’s spurious claim to that part of Aquitaine. The claim was based on the supposition that the English sovereign Henry II had pledged Gascony to Alfonso VIII of Castile as part of the deal that took Henry’s daughter Eleanor to Castile as queen in 1170.

The marriage negotiations included an Anglo-Castilian treaty by which the kings of Castile and England became allies against all enemies. Edward was to be knighted and would assist in the Castilian struggle to reduce Navarre. Interestingly, for a time when the reconquest was not yet complete, Henry also agreed to assist Alfonso in an invasion of North Africa.

In October 1254 Prince Edward arrived in Burgos for the wedding. The venue was the monastery of Las Huelgas de Burgos, founded by Alfonso VIII of Castile and Eleanor of England in 1187 as their future mausoleum. The ceremony most likely took place on 1 November. The groom was fifteen, his bride just ten. Later that month they travelled to Gascony where they spent a year before journeying to England the following October. It was an arranged marriage between two very young people from vastly different backgrounds but it was to last for thirty-six years and produce more children than the union of any other king and queen of England before or since.

During the next ten years, Henry III’s inept rule provoked the barons to take government into their own hands. For a time Edward supported the rebels, led by Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester. Later he turned to support his father and was captured during the royal defeat at the Battle of Lewes in 1264, after which Eleanor fled to France. Edward escaped a year later to lead royalist forces back to victory at the Battle of Evesham in August 1265 and Eleanor returned to join her husband, who became effective ruler.

Edward was the archetypal medieval king. His tall and powerful physique gave him an advantage in tournaments in that age of chivalry. He hunted stag, practised falconry, patronised minstrels and heralds and played chess. But no knight’s record was complete without a crusade. And so it was that, in August 1270, Eleanor left with her husband on the long and dangerous journey to the Holy Land. The Fifth Crusade did little to help the fortunes of Jerusalem. One of its few legacies was a tale that was long recounted as proof of Eleanor’s selfless devotion to her husband. The story goes that, whilst in his chamber at Acre, Edward was visited by a Moslem who attacked him with a poisoned dagger. Edward fought back and killed the would-be assassin before Eleanor dutifully sucked the deadly poison from his wound. It is a nice story but unlikely to be true: it first appears in a work written by an Italian Dominican friar no less than a century and a half later. That he was from an order that Eleanor supported suggests ulterior motives for embellishing a less remarkable account of what actually happened.

Eleanor and Edward left the Holy Land in September 1272. In Sicily they received the dramatic news that they were king and queen, Henry III having passed away. England was stable enough for them not to rush home. Eleanor had good reason not to travel on: she was pregnant with her eighth child.

One of the frustrations of medieval history is the difficulty of establishing facts. How many children did Eleanor actually have? Most likely fourteen, but we have only twelve names – four boys, called John, Henry, Alfonso and Edward, and eight girls, Katherine, Joan (two), Eleanor, Margaret, Bernagaria, Mary and Elizabeth. It is possible that there were more. The tragedy is that only six lived to adulthood.

Four of Eleanor’s children had already died when she gave birth to a boy in Aquitaine in November 1273. She invited her brother Alfonso X to the baptism in Bayonne. Amazingly for a child second in line to the English throne, he was given a very foreign name – Alfonso, after his godfather and uncle. When the baby’s elder brother died the following year, he became first in line until his own untimely death at the age of ten. Eleanor must have suffered a great deal, both physically, during years of pregnancy and childbirth, and mentally, having to cope with the illness and death of so many of her children. It appears that she mourned Alfonso the most, decreeing that, when she died, his heart should be buried with her own.

Queen Eleanor and King Edward I arrived at Dover on 2 August 1274. Seventeen days later they were crowned in Westminster Abbey. Queen Eleanor was a sophisticated cosmopolitan woman who coped well with the cultural shock of thirteenth-century England. She owned and commissioned literary works and was very interested in education. She enjoyed embroidery and weaving, and kept dogs. Notably, she did not bring in Castilian relatives and hangers-on, but she did introduce carpets to England in 1255 and, apparently, the first merino sheep. There are also records of her purchasing olive oil, pomegranates, figs, oranges and lemons, either from abroad or directly from Castilian ships calling at English ports. She was obviously supportive of her husband but the notion that she had a calming influence on him is probably untrue. Like so many others, Eleanor had a reputation in death that differed considerably from that in life. As Edward’s wife, many people in England denounced her as a foreign-born land-grabber who caused her husband to rule harshly. Such a view would have been aggravated by her not speaking English, if that was indeed the case. She and her husband both had French mothers, and French was spoken at court. Unless you planned to speak to peasants and tradesmen, there was no point in learning English.

Financial arrangements at the time did not allow the queen to have all her expenses covered by the king. Instead, Edward encouraged Eleanor to augment her own income through the acquisition of land. The stewards she employed to act for her in this earned her much criticism as they went about their work with some ruthlessness. One of her methods was to take over debts to Jews, who were struggling due to arbitrary Crown taxes, then charge the same exorbitant interest rates whilst enjoying the protection of her position. Her stewards were quick to seize manors and other assets if there was any default on payment – it was the manors they really wanted. Knights who had borrowed money for the crusade were incensed to lose their property by such underhand methods. Most of her acquisitions, however, did not involve the Jews. Anyone with land, whether financially burdened or not, feared that their property could fall under the greedy gaze of her stewards, who would thus concoct some way of obtaining it. After she had acquired the land, her ruthlessness fell on the tenants. The Archbishop of Canterbury, John Pecham, was sufficiently outraged by her behaviour to warn her that she was committing mortal sin. Her husband’s desire to give her a reputation not enjoyed in life might be one of the reasons why Edward arranged for three magnificent tombs, twelve beautiful crosses and a funeral procession and ceremony of unprecedented splendour.

In 1290 Edward expelled the Jews, a move that enabled him to raise substantial revenue in taxes from subjects who no longer had financial obligations to the departed moneylenders. Late that year, Queen Eleanor was on her way to the Scottish border when she was taken gravely ill. The forty-six-year-old queen died in Richard de Weston’s house at Harby, Nottinghamshire on 28 November. Her body needed three tombs as her intestines were to be buried at Lincoln Cathedral, her heart with that of her beloved son Alfonso at the London Dominican church...