Daughters of Chivalry

by Kelcey Wilson-Lee

  These elaborate and costly memorials were merely the beginning of a unique commemorative programme that Edward constructed following Eleanor’s death at Harby. In the years that followed, he installed a prominent public monument to her memory at each of the sites her body had rested overnight on the journey from Lincoln to Westminster: the dozen so-called Eleanor Crosses are among the best-known examples of medieval commemoration, and are often pointed to as evidence of the king’s great love for his wife. Each of the twelve monuments was distinct, the work of a number of craftsmen from London and local workshops, but all took the form of tall, lavishly decorated stone pillars featuring life-size statues of the queen gazing serenely out over crossroads and market squares, under ornate Gothic canopies topped with the eponymous crosses. Her posture evoked contemporary representations of the Virgin Mary as Queen of Heaven (the ultimate intercessor), while heraldic shields recalled her connection to Castile, and some of the monuments also included carved depictions of books – an appropriate memorial to a well-educated woman. This series of monuments, only three of which survive today, is unique in the history of England; its commissioner, King Edward, was inspired by a tribute constructed following the death of his uncle Louis IX of France, remembered as St Louis. Like the monuments that covered her body, viscera, and heart, these memorials were intended to prompt viewers to pray for the queen’s soul, but they also demonstrated Edward’s wealth, glorified his reign, and commemorated his connection through Eleanor to powerful continental courts.9

  Their daughters may never have seen many of the twelve Eleanor Crosses that recalled their mother’s memory at the crossroads and market sites between Clipstone and Lincoln, though Elizabeth, living at Langley, would regularly have gazed into the eyes of the mother she barely knew while passing the statue in nearby St Albans. Their eyes would also have fallen on her gilded monument at Westminster during the annual celebrations on the anniversary of her death and on other important occasions, given the tomb’s position immediately adjacent to the central shrine in the royal abbey. These representations of their mother emphasized Eleanor’s role as a conduit of royal power, dignity, and prestige even beyond her death, celebrating her as an everlasting princess-queen and embodying the connection between England and Castile. By placing her tomb alongside that of Henry III and the shrine of Edward the Confessor, Edward aligned the memory of his beloved wife with English royal authority and even sanctity, the prestige of which, in turn, reflected positively on Eleanor. The monument is therefore not only a manifestation in marble and gold of the role that princesses were expected to play, but also of the way that their individual interests were inextricably aligned with those of the dynasties from which they sprang. The prestige that Eleanor’s Castilian royal connections brought to her husband’s court enhanced his cultural authority both at home in England and also within a continental context. At the same time, her own influence was strengthened by any improvement in Edward’s position. She was not simply a pawn, but a partner in the project of Castilian and English kingship. This was a lesson not lost on her daughters.

  Just over two months after Eleanor died, Edward travelled to Amesbury to visit Mary and his mother. He undoubtedly shared the details surrounding the queen’s death with them – Mary, after all, was the only child who had not travelled to say goodbye at Clipstone, and it would have been natural for her to seek reassurance that her mother had thought of her during her final weeks. The king likely brought Mary a remembrance her mother had set aside for her when she was sharing her personal effects among her children. At Amesbury, Edward would have found his second-youngest daughter rapidly entering adolescence. She was nearly twelve – the age Queen Eleanor had been when Edward met and married her. For Mary, the end of her youth meant not marriage, of course, but that she was nearly old enough to graduate from her lengthy novitiate and become a fully professed nun, as her elder cousin Eleanor of Brittany had done the previous year. The ceremony which accompanied her final vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity would be the most significant moment of Mary’s life, and a critically important step, if she was to be elected abbess of the order’s motherhouse at Fontevrault, as befitted a princess of her status. Her cousin Eleanor, only four years Mary’s senior and living with her and their grandmother at Amesbury since 1285, had transferred to Fontevrault in the preceding year at the request of her own father, the Duke of Brittany. Mary was only kept at Amesbury to provide company for their grandmother, and the princess may have discussed both the ceremony of her final vows planned for that autumn and longer-term plans for her transfer to Fontevrault with her father.

  The latter topic must have seemed highly relevant by the winter of 1291, as the king would have found his mother, the dowager queen Eleanor of Provence, at the very advanced age of sixty-eight and clearly weakening. In addition to deriving what comfort he could from his mother in his time of grief, Edward most likely discussed with her the expectations surrounding Mary’s planned move to Fontevrault, as well as his plans for the goldsmith William Torel to craft matching, side-by-side effigies to commemorate his father and his own wife at Westminster – plans that, in practice, excluded the dowager queen from being buried alongside her husband in the great church he had rebuilt at Westminster. Edward might, too, have spoken to his mother about the developing crisis relating to the Scottish succession – she would have taken a personal interest, since her own daughter Margaret had been the grandmother (and namesake) of young Margaret of Norway, the tiny Queen of Scotland who had died tragically at Orkney the previous autumn, having fallen ill on her way to marry Prince Edward. For the dowager queen, the death of her young great-granddaughter – the last of her five direct descendants among the Scottish royal family – must have been a bitter blow. Edward would probably have shared his plans to travel north and arbitrate, as feudal overlord of Scotland, between the competing claims of Robert Bruce and John Balliol for the Scottish crown.

  Three months later, the king was at Norham near the east coast on the River Tweed considering these competing proposals, when a messenger arrived from the Cotswold town of Winchcombe. The messenger had not come primarily in search of King Edward but of his son-in-law, Gilbert, who was also in attendance. The news was joyous: on around 10 May, the Countess Joanna had successfully delivered her first child, a healthy baby boy, whom the countess named Gilbert, for his father. The king’s pleasure at learning of the safe birth of his first grandchild – fourth-in-line to the throne, and a healthy male – is apparent in the gift of one hundred pounds he made to the messenger. The chronicler Thomas Wykes described Gilbert’s joy as ‘inestimable’; he was probably also very relieved that his gamble in disinheriting his daughters to marry the princess had paid off with the birth of a longed-for male heir for the Clare fortune. Joanna seems to have felt some trepidation as her delivery approached – the fact that the news came from Winchcombe suggests she had taken up residence at Hailes Abbey, an immense Cistercian monastery and one of the most important pilgrimage sites in the country: at that abbey, she would have felt protected by the presence of one of England’s most precious relics, a phial of the Holy Blood, reportedly collected from the wound in Christ’s side as he was dying on the cross. Safely delivered, the baby’s birth was enthusiastically greeted across the country and is recorded in several chronicles, the commentators perhaps considering that he might one day become king.10

  One month later, another messenger arrived from the south with less welcome news for the king. His mother had died at Amesbury, on the feast of the Nativity of St John the Baptist. Mary’s time as companion to her grandmother had come to an end, and she was now free to move to Fontevrault. Back at Amesbury, the nuns had the body of the deceased queen embalmed, since there was initial confusion over where she would be buried and any funeral would need to wait until the royal party had returned south. The dowager was not laid to rest in the priory church until September, in a funeral presided over by her son and the principal magnates and prelates of the country. T
he occasion likely also brought Mary’s sisters and brother together at Amesbury, probably for the first time since the tournament at Winchester the previous year. So much had happened during the previous fifteen months: two sisters had been married, one had become a mother, and another was on the verge of taking her final vows as a nun. Their mother and doting grandmother – the two queens who provided the princesses with distinct models for how to live, reflect well on the English royal line, and achieve influence as a royal woman – were both dead.

  The deaths of the queen and the queen mother in such quick succession would have had a greater impact on Eleanora than on anyone else, except perhaps her father. The eldest princess had remained close to her grandmother, visiting her regularly even after she entered the priory. She had also been close to her mother – from the age of eight, Eleanora was an almost constant figure at court, frequently travelling around the country in the company of the queen and her ladies. These two women were not just family for Eleanora – they were the most direct and accessible role models she had in trying to understand her own future path and to craft her own royal female persona. For more than a decade, the princess watched and learned to emulate their behaviours, though she would have found their styles of queenship different, and even opposing, in many respects, and this too would have shaped her understanding of the possibilities open to her. Now they were dead, and for Eleanora, both everything and nothing had changed.

  At twenty-two, she remained in the same limbo she had inhabited for the past decade, irreversibly attached to a king she was forbidden to marry. How many times must she have regretted the caution her mother and grandmother had exercised in persuading her father not to send her to Aragon at the age of twelve. Then, suddenly, her situation changed irrevocably. Alfonso, King of Aragon, sometime ally of Edward, and Eleanora’s proxy husband whom she had never met, died after a short illness, less than one week before her grandmother’s death. And so she was forced to confront simultaneously the loss of the grandmother who had been the single constant throughout her life – who had nursed her dying siblings during their parents’ lengthy journeys abroad – and the knowledge that she would now never be Queen of Aragon. She might have cast her mind back to lessons with her mother on the different dialects and foreign customs of Spain, wondering what to do with the accumulated knowledge of a woman who had spent a decade preparing to take on a role that she was now denied. In the months that followed, as a new hierarchy formed at court, with Eleanora taking on an enhanced role as the senior royal woman, she may have wondered whom she would marry, freed as she was from her bond to Aragon.

  For her sisters Joanna, Margaret, and Elizabeth, life continued as it had before the upheavals caused by the deaths of the two queens: Joanna was pregnant again by the end of the year, with a daughter she would name Eleanor for her mother, grandmother and sister; Margaret remained at court, joined again by her young husband after he returned to complete his education under his father-in-law. Elizabeth remained at Langley with her brother, waiting to take her own place beside the heir to the County of Holland.

  For Mary, this period marked a significant turning point in life. That autumn she took her final vows, kneeling before three bishops in the priory church where her grandmother’s body had only just been laid to rest. This profession bound Mary ever more tightly to the order of Fontevrault, of which she was now a full member. The death of her grandmother, however, also released the young nun from her ties to Amesbury – since before she entered six years earlier, her parents had agreed that Mary would transfer to the motherhouse in Anjou after the death of the dowager queen. The abbess of Fontevrault was unlikely to overlook so rich a prize for her house as the daughter of a king, and accordingly travelled to England in early December to collect Mary. She would have found London filled with solemn pageantry, as all the assembled aristocracy of England had been summoned to Westminster Abbey to participate in the decorous proceedings that marked the first anniversary of Queen Eleanor’s death, as well as the burial of the queen mother’s heart at Greyfriars, the church of the London Franciscans.

  However, things did not go according to plan for the abbess, for at some point during her week-long stay, she was informed that Mary would not be joining her on the return to Anjou after all, but would instead remain at Amesbury. Whether Mary refused to go or her father, having lost his wife and mother in quick succession, determined not to give up his child, Mary’s path no longer took her out of England, outside the kingdom her father ruled, and where her own influence – since she could never marry a foreign ruler – might be greatest. Like her sister Joanna, who was married to an English nobleman, Mary remained a princess at home.

  VIII

  Alliance

  1293–5

  BRISTOL, BAR, WESTMINSTER

  On 30 August 1293, King Edward commanded Reginald de Grey, Chief Justice of Chester, to summon the principal knights of Cheshire to Bristol on the Sunday after the feast of the Holy Rood. Notices to the same effect were sent to the Sheriffs of Cornwall, Cumberland, Derbyshire, Essex, Hertford, Lancashire, Northampton, Nottinghamshire, Surrey, and Sussex, each detailing a list of local aristocrats who were expected to join the royal household for the long-awaited wedding feast of the king’s eldest daughter Eleanora. Finally, twelve years after her proxy marriage to Alfonso of Aragon, at the age of twenty-four, she was to be married, though not to a king – rather, her fiancé was a mere count, the ruler of Bar, a small province sandwiched between the French county of Champagne and the German Duchy of Lorraine.1

  Near the start of that year, a delegation from Bar had arrived at King Edward’s court. At this time, the king’s household usually included Eleanora, Margaret and Jan. They spent most of Lent in the flat Norfolk countryside that year, and the proximity of the king during the season of penitence was of interest to the Norwich monk and chronicler Bartholomew Cotton. He recorded that the royal household was quiet, with only a small number of its usual noble attendants present, but that Henri III, the recently elevated Count of Bar, arrived with his priestly brother Theobald and some of his knights and spent the greater part of the season with the king in East Anglia. Though the cause of his visit to England is unrecorded, Henri had most likely come to discuss a political and military alliance against the French crown: nearly a decade earlier, the Countess of Champagne, his nearest rival, had married the heir to the French throne, and his own lands now seemed in danger of being subsumed by French expansionism.2

  The Lenten visit to Norfolk could hardly have given Henri the same display of the cultural sophistication of England that Edward was normally so determined to present to the ruling families of northern Europe – of the chivalric finesse projected at Margaret’s wedding, for example, or of the round table tournaments at Winchester. Nevertheless, Henri, whose personal ambition of travel in the Holy Land had only been curtailed by his elevation to ruler of Bar following the death of his own father, would certainly have admired Edward, the famous crusader king who continually professed his ambition for peace in Europe so he might retake the Cross and reconquer Jerusalem for Christianity. Even if the stay in Norfolk did not showcase England’s wealth and cultural refinement at its best, the young count was probably afforded greater access to the king than he might have enjoyed in the bustle of a full court at Westminster. The men seem to have made a favourable impression on each other – throughout that spring and summer, Henri remained by the king’s side as he resumed his unceasing progress throughout England. Travelling with the royal party, he would have frequently interacted with Eleanora, whose elevated status since her mother’s death was signalled by a personal household that had grown to include such specialized administrators as a clerk of the stables and a keeper of her wines, in addition to a chaplain, sumpterers and chariot runners, ladies and pages.3

  Within a few months – and seemingly agreed in conversation by the parties involved rather than by the usual teams of diplomats (whose negotiations would have been better recorded) – the Co
unt of Bar was betrothed to marry the eldest English princess. Aged thirty-four and still unwed, Henri had stumbled on extraordinary fortune: such a minor prince could hardly have anticipated that the great English king would bless Henri’s marriage to his first-born child, who was second-in-line to the English crown. That this agreement was reached suggests a strong personal connection between Henri and Edward, and possibly a personal connection between Henri and his future bride. The somewhat one-sided nature of the marriage between the minor count and the daughter of a king is made clear in comparing the dowry and dower agreed for this match with that of Margaret, who married the heir to the comparatively wealthy Duchy of Brabant. Eleanora’s dowry was set at ten thousand marks, or seven thousand pounds, while Margaret’s had been nearly double that amount. The dower estate that Eleanora stood to receive on Henri’s death, however, was worth nearly five times as much as that promised to her younger sister – an astonishing fifteen thousand livres Tournois per year, or nearly four thousand pounds. To achieve this immense value, Henri agreed to place in his bride’s hands an estate that included many of the principal towns in his province, as well as the home castle at Bar itself. This was the price that a minor count might expect to pay for marrying the daughter of a king, and Henri acceded unhesitatingly to the expectations of the English negotiators.4