“Did not Guinevere die at Amesbury, where she had taken vows to atone for her sins in the last years of her life?” To my surprise, I heard my own voice speaking. I had not meant to speak out of turn, but was used to saying what was in my mind without censure.
Edward moved his leonine head to look at me, his expression sour and full of warning. The Queen suppressed a little smile behind her hand, pretended to cough. She was laughing.
Abbot John looked startled at my presumption in speaking out of turn; he did not recognise me in my plain clothing and head covering. He spoke to me as he would to a simple soul, some woman attendant of little consequence who had loose lips. “Indeed, that is so, Madame. The nuns of Amesbury, ‘tis said, did however contrive for the Queen, as in her final wishes, to be borne to Glastonbury, to lie forever next to her rightful lord.”
The abbot pointed to an ossuary box of polished marble, inlaid with gemstones, and seated on a little stool of carved oak, with the upswept hands of gilt angels supporting its heavy base. “Their remains are enclosed there in new reverence, waiting for reburial within the choir.”
I fixed my gaze on the stone box. The abbot proceeded to talk with Edward; their voices blurring in and out amidst the hazy candle-smoke and the soft chanting of the monks. My mind flew back through time, recalling the legends I had once adored…and tried to emulate in the glories of my court.
Amesbury…a little Wiltshire town I had frequently visited when on my progresses. Not far from Marlborough; midway between there and Sarum. An abbey that now served as the village church, where Eleanor of Brittany’s bones lay buried before the altar graced by the relics of Saint Melor, his fate so like that of her own unfortunate brother Arthur. A river and hill and a plain beyond, where the Choir of Ambrosius stood in awful, time-ravaged majesty, its gaunt ruins dappled with light and cloud shadow, its soil rich with the bones of slain men. A community of nuns in a daughter-house of Fontevraud, nestled by the bend in the river and sleeping in the lee of the great wooded hill. a place where Queen Guinevere sought to ease her distressed heart and atone for her sins, where at last she gave up the ghost and the nuns took her body, surrounded by candles like a myriad of will o’ the wisps, to fabled Glastonbury with its blood-tinged spring and misty Tor.
Suddenly I longed for quiet, dreaming Amesbury, where swans rode, gleaming white, on the swells of the Avon near the priory’s ivy-swathed wall. Longed for solitude, for sanctuary, for a quiet and contemplative ending to my own eventful life.
The Queen that was…
Chapter Thirteen
In the summer of 1286, I sought out the priory of Amesbury, with the intent to stay there for the rest of my days. I was not alone in my haven, for my granddaughter, another Eleanor, the daughter of Beatrice, had taken the veil there, and so had Edward’s young daughter Mary. I did not know what kind of nun Mary would make, as she seemed a frivolous and headstrong girl, who like game playing and had no particular piety, but such was her destiny, decreed by her father. She would do her duty to her kin as princesses must.
I had attended Mary’s veiling, along with the entirety of the royal family, brothers, sisters, cousins, the King and Queen. Pavilions and golden canopies stretched across the verdant lawns outside the priory, and musicians played as if we were all at a great fair rather than a solemn veiling of a young nun. Goose and swan were served on silver plates, and there were subtleties fashioned into the shape of church towers.
It was a fine Plantagenet party, one of the best in recent years, but it was soon over. The pavilions were dismantled, the entourage passed out upon the road that led to Old Sarum, where Henry’s grandmother had once been imprisoned, and thence to Salisbury, where the fine modern cathedral, consecrated a mere thirty years ago, towered over the fine new colleges of De Vaux and St Edmund’s. A busy, happy place, where the cathedral clergy taught a burgeoning array of theological students.
I would not see such sights again.
I retired from the world, and the gates of the priory closed, clanging behind me with steely finality. My fine dresses were packed away in chests and the rough grey robes and wimple of a nun brought to me, though, unlike my granddaughters, I was not professed and by special decree, still kept control over some of my dower lands.
And so the years passed, in prayer and solitude. Where once crowds cheered—or hissed—I heard only birdsong, the lowing of cattle in nearby fields, the ringing of bells, the churning of the river, the rush of wind through the trees on the nearby hill.
Once I walked out with Mary and Eleanor and went down to where the river wound round the flank of the hill. Here, the waters broadened out, forming a pool that was mildly warm to the touch; on cold days, we could see wisps of mist rising from it like ghostly hands. A little bath house stood nearby, used by those who suffered aches in the bones as I had begun to do; at certain times the waters would rise, covering the floor and the bathers huddled within.
Mary was down by the waterside, amidst waving reeds and long grasses. She was prodding at something on the water’s edge with the toe of her shoe. “Grandmother, look at this!”
Bending, she picked a large chunk of rock up from the mud and proffered it.
“Why would grandmama want an old stone, Mary?” said Eleanor contemptuously.
“It’s not just an ‘old stone’!” insisted Mary. “Look at it! Look at it, grandmama.”
I took the stone from Mary, uncaring that cold mud slopped onto my robes. The stone was purple, a deep rich royal purple.
“It’s magic,” said Mary. “It must be…because Guinevere lived here once!”
“Don’t be silly,” said Eleanor with the arrogance born of being a few years older than her cousin. “Magic doesn’t exist, Mary; and to believe it does is sinful. You should put these notions out of your head now; you are a nun and should fasten your mind only on Our Lord. As for that Guinevere—she was a wicked adulteress, for all she was a great queen. She is probably in hell being roasted by devils even after all these hundreds of years!”
“You’re so boring, Eleanor,” said Mary. I am sure she would have stuck her tongue out at her cousin but for fear of being reported to the prioress. “What do you think, grandmama? Is the stone magic? ”
“I do not know.” I turned the damp stone over in my hands. Its rich hue…I was reminded so much of my royal robes of long ago. Now Eleanor of Castile wore them; my robes were uniform grey. “But it certainly is a colour fit for Queens both old and new.”
“Plantagenet purple,” said Mary defiantly, eyeing Eleanor. “I would wear it still if I hadn’t been made a nun.”
“Plantagenet purple.” I laughed and tossed the violet-hued rock back out into the pool before my two granddaughters, veiled or not, got into an unseemly battle of words or worse. Ripples ran wide; birds soared up out of the brush and vanished into the treetops, shrilling in alarm.
“I saw her,” Mary breathed, suddenly catching my sleeve. “Didn’t you see her too? Just now. A woman in the trees, with hair like gold. Guinevere’s spirit. It has to be.”
“Come, Mary, it is time to go.” I glanced at Eleanor’s pursed lips and dragged my younger grandchild from the water’s edge.
A magical day, a strange day that left me wondering. And drawn. For I, in one brief second, thought I too saw a golden-haired woman hovering like a white phantom amidst the slender trees. Beckoning in her robes of purple hue.
News reached me in the priory. Even in remote Amesbury, it often did, and the nuns enjoyed a bit of gossip as much as any, although they pretended to eschew such idle talk. Rumour had it that the late Louis of France was to be canonised by the Pope. The thought somehow pained me. He was saintly, that was for certain, and pious to the point of mania; his failed crusades testified to that, and his wish for Marguerite to live as his sister at one point. But a saint? This man who led most of his kin to death in a miserable field in Tunisia?
Becoming a saint would wipe out all his mistakes, his failings, and raise him above all
other earthly men. People would come to pray at his tomb. France’s esteem would rise in the world, while England’s would languish.
I wanted Henry made a saint too.
I had already spoken of this matter to Edward a few years ago; in fact, we had argued bitterly over it. “Edward,” I had said, “your father, for all his faults, was a pious man and great builder for God’s glory; he worshipped the Confessor and he built anew Westminster Abbey that men should marvel for a thousand years. Do you not believe it is time to ask the Pope if he may join the ranks of the saints?”
Edward had thrown back his head, roaring with laughter that made me wince with its harshness. “A saint? Father? Surely, you jest, Madame?”
“I do not jest.” My tone was crisp. “Once, shortly after your father’s death, a knight sought special audience with me. He had been blinded in a cruel jousting accident, but afterwards he had knelt at Henry’s tomb and was miraculously cured, his eyesight restored! He swore upon the Holy Rood that his tale was true. He came to tell me what had transpired, because he believed the King should be made a saint.”
“He came, Madame, because he thought you were weak and would pay him for his sweet and flattering words! Mother, this knight, whoever he was, most assuredly was a charlatan and a thief. I hope you did not pay him overmuch for telling you of his wondrous recovery at my sire’s grave.”
“He asked for nothing, Edward! I believe he told the truth.”
“I thought you were more intelligent than that, mother. Maybe encroaching age had withered your brain.”
“Edward, you dishonour me, and your father’s memory! How dare you speak so!”
“How dare I?” He glowered at me beneath beetling brow, a look that would make most men quail. It even stopped my heart a little. “Let me tell you how, Madame! Because I am King of England!”
He had turned his back on me then, and would speak of the matter no more.
Now, hearing of Louis’s forthcoming canonisation, I wanted to write to Edward and beg one last time…but the fire in me was slipping away, dwindling. I had begun to feel old and tired. One night in my chamber I wrote a short missive that began ‘Your father deserves to be a saint.’ I never finished it. Reading it over, with a soft curse I tossed it on the embers in the brazier.
Edward would not listen.
The Queen was dead. Little Eleanor of Castile who, despite the sternness of Edward’s temperament, he loved beyond all others, whose council he had always valued. When they were returning from Gascony after their crusade, she had contracted the quartan fever, which had robbed her of good health from then on. After the birth of her last child, Edward of Caernarfon, in 1284, she had relied more and more on the ministrations of physics in order to perform her duties. Finally, when travelling from Clipstone Palace to Lincoln with the King, she fell seriously ill near Harby in Nottinghamshire. Carried unconscious to the house of a local man named Richard de Weston, she breathed her last amidst humble folk with simple things around her.
Edward bore her body to Lincoln, where it was embalmed and her entrails buried in the beautiful cathedral on the hill. Then, surrounded by black-clad mourners, he set off for London, arriving in the city in eleven days. Eleanor’s heart was sent to Blackfriars, and her remains placed in a tomb at my husband Henry’s feet. Grief stricken, Edward swore that he would erect a cross to Eleanor at every spot her cortege rested upon its doleful journey to Westminster.
My son was a doting husband, no matter what any may say of his other attributes.
Eleanor of Castile’s death filled me with great distress in more ways that one. She was a sweet girl, of much charm; her demise saddened me, and I know she was a restraining influence on my headstrong Edward.
But I was distressed for another reason.
Years ago, I had made arrangements for my own future death. My heart would be removed, placed in a golden casket and buried at the house of the Franciscans in London. The rest of my earthly remains were to be carried to Westminster and interred beside Henry, as befitted his faithful Queen of many years.
The latter was not going to happen now. My privilege had been usurped…on the orders of my own son.
Eleanor of Castile, whom he loved far more than me, lay in my appointed place in Westminster Abbey.
Summer time.
Midsummer’s Eve, the day of St John, has come. I am not well. The canker the doctors say gnaws my belly like a worm has flared in the night. Outside the window in my quarters, the morning sky is the colour of a blush; all around in the local villages, Amesbury, Durnford, Woodford, the people have been lighting fires for three days solid—smoke trundles through the air, blending with mist off the river.
I am weary, earlier I forced myself to go to Nocturn and pray for my family, for the bereaved King, my son. Then, after a brief sleep, I sat down to reading scripture, but my eyesight faded in and out, in and out.
Now, sitting alone, my limbs feel like heavy clay, drawing me down, down, down. Soon, it would be time for Lauds, and the sun would rise. Would I even have strength to attend?
I glance out the window again. On the high hill above the old pool with its royal purple stones, amidst the waving leafy green boughs, I see a fire burning, a tribute to the rising sun, a beacon heralding the forthcoming day. A pagan symbol that should have filled me with revulsion, yet strangely brought a fierce, desperate excitement.
I pull myself into the window embrasure, holding the edges with trembling hands. Somewhere it seems I can hear chanting and singing in an unknown tongue; it is not the sisters in their austere church. Is it coming across the Plain, brought down the wind, perhaps from the old stones of Ambrosius’ Choir, where, it is whispered, men gather on Midsummer’s night?
Or is it just a dream, the fancies of a woman who is…dying?
Suddenly I see her.
Out amidst the trees, still furled in night’s blue shadows. Her hair is gold like wheat, like ripe corn, and her robes are royal purple.
“Guinevere!” I cry joyfully, as my hands fall from the window ledge and I fall after, the young Eleanor leaving the old and running free, free across the dewdrops, seeking the legends she has always loved, seeking the truth, seeking eternity….
Epilogue. Sometime in the 2000’s
John Webb’s palatial mansion stands watching over the site of Amesbury Priory, stiff columns and fancy portico, wide, sun-catching windows opening on the day. Behind it, over the ornate grey bridge, the river still coils past the Chinese garden house; it floods in heavy rain, turning the fields below the hill known today as Vespasian’s Camp into a lake that shines like a silvered mirror.
The sacred spring, uncovered by recent archaeology, warm even when it is cold, flows dark and mysterious on its primeval course, giving up its secrets slowly. Stones lie within it, magic stones that turn a rich royal purple when exposed to air.
Magic? In our age of science, it is the algae Hildenbrandia rivularis, combined with warm water that causes the vivid colouring to form.
Under the green lawn, carefully trimmed, lie the foundations of monastic buildings. Of a church razed to ground level, a victim of the Reformation and then of ‘modern progress.’ Not one stone remains above ground, yet the bells of nearby St Mary and St Melor still ring out over the buried treasures below, soothing, counting the hours, as they always did, time out of mind. As they did in her day.
A Queen lies there, sleeping, wrapped in a green mantle of grass.
Undisturbed.
Lost.
Waiting, like King Arthur in the stories she loved, for a glorious return.
THE END
Historical Notes
Eleanor of Provence was not the easiest medieval royal to research. The time she lived in is well-covered by historians, but, like many women of the era, her personal life falls between the cracks; we see just a hazy ghost, the shadow of a woman. Her unpopularity in England was also a problem, as the views of the chroniclers were often biased against her; this was mainly because she
was ‘foreign’ and favoured her ‘foreign’ relatives.
What we do glean from the writings of the time is that she was well read and educated, enjoyed Arthurian legends and romances, and was genuinely beautiful, not just called so as a convention. She remained close to her sister Margaret/Marguerite all her life, and was a loving mother to her children, getting sweets for a sick son, insisting she stay with another while he lay ill in a monastery (horrifying the monks), worrying about a daughter married young and living far away in conditions she couldn’t see. She showed similar affection to her grandchildren. On the negative side, she liked to spend and favoured her own family too much; she was also very shrewd maintaining her own properties and knew how to get cash when needed—usually at someone else’s expense.
There are only two extant biographies of Eleanor (one of which is also about her three sisters) and even fiction seems to have passed her by—I can think of only two modern novels that cover her life (and they are not exclusively about her, but also the sisters), and one older novel, THE QUEEN FROM PROVENCE, written by that doyen of historical fiction, Jean Plaidy. She gets a mention in novels and non-fiction on both her husband Henry III, her son Edward I, and Simon de Montfort, of course…but nothing much more than that.
Therefore, establishing a clear timeline of Eleanor’s life was occasionally quite difficult. Several books disagreed with each other in various places. I have tried to keep to what is known but in several segments of the novel have combined events into a shorter time frame, such as the death of Eleanor’s sister Sanchia and the birth of her daughter Margaret’s baby.
Although the famous battles of Lewes and Evesham are covered, since I have written the story through Eleanor’s eyes, of course she could not ‘see it happen’ in person. It is covered instead through information gleaned from messengers. I didn’t want the story to get away too much and become just another retelling of those battles and their consequences for England; I wanted to show how Eleanor might have felt, with husband and son captive and then, beyond all hope, decisively victorious at Evesham.
MY FAIR LADY: A Story of Eleanor of Provence, Henry III's Lost Queen Page 26