by Lisa Hilton
Eleanor was close to both her elder daughters, Margaret and Beatrice. When, in 1251, Margaret, aged eleven, had been married to Alexander III of Scotland, the tension between the two countries made visiting difficult. In 1252 Henry asked that Margaret might be permitted to come to the English court, but his request was denied, so in 1255 Eleanor sent an envoy, Reginald of Bath, to investigate her daughter’s situation and report back. Reginald was allegedly poisoned by the Scots after advising that Margaret was miserable, and Eleanor and Henry immediately set off for Scotland, accompanied by troops. Margaret and Eleanor were able to spend time together at Wark in Northumberland, and the next year she and her husband came to London and Woodstock. In 1260, Margaret was at Windsor, with Eleanor in attendance, for the birth of a grandchild. Eleanor was considerate towards Margaret’s servants in Scotland, Matilda Cantilupe and Geoffrey de Langley, who received New Year gifts of dishes and a goblet.
Beatrice, as Duchess of Brittany, was even further away than Margaret, but evidently trusted her mother: she sent some of her children to live with Eleanor while she was away on crusade with her husband. Eleanor had to endure the grief of outliving both her surviving daughters, who died within a month of one another in 1275. Beatrice’s request to be buried in the Franciscan convent in London, a place Eleanor favoured and where her own heart was placed after her death, suggests that they enjoyed a religious connection which may have given Eleanor some consolation. A surviving book of hours, probably presented to Beatrice by Eleanor on her marriage, also points to a spiritual affinity. Edmund’s first wife, Aveline, too, died early, after giving birth to twins in 1274.
Eleanor took comfort in her closeness to her brood of grandchildren after the loss of her daughters. Edward and Eleanor had fourteen children in total, though many of them died young. After the demise in 1272 of Richard of Cornwall, who had been left in loco parentis while they were away on crusade, their daughter Eleanor and son Henry lived with their grandmother, and thereafter Eleanor continued to stay with her for long visits when she was not travelling with her father and mother. Henry’s death in the sad year of 1274 was also attended by Eleanor of Provence, and, as John Carmi Parsons remarks, ‘it was perhaps better that the dying boy … was supported by the grandmother he knew intimately, not the mother he had met for the first time in his memory only some ten weeks earlier’.6 Eleanor founded a Dominican priory at Guildford in Henry’s memory.
The two Eleanors were united in their concerns for the children’s welfare and, one suspects, in deploring the English climate: a letter from the elder to the younger in 1290 warns of the dangers of a long visit to the north. They went on a pilgrimage together to St Albans in 1257, attended the consecration of Salisbury Cathedral in 1258 and held court together at Mortlake in 1259. The most notable instance of the two women working together was their successful prevention of an early marriage for Edward’s eldest daughter. Both women had been married in their early teens, and their collaboration here suggests they had discussed their experiences intimately. Perhaps Eleanor of Provence took pains to avoid causing the kind of difficulties mothers-in-law could create after hearing about the experiences of her sister Marguerite of France with the overbearing Blanche of Castile. And for her part, Eleanor of Castile was a support to her motherin-law when she herself became Queen in 1272.
When Henry III died at Westminster that November, Eleanor of Provence found herself suddenly isolated. Sanchia had died in 1261, Peter of Savoy in 1268, her mother and Boniface were also dead and all her children were abroad. Though Prince Edward’s succession passed uncontested, the grievances of the past still lingered. The King had passed away to the sounds of riots outside his palace. He was buried on 20 November, after which Eleanor travelled to Windsor to join her grandchildren Eleanor, Henry and John of Brittany. Edward and the new Queen joined her there when they returned to England in December.
For the next decade, Eleanor lived mainly on her dower properties at Guildford, Marlborough and Ludgershall, though she also spent time at Clarendon, Westminster and Windsor. By the mid-1280s, now in her early sixties, she was considering a retreat to the cloister. Curiously, for one who had had such a cold and troubled relationship with the country of which she had been queen for nearly forty years, Eleanor chose to spend her last years in England. Her choice of retreat was Amesbury, a daughter house of Fontevrault, though Fontevrault itself would have seemed a more obvious destination. Perhaps Eleanor’s determination to die in England was a gesture of reconciliation.
Like Berengaria of Navarre, Eleanor changed her title when she entered the convent, styling herself ‘a humble nun of the order of Fontevrault of the convent of Amesbury’, but typically, she did not choose to retire altogether humbly. Fifty-seven oaks were used in making the improvements to Amesbury she considered essential for her arrival, and she never became a fully professed nun, choosing to retain both her wealth and a degree of influence in the outside world. Although she entered the monastery in July 1286, she was still exchanging letters with her daughter-in-law that year about the murage rights of Southampton, which had been passed on in dower to Eleanor of Castile. She also maintained a correspondence with Edward and kept a sharp eye on her lands and business. The fact that she still had one foot firmly planted in the world gave rise to a degree of mockery, yet it was her removal to Amesbury that led to the only known conflict with Eleanor of Castile. Beatrice’s daughter Eleanor of Brittany took the veil there in March 1285, eventually rising to become abbess of Fontevrault itself, and while her vocation may well have been genuine, this was not the case with Edward’s little daughter Mary, who was enclosed at Amesbury at the age of six in August the same year. Eleanor of Castile objected to the move, probably because Mary was too young to know her own mind, but Eleanor was selfishly bent upon keeping her granddaughter with her. (Mary showed that her vocation was not all it might have been when, after her grandmother’s death, she took to visiting her father’s court and developed a taste for extravagant gambling. There were also slanderous rumours of a liaison with the Earl of Surrey, her nephew by marriage.)
Eleanor of Provence died at Amesbury on 24 June 1291, and was buried there on 8 September with Edward, Edmund and a large gathering of magnates and clergy in attendance. The Westminster Chronicle described her as ‘Generosa et religiosa virago’, a rare accolade for a woman. Eleanor had not been popular, but she was respected. Her informal role in government had been essential during the Montfort revolution and her position had been affirmed internationally even as De Montfort was issuing writs in Henry’s name, as a powerful counter-influence to the depleted command of her imprisoned husband and son. Eleanor’s resourcefulness, intellligence and above all her conviction of her own authority emphasised the implicit power of English queenship. After the uneven career of Eleanor of Aquitaine and the almost total lack of influence of Berengaria of Navarre and Isabelle of Angoulême, Eleanor of Provence re-established the role of consort on its great Anglo-Norman model. Her financial acuity did not make her lovable, but the thousands of pounds she disbursed in ‘secret gifts and private alms’7 had created a discreet diplomatic network on which she drew in crisis. Her snobbery and lack of sympathy for her husband’s magnates contributed directly to a pivotal struggle for power between lords and crown, but it was her perspicacity and energy that also helped to solve it. At the end of her life, despite its many defeats and disappointments, Eleanor had made her peace with the English. The differences between the posthumous reputations of Eleanor and her daughter-in-law exemplify the way in which monarchs could manipulate posterity, to the extent that Eleanor of Castile is the better remembered of the two. Yet it was the first of three southern princesses who was the greater English queen.
CHAPTER 9
ELEANOR OF CASTILE
‘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 b
y 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 motherin-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 Beam’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 LusignanSavoyard 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 motherin-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 Edm
und 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.