Following the ceremony, a sumptuous feast took place in Westminster Palace. According to a contemporary chronicler, the feast was attended by thousands of well-wishers. In addition to the large party who had travelled from abroad, the bride’s brother, six-year-old future king Edward of Caernarfon, was said to have led a train of eighty knights dressed in armour; Margaret’s uncle, the Earl of Cornwall, was accompanied by a hundred knights, and sixty ladies. Another one hundred and three knights and sixty ladies were said to have accompanied Joanna’s husband, Earl Gilbert. The countess herself was not far away, in residence at Clerkenwell, but her presence at Margaret’s wedding is unrecorded. If Bartholomew can be trusted, Joanna was one of the few aristocrats in England to miss the event – in addition to the hundreds listed above, dozens of knights each accompanied the leading earls, while over seven hundred other knights and ladies, and more than a thousand Londoners, all dressed in their richest attire, were said to have made up the party.11
There were so many revellers that the party spilled out from the royal palace, dancing and carousing in the surrounding streets. The guests were entertained by hundreds of performers who had travelled from across Europe, such as Calot Jean, a Sicilian dwarf who was regularly employed as the fool of the Count of Artois – he arrived with the Brabaçon delegation and earned forty shillings as a payment from the king. In all, 426 minstrels and musicians – including harpers, trumpeters, lutenists, and fiddlers – performed for a share of one hundred pounds, provided by the bridegroom and distributed the morning after the wedding by the king’s harper. To judge by the fourteen days it took four young pages to collect the candles required for the event, the festivities must have continued well into the early hours. Unsurprisingly given their scale, the celebrations grew raucous – the king himself, perhaps recalling the table damaged by the Sheriff of London at Joanna’s wedding feast, became so incensed with the unruly behaviour of a young squire, that he beat him with a stick.12
The splendour and pomp surrounding this dynastic union formed an occasion people would remember, an event that would be talked about across Europe. It was staged to impress the aristocracy of England on whose loyalty King Edward depended, the Brabaçon nobility into which his daughter was marrying, and the wider group of European rulers whose emissaries would have borne witness to the magnificence on display. This was the reason behind the jewels and glittering robes, the feast that fed thousands, and the hundreds of assembled knights: to declare Edward’s wealth and England’s sophistication to his subjects and princely peers. The family of the bridegroom, too, needed to present themselves splendidly to avoid seeming unrefined by comparison – which accounts for the vast number of entertainers they hired, the huge delegation that would have cost a fortune to transport, and the stylish-but-impractical furs in July. Weddings like Margaret’s represented investments in the expansion of English economic and political influence, as well as opportunities for European nobles to come together and perform their shared culture. In doing so, they played an important role in promoting English cultural hegemony and maintaining peace between neighbouring nations.
Rumours of the wedding’s magnificence spread throughout England and were considered sufficiently fascinating by a monk from the cathedral priory at Norwich that he devoted a lengthy section of his chronicle to describing the wedding. Bartholomew had not been as enthralled with Joanna’s smaller wedding two months before, which is recorded very plainly, noting only that ‘the Earl of Gloucester took Lady Joanna, daughter of the king, as his wife, and the wedding was celebrated near parliament in London after Easter’.13
Joanna’s absence from all the splendour is surprising. Her reason for missing her sister’s wedding can only be surmised, but as she was staying nearby in Clerkenwell, and as her husband participated in the event with such a large retinue, she could not claim the excuse of being too far away to travel. Recalling how recently she had thrown a tantrum on realizing that Margaret’s household had two more pages than her own, it is difficult to avoid the impression that the courtly magnificence of her younger sister’s wedding, compared to the relative quiet of her own, might have chafed at the new countess, forcing her to realize her little sister now outranked her, and leaving her unable to bear taking part in the celebrations.
VII
Three Deaths
1290–1
CLIPSTONE, AMESBURY
In late summer 1290, the newly married Margaret, together with her husband, her parents, and her sister Eleanora, left London and headed north-east through Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire, and into Lincolnshire. While on her travels Margaret seems to have embraced the same new-found freedoms and independence from her parents that Joanna had enjoyed shortly after her marriage. Like many fifteen-year-olds, Margaret struggled to get out of bed early – and, for her, freedom meant skipping morning Masses, much to the horror of her father. By 8 September, the party had travelled as far as the manor of Torpel, south of Stamford, where Margaret and Jan issued their first charter as a married couple, assigning the men who would look after her dower estate. Jan’s seal is affixed to the letter, but Margaret seems not yet to have had a seal of her own and instead used her mother’s. Soon after they sealed the charter, Jan departed for an extended visit back to Brabant, where he was to learn about statecraft from his father, their names appearing side-by-side on papers granting particular privileges to communities within their duchy.1
Meanwhile, Margaret and Eleanora continued onwards with their parents, travelling in a pattern that would have felt very familiar from their many years of itinerant courtly living. From Torpel they headed west towards Nottingham and then north to Clipstone. The residence there was a favourite of the royal family in the thirteenth century; it was a sprawling palace in the middle of a deer park dotted with immense oaks near the centre of Sherwood Forest, where ancient laws reserved ‘beasts of the chase’ for pursuit by the king. The palace had been predominantly built in the late twelfth century by Henry II; inside a gate were a collection of chapels, halls, and kitchens, with separate chambers for the king and queen, as well as lodgings for the many retainers who shared the English royal family’s thirst for the hunt. In 1282, Edward had added an immense stable block capable of housing two hundred horses, probably to accommodate a breeding programme for hunters – the hardy-yet-agile horses used in stag and fox hunting.2
The family arrived at Clipstone in mid-September, whereupon the king sent a message to London, summoning his men northwards to Clipstone for the annual Parliament at the end of October. Near the end of September, the royal party were off again, looping into Derbyshire and Cheshire as far as Macclesfield then back along the southern perimeter of the Peak over the course of about three weeks. Along the way, they checked on the queen’s properties, and hunted stags in the Peak Forest. It is possible that the king and queen had planned to travel to Scotland to meet Prince Edward’s newly betrothed, Margaret, the ‘Maid of Norway’, a princess who, at seven years old, was also the rightful Queen of Scotland through her mother’s line. However, a close examination of the distances travelled each day throughout the autumn reveals a steady decline in their daily progress and this, together with the king’s decision to call Parliament to Clipstone, suggests that Eleanor’s worsening health may have halted their travel. The queen had throughout her life coped robustly with constant long journeys, but she was now rapidly declining and Edward may have realized he could neither continue onward nor make it back to Westminster without leaving Eleanor behind. Unwilling to leave his wife in the circumstances, the king instead summoned his men to him.3
The Parliament at Clipstone was the first since Edward had expelled the Jewish population of England during the previous July. This expulsion had been years in the making, with the king taxing the Jewish population of the country so heavily and regularly (they were exempt from the protections of Magna Carta) that, by 1290, there was little left to tax. The king confiscated and sold their properties (realizing more than two
thousand pounds of profit), claimed the right to collect all debts owing to them (minus interest, to avoid charges of usury), and issued a proclamation ordering the whole Jewish population to leave the country. In addition to the economic benefit he gained from confiscating Jewish property, Edward probably knew the gesture would prove popular, since almost everyone owed money to Jewish lenders, who were the only people able to lend, and all interest was wiped clean. By late October, the mood among the nobles and leading churchmen had turned from celebration to religious duty, and the king once again entertained talks of joining an expedition to bolster the city of Acre from an invading Muslim army from Egypt.4
The royal households were at that time jostling for space at Clipstone with the parliamentary representatives who had travelled north and were accommodated wherever rooms might be found in the villages around the king’s house, their humble cart horses and sumpter mules crammed into the stables of the royal stud. And not far behind them came Joanna, the Countess of Gloucester and Hertford, accompanied by a single groom. Her journey from Clerkenwell could not have been pleasant. She travelled through the wet and cold English late autumn on horseback, on roads even more worn than was usual for that time of year by the recent tread of horses carrying the parliamentary knights. Joanna’s fatigue and discomfort at confronting the elements, along with the frequent jolts of travelling on horseback, would have exacerbated any sickness she felt from being nearly two months pregnant. Still, she may have reasoned that the proposed journey – even at an inhospitable time of year – was unlikely to be as dramatic as the crusade to save Acre that she and her husband had briefly pledged to make back in the summer. Nor would it be as uncomfortable as those journeys undertaken by her own mother, who had travelled on her own crusade across Europe to the Holy Land and back, and through battle-scarred landscapes during her many pregnancies. In any event, she had been summoned to Clipstone, and it was not a request she could fail to answer.5
Trailing the main royal party northward was the nursery household of Elizabeth and Edward, brought from Langley. Their grandmother had written from Amesbury to express her unease with the idea of the young children travelling north so late in the year: ‘When we were there, we could not avoid being ill, on account of the bad climate. We pray you therefore, deign to provide some place in the south, where [they] can have a good and temperate climate, and dwell there while you visit the north.’ Her anxiety went unheeded, and the children’s household was already at Clipstone when Joanna arrived. Only Mary’s presence is unrecorded; perhaps her grandmother’s concerns about children travelling during poor weather were allowed in the case of the young nun to overrule her mother’s desire to see the child. On arrival at Clipstone, Joanna found most members of her immediate family, as well as an enormous assembly of knights and magnates.6
The Queen’s Chamber at Clipstone looked out on the deer park through delicately arched windows, but the view was normally blocked from the inside, with the light and cold kept at bay. Eleanor always installed heavy tapestries in her rooms, similar to those that had lined the walls and the floors of the Spanish palaces of her childhood – this small concession to the comforts of home marked her out as foreign to the English observers like the chronicler Matthew Paris, who could not fathom the absurdity of putting a carpet on the floor. As she became increasingly weak, she called her children to her so that she could give them some of her favourite personal effects to remember her by; among them was a great crown studded with rubies, emeralds, and pearls that she bequeathed to Elizabeth, who all her life would remember her mother in association with this fabulous gift.7
Prince Edward was only six and, as her health failed, Eleanor must have worried that he would share the fate of his brothers John, Henry, and Alphonso, and end his life in an early grave rather than on the throne. She may have wondered whether one of his elder sisters would wear the crown instead: Eleanora, the prince’s heir, now in her third decade and still husbandless, or the tempestuous Countess Joanna, who was possibly even then carrying a future king inside her belly. Margaret’s path seemed to mirror her own most closely – both women married princes who were destined to rule, both had known their spouses from early adolescence, and both pairs of married couples were close in age, unlike the nearly thirty years that separated Joanna and her husband – and this knowledge may have brought comfort to a mother hoping her daughter might enjoy as happy a union as she had. Very little can be said of Eleanor’s relationship with Elizabeth, given the extremely limited time they spent together after Elizabeth’s first years, but Eleanor’s gift-giving suggests a desire to instil in her youngest daughter a sense of the role she would be expected to play in the pageantry of courtly culture.
The family remained together until Parliament dispersed on 13 November. The next day, the youngest children left Clipstone and began the return trip to Langley, while Joanna most likely headed back to Clerkenwell. Their parents, probably accompanied by Eleanora and Margaret, made for Lincoln. It was a journey that under normal travelling conditions could be easily accomplished in one day. But the queen never made it that far; her health finally failed on the journey from Clipstone, and she came to a stop in the small village of Harby, just five miles short of Lincoln. Medicines were frantically procured, but nothing seemed to slow the queen’s decline. On the evening of 28 November, in a manor house owned by a relative of one of her courtiers, Eleanor of Castile died at the age of forty-nine, her husband of nearly four decades by her side, with two of their five daughters present or close by. The disarray within the royal household was so great that, for several days before and several days after the queen’s death, it ceased to function as a machine of statecraft – letters were sent without being copied into official registers, and the king refused to deal with the usual daily paperwork of governing. For Eleanora and Margaret, the grief at their mother’s death can only have been compounded by witnessing their all-powerful father struggling to cope with the enormity of his loss.
The programme of commemoration that Edward put in place following Eleanor’s death is among the most extraordinary in European history, and illustrates both medieval attitudes to death and memory, and also the important political role that royal women could play even after their deaths. The manner and aftermath of the queen’s passing would have instructed her daughters about the roles they were expected to embody. Immediately following her death, the queen’s body completed the remaining five miles of its journey to Lincoln, where it was embalmed. The inner organs were removed and the body was wrapped in linen and preserved against rapid decay with the help of sweet-smelling spices, herbs, and precious resins imported from the east. This process, which is now more commonly associated with ancient Egypt than with medieval England, was fairly common among the aristocracy, before Pope Boniface VIII issued a declaration against the practice in 1299. By removing the inner organs from the body, they might be buried in a separate place from the body, thus increasing the number of prayers that could be elicited from priests and the faithful viewing a tomb. As with the separate burial of little Henry’s heart at the Franciscan friary in Guildford, the extra prayers were thought to speed the journey of the soul through the sufferings of purgatory to the bliss of heaven. This practice of bodily division and separate burial also enabled high status individuals like Eleanor of Castile to make personal choices about their ultimate resting place while also fulfilling their dynastic responsibilities.8
After Eleanor’s internal organs, except her heart, were buried in the Lady Chapel at Lincoln Cathedral, her body and heart were then taken south. The funeral cortege was led by the king, but probably also included Eleanora and Margaret. It proceeded at a stately pace along a somewhat circuitous route seemingly designed to take in sites associated with the queen, making twelve overnight stops – at Grantham, Stamford, Geddington, Hardingstone, Stony Stratford, Woburn, Dunstable, St Albans, Waltham, Westcheap, and Charing – on the way to Westminster Abbey. The journey provided ample opportunities for members of
the public to witness the astonishing majesty of the regal party, which may have been joined by Elizabeth and Prince Edward at St Albans, close to Langley, and by Joanna at Westcheap (now Cheapside, in London). After nearly two weeks, the mourners’ parade arrived at Westminster where, on 17 December, in a magnificent funeral ceremony at which her husband, children, and most of the nobility of England were present, the queen’s body was solemnly laid to rest in a temporary grave near the high altar. A separate ceremony followed in which her heart – now joined with that of her beloved son Alphonso – was interred in the now-lost priory church of the Dominicans near modern-day Blackfriars Station in London. These ceremonies inaugurated a programme of remembrance that lasted years and took in locations across England: within six months of her death, more than forty-seven thousand Masses had been sung for the queen’s soul, episcopal indulgences (or exemptions from penance) and special alms were promised to those who prayed for her; at Bath, Coventry, and St Albans, priests were employed to pray continuously on her behalf.
At each of the three burial sites, sumptuous monuments were constructed in the years immediately following Eleanor’s death. Only one, at Westminster, survives intact: the gilded bronze life-size effigy of the queen, posed as she appeared on her seal, sculpted by the London goldsmith William Torel and placed atop a polished marble tomb chest. The depiction of Eleanor grants her all the graces of idealized medieval beauty – a high forehead, a long neck, and delicate features – but these details would not have been readily visible from ground level by the scores of pilgrims who filed around the tomb as they circled close to the nearby shrine of the greatest English royal saint, Edward the Confessor. Above all else, Eleanor’s Westminster monument projected the idea of wealth and powerful connection: the copious deployment of images of castles and lions reminded viewers of the queen’s association with the royal Spanish houses of Castile and Leon; the French inscription recalled her descent from a king and a countess; the golden effigy required the purchase and melting down of 476 gold florins, the solid gold coins minted in Florence that served as a nearly universal high-level currency in the later medieval period. A copy of this memorial was installed at Lincoln, exporting the grandeur of its metropolitan craftsmanship to audiences far from London – its success as a symbol of royal power may be inferred from its destruction by Oliver Cromwell’s men following the Siege of Lincoln over three centuries later. The final memorial, at Blackfriars, was lost when the priory church was dismantled following the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the mid-sixteenth century; there, accessible only to members of the Dominican order, the double heart burial of Eleanor and Alphonso was commemorated by a memorial featuring devotional paintings and the figure of an angel, wholly different to the representation of royalty in the public cathedrals at Westminster and Lincoln.
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