By early in the eighteenth century, sketches and prints of the remaining crosses begin to appear, and a first attempt was made to restore the Hardingstone cross. By 1720, Good Queen Eleanor’s reputation was firmly established; the last publication of ‘The Lamentable Fall’ features a disclaimer from the printer excusing himself from publishing a version so much at variance with what was ‘known’ to be the truth.
The remaining crosses were gifts to the cult of the picturesque emerging in the eighteenth century, and romanticised renditions of the survivors appeared in some numbers. By the end of the eighteenth century, the crosses were considered important historic monuments and featured on the Society of Antiquaries’ Vetusta Monumenta of 1780 and 1791. This round-up of notable and endangered items involved scrupulous drawings of each, accompanied by renditions of notable points of detail; by the end of the century, Cruikshank was mocking antiquaries admiring the Hardingstone cross.
Some hint of the frantic attentions of those antiquarians can be traced in the history of the Hardingstone cross. The first recorded restoration was in 1713, when the justices of the county, ‘seeing its dilapidated condition’, made an order for its repair. A cross three feet high was erected on the summit (to replace that which had been lost before 1460), four sundials with mottoes were placed on the third stage, and on the west side of the bottom stage was placed a white marble tablet surmounted by the royal arms, with a long Latin inscription. More repairs were performed in 1762. A further extensive ‘restoration’ in 1840 under the direction of Edward Blore undid the ‘improvements’ of the 1713 restoration. However, he made his own additions: the picturesque broken shaft which is still visible today was substituted for the cross, and one of the gables was completely rebuilt.12
Meanwhile, in 1739 Eleanor appeared on the London stage again – in a very different guise to her earlier appearance. James Thomson wrote a play based on Baker’s saccharine and inaccurate version of the Acre myth. Edward and Eleonora: A Tragedy was intended to support the campaign of his patron Frederick Louis, George II’s son, to be given a greater role in public affairs. The by-product of Thomson’s intent was that Eleanor was explicitly presented as ‘a Princess distinguish’d for all the Virtues that render Greatness aimiable’ as well as her ‘endearing goodness’. For those who are wondering where the tragedy comes into the play, in this version the price for saving Edward’s life is for a willing victim (Eleanor of course) to suck the poison from the wound in certain knowledge that he or she will be poisoned instead. Those of delicate sensibilities will be relieved to hear that, his heart wrung by such devotion, the evil sultan supplies an antidote in the last few minutes of the play.
Appalling as the play sounds, it was considered perfectly reasonable at the time – at least by those on one side of the political argument. Better still, the play was a succès de scandale, achieving the accolade of being the second play banned from performance by the Lord Chamberlain under the Licensing Act of 1737 – and accordingly selling very well indeed in hard copy and being performed frequently in the latter years of the eighteenth century, when its political overtones were no longer audible. Its reflection can be seen in the repeated depictions of the Acre myth in the art of the late eighteenth century, with Blake and Kaufmann, among many others, giving us touching depictions of Eleanor’s heroics.13
It was against this background that, in 1842, Joseph Hunter, the Assistant Keeper of Records at the then Records Commission (precursor to the Public Records Office), wrote a scholarly article on Edward’s commemorations of Eleanor. He did highlight the falsity of the Acre myth, but simply repeated the character sketches of Eleanor provided by Walsingham, et al., which effectively served to authorise those accounts.
But of course the most prominent and influential author to deal with Eleanor’s life was Agnes Strickland, in her 1840–48 publication Lives of the Queens of England, a work which was hailed as a sine qua non for all those pretending to an accurate knowledge of English history. The huge success of this publication has made it the source material for depictions of medieval queens well into the twentieth century, and sometimes even to date.
In fact, the earlier queens’ lives (including that of Eleanor) were probably the work of Agnes’ sister Elizabeth. Her account, although occasionally referencing some of the medieval chronicles, is substantially based on the Tudor historians and later antiquarians and, putting it with the utmost of charity, evidences little evaluation of the materials available. A starting point in the now accepted vision of Eleanor the dutiful wife and mother having been adopted, what was added was only that material which was conformable with this picture. Thus, the picture of Eleanor is fleshed out with references to her literary interests, her wardrobe and her taste in items of personal refinement. Interestingly, references exist in some of the sources used (such as Botfield and Turner’s edition of Eleanor’s executors’ accounts) to the more hard-edged aspects of Eleanor’s personality, and yet these were ignored. Parsons concludes, and it is hard not to agree, that the case for deliberate suppression of this evidence is compelling. However, to be entirely fair to Strickland, Botfield and Turner themselves had introduced their work with a pen portrait which was still more emphatic in its assertion of Eleanor the sweet peacemaker. One suspects that the picture of the fertile and compliant consort queen was so very much in tune with Victorian sensibilities that it seemed a pity to ‘spoil’ it by painting a picture of a much more complex personality, particularly when the materials were very fragmentary.14
There was also a degree of synchronicity in the ‘setting’ of Eleanor’s image. At the same time as the Strickland image disseminated itself, in the wake of the fantastic success of the Lives of the Queens of England publications, the artistic style which characterised the Eleanor crosses entered again into vogue, bringing a new round of appreciation for the surviving monuments. Thus the use by Gilbert Scott of the crosses as models for the Martyr’s Memorial in Oxford and the Albert Memorial in London focussed attention back on Eleanor, as the inspiration for this medium of artistic and emotional expression. So too did the parallel between Queen Victoria’s overpowering grief for the premature loss of a beloved consort and that of Edward’s mourning for Eleanor.
This revival of interest in Eleanor and her crosses is what gave rise to the erection of the modern Charing cross, intended as a replica of the destroyed Charing/Whitehall cross in 1864. Ironically, although a fake, and put in place as an advertisement for a the newly built Charing Cross Hotel, it has served the purpose of the original perhaps better than all the others put together, through the accident of its location outside one of London’s busiest railway stations.
Illustrating the strength of the fashion for the crosses, in 1840 Jesse Watts Russell raised a replica of an Eleanor cross at his home town of Ilam in Staffordshire in commemoration of his wife Mary, and another was raised in 1869 in Walken in honour of Lady Ellesmere. There are other local crosses which are plainly inspired by the Eleanor cross model at Sledmere in East Yorkshire and Glastonbury.
Most recently, in 2008 a reinterpretation or homage to the lost Eleanor cross of Stamford was erected in the town’s sheep market as part of Stamford’s Gateway project. Based on the one verified survival from that cross, the cross is essentially a tapered spike or needle composed of bands carved with a repeating spiral pattern of roses which tapers into a bronze point.
As for Eleanor’s reputation, while the early part of the twentieth century saw her famed in Hutchinson’s History of the Nations as one of the ‘Famous Women in History’, along with Mary, Queen of Scots, and Lady Jane Grey, her fame soon began to fade. As the century progressed, scholarship around her land acquisitions, the inquest into their management and Pecham’s letters provoked a somewhat revisionist attitude in historians. So, recently, Lisa Hilton’s precis of Eleanor saw her as a horrible woman with a vile temper. Yet in the absence of a full work on Eleanor, most scholars have stopped somewhat short of wholesale condemnation, tending to echo the Duns
table annalist and simply categorise her as being somewhat rapacious in her land acquisitions. John Carmi Parsons, who set out to produce that full work, seems to have been troubled by the binary nature of the images which emerge from the details. He at once sees in the household record a gracious and generous spirit and also, from the business records, a person whose admirable resolve and tenacity displayed itself in some very unpleasant ways.
At the same time as scholars have grappled with the difficulties of the fragmentary nature of the sources, and the ambivalent picture which emerges, the accepted portrait has continued to exist in the popular mind. Of that portrait, one facet stands clear. Aided by the crosses, and most of all the replica at Charing Cross railway station, now boosted by a 100-metre mural depicting the cross’s construction on the Northern Line platform and a cocktail bar named after Eleanor, her story has become set in romance. If Eleanor exists at all in the consciousness of most people, she is seen as Edward’s chère reine. It is perhaps appropriate that, through all the twists and turns of Eleanor’s afterlives, the deep love of Edward for Eleanor is the one point at which the historical record and popular myth actually do now coincide.
Oddly enough, it may be that Eleanor, trained to regard her greatest glory as coming to her from her husband, would not object to this being her immortality. But surely, having considered Eleanor’s life fully, she deserves rather more than this. Certainly, she should at least be remembered as a queen who lived a most remarkable life. Eleanor of Aquitaine is often identified as having led an exceptional life, by dint of her travels and her captivity. But Eleanor of Castile had experience of far more countries, both to live in (Castile, Gascony, England, Wales, Sicily, the Holy Land) and to visit (Scotland, Aragon, France, Italy, Tunisia). She too faced a rather more real, though shorter, captivity and far greater want of resources. But Eleanor was so much more than even this allows. She should be celebrated for her truly remarkable abilities. She was a woman who was highly intellectual and who promoted intellectual and artistic endeavour; England would not see another queen of similar abilities until the Tudors sat on the throne. She was a woman who ran a massively demanding property business alongside discharging her job as both queen and mother of sixteen children. She was also a woman who advanced the cause of civilised life in the rather unpromising ground of medieval England. As the champion of decent bathrooms, forks, culinary variety, well-decorated rooms and exquisitely designed gardens, she was a woman much in tune with modern sensibilities.
But finally, Eleanor should now be given credit for her role as Edward’s consort/adviser. Those who have concluded that she had no political role were surely wide of the mark. Close examination of the record shows again and again the traces of her subtle touch in directing his political and even his military endeavours. While it would be wrong to suggest that she was in any sense the sole power behind the throne, or a dominating force over her husband, the material gives grounds to believe that she was a highly influential adviser to Edward throughout their marriage, that she helped to develop in him the abilities which he had and that she assisted him with much relevant knowledge as his career progressed. Indeed, one cannot help but wonder whether, without Eleanor, Edward would have become such an outstanding king that the accolade of greatness is often bestowed on him.
Eleanor thus deserves to be remembered in the modern world as a remarkable woman and an exceptional consort. Truly, she was a queen who fully deserved the unique and beautiful series of monuments which have kept her in the public eye in the many years in which almost all detailed memory of her life and abilities was buried.
1. The clearest picture we have of Eleanor; it characteristically invokes her heritage, in the repeated patterns of castles and lions on the cushion beneath her head.
2. Eleanor and Edward’s common ancestors, the formidable Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II, buried together at the Plantagenet family burial site of Fontevrault Abbey.
3. The tomb of Eleanor’s grandmother, Berengaria ‘the Great’. A key adviser to her son, also accompanying him to war and managing politically vital properties, she will have been held up to Eleanor as the perfect model of a Castilian princess.
4. The resting place of Eleanor’s great-grandparents Eleanor of England and her devoted husband Alfonso VIII of Castile at the Castilian necropolis of Las Huelgas Abbey. It was here that Eleanor and Edward married in 1254. The artistic link between this tomb and Eleanor’s is clear.
5. The court of Eleanor’s brother Alfonso X ‘the Learned’, depicted, probably accurately, as a luxurious but work-hard-play-hard environment.
6. The man who bestrode Eleanor’s childhood – her father, Ferdinand III, ‘El Santo’. The hero of the Reconquista, but also a wise man and a scholar, who believed it was a king’s duty to devote himself to the good of his country.
7. One of the wonders of the world – Eleanor was familiar with the fabulous beauties of such buildings as the Cathedral/Mosque of Cordoba, with its forest of pillars.
8. The famed Patio de Doncellas; stunning, but only a pale shadow of the beautiful gardens with which Eleanor grew up.
9. The unhappy king. Henry III lacked nearly all the attributes of a successful king.
10. Elegant, charming and determined to control her son Edward, Eleanor of Provence never entirely accepted Eleanor’s place in Edward’s life.
11. Richard of Cornwall, Henry’s younger brother. A talented diplomat and businessman, his clash with Alfonso made Eleanor’s first years in England miserable. He was, however, the person Eleanor trusted with her children when she departed on Crusade.
12. A man of exceptional abilities, Simon de Montfort brought England to civil war and held Eleanor captive for a year. His epochal death restored her to fortune, but cast a long shadow.
13. A product of troubled times – the Douce Apocalypse. Eleanor and her arms appear with Edward in the initial capital, proof that even with limited resources Eleanor could not resist commissioning books …
14. Or making jokes – here highlighting her least favourite people: Simon de Montfort (with his banner of a forked-tailed lion) fighting for the beast …
15. … and Gilbert of Gloucester, whose arms fly above the forces of darkness. The later unacceptability of this joke may explain why the book was never completed.
16. The castle and town of the Peak (Peveril Castle and Castleton) was the only part of Eleanor’s property empire to remain with her from the first dower to her death.
17. The Chateau of Mauléon. Acquired by Edward during a period of exile in the troubled years of the early 1260s, it was the location for his first venture into bastidisation. Eleanor and Edward would later return here with their son-in-law designate, the King of Aragon.
18. Eleanor commences her property business after the Barons’ War. This is a draft letter explaining her planning and may even be in her own hand ...
19. Europe’s foremost troublemaker – Charles of Anjou, younger brother of Louis IX. Diverting the Crusade to his own ends (with fatal results), holding Eleanor’s brother prisoner and employing the young Montforts were just some of his sins.
20. Part of the immense complex of the Knights Hospitallers, where Eleanor spent over a year and gave birth to Joan ‘of Acre’.
21. A thoughtful commission by Eleanor while at Acre, The Lord Edward’s Vegetius is the first translation into Anglo-Norman of this key military manual. It conveys a subtle hint that Edward (pictured here with Vegetius) would learn from studying it. And the Welsh wars were to prove that he did just that …
22. This lively sea battle is possibly intended as a depiction of Hugh of Cyprus’ rout of Sultan Baibars’ fleet, and is characteristic of the books which Eleanor commissioned.
23. The Acre myth, at its most romantic, thanks to William Blake. There are plenty of other versions of the scene – some even more ridiculous …
24. These sketches in the Cotton Manuscript are not the most flattering depictions, but they are plainly intended to offer so
me form of resemblance.
25. These figures at Lincoln, however, though often referred to, are no safe guide. They have been restored extensively.
26. The hunting lady with dogs in the Alphonso Psalter – a commission by Eleanor for her son Alphonso – may well have been intended as a depiction of Eleanor. She shares face and eye shape with both the tomb effigy and the Cotton depictions.
27. A marvellous testament to the tight ship Eleanor ran in business, this picture of one of her couriers explains their reputation for expedition. Note not only the speed, but also the use of Eleanor’s Castilian arms.
28. In contrast with earlier queens, Eleanor emphasised her power on her seal. Instead of the accepted floriated sceptre and an orb with peaceful dove, she adopts a position of power with a conventional sceptre, and the background is larded with references to her heritage. She is herself, not ‘a queen’.
Eleanor of Castile: The Shadow Queen Page 54
