Queens of the crusades, p.38
Queens of the Crusades, page 38
In 1846, King Louis-Philippe had the effigies brought to Versailles to be restored and repainted; they were taken back to Fontevraud in 1849. In 1866, after the British government had returned Napoleon Bonaparte’s remains to France, the Emperor Napoleon III offered to send the Plantagenet effigies to Westminster Abbey. Queen Victoria initially accepted, then declined in the face of legal opposition in France.
In 1963, the prison closed, and the abbey was restored to something of its former glory, with the four tombs being placed in the south transept of the church. In the 1990s, they were moved to the choir, and remain there today. After more than 800 years, the effigies are remarkably well preserved.
* * *
—
On November 20, at Marmoutier, Henry and Alienor received news of their son’s marriage. Henry hosted a lavish feast in the young couple’s honor, which cost him a fortune. His barons were distinctly unimpressed and strongly censured him for his extravagance, but Henry was not listening.
In November, he and Alienor visited Pontigny Abbey and offered at the tomb of Archbishop Edmund Rich, who had officiated at their wedding and had been canonized in 1246. Later that month, they were at Chartres Cathedral, which afforded Henry inspiration for the design of Westminster Abbey. At Chartres, the royal couple met up with King Louis, who gave them a warm welcome. He had arranged a family reunion, bringing his wife, Marguerite, the Countess of Provence and her youngest daughter, Beatrice, Countess of Anjou, “and they all took great pleasure and comfort in greeting and talking to each other.”7 Marguerite gave Henry a basin of mother-of-pearl shaped like a peacock and inlaid with gold, silver and sapphires.
Early in December, the royal party were all together at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, whence they traveled in their own chariots to Paris. The two queens, Eleanor and Marguerite, wore robes trimmed with ermine. Their great procession, which included a thousand richly dressed knights on fine horses, was welcomed on December 9 by church bells and garlanded students singing and dancing. Louis had offered Henry the use of his palace of the Louvre or any other royal residence, but Henry chose the Old Temple, built by the Knights Templar in the twelfth century, because it was large enough to house his retinue, which appeared to the people to resemble an army.
In Paris, the four sisters were reunited when Sanchia, Countess of Cornwall, arrived. That there was rivalry between them is evident from Matthew Paris’s description of Sanchia hastening to Paris with “a great and noble retinue, lest her condition should appear inferior to that of her sisters. They joined forces with mutual greetings, familiar conversation, congratulations and consoling each other. Their mother, the Countess Beatrice of Provence, was also present, an older Niobe, but extremely beautiful, gazing with fond pride upon her children. No mother in all womankind had so much reason to be proud and happy in fair and exalted offspring as she in her daughters.”8 Observing the family reunion, Louis said to Henry, “Have we not married two sisters, and our brothers the other two? All that shall be born of them, sons and daughters, shall be like brothers and sisters.”9 Indeed, it was largely thanks to these close family connections that there would be peace between England and France for the next four decades.
Henry and Alienor stayed in Paris for eight days. On the second day, he hosted a meal of meat, fish and wine for the poor people of the city. “Crowds assembled, rushing in masses and vying with one another in their endeavours to see the King of England, and his fame was carried to the skies by the French, on account of his munificent presents, his hospitality during that day, his bountiful almsgiving and select retinue, and because the King of France had married one sister and he, the King of England, another.”10
On the third night, Henry played host to Louis, Marguerite and numerous other royal and noble guests at what was called “the feast of kings” because so many crowned heads were present. It was held in the great hall of the Old Temple and was said to outrival the feasts of King Arthur and Charlemagne. Henry insisted that Louis sit in the seat of honor at the center of the high table. It was later alleged that Marguerite, Alienor and Sanchia made Beatrice sit on a stool at their feet, a petty revenge for her having inherited Provence.
Affording eight days of talks between the two kings, this visit went a long way toward calming the political tensions between England and France. One of the benefits was the forging of a friendship between Henry and Louis, and also between Henry and Marguerite, which comes across in the letters they sent each other right up until his death. Afterward, Marguerite continued to exchange letters with her nephew, Edward.
During Henry’s visit to Paris, Louis took him to see many of the city’s churches and the glorious Sainte-Chapelle; according to a poem of the time, Henry so wanted the chapel that he would readily have put it in a cart and carried it away. Instead, it offered further inspiration for the building of Westminster Abbey.
Henry and Alienor’s ship docked at Dover on December 27. There was resentment in England at their long sojourn in France, which was seen as an excessively prolonged pleasure trip, and grumbles at the cost of the lavish alms Henry and Alienor had distributed to the poor of Paris. It was Alienor who got most of the blame. The royal couple only made things worse when, after their state entry into London on January 27, 1255, they demanded a gift of £100 (£73,000) from the city fathers. On top of this, they fined the people of London 3,000 marks (£1,470,000) for letting a murderer escape from Newgate, and demanded that they pay 4d. (£12) a day for food for a white bear that Henry kept in the Tower menagerie. These were all measures to satisfy the creditors who were hounding the King and Queen. The cost of the Gascon campaign had been high, and the royal couple had been more than ordinarily extravagant while visiting France.
* * *
—
On, or shortly before, May 29, 1255, at Bordeaux, after just seven months of marriage, thirteen-year-old Eleanor of Castile bore a daughter who was at least two months premature and who died that day. Her existence is known only from an entry in Edward I’s wardrobe accounts for May 29, 1287, which records that Eleanor offered a gold cloth to the church of the Dominican friars at Bordeaux to mark the anniversary of the death of her daughter. No other child of hers is known to have died on that date or been buried in Bordeaux. Given her extreme youth, the fact that she did not bear another child for at least five years, and that she thereafter conceived regularly, it is clear that Edward avoided imperiling her and the Castilian alliance by risking another pregnancy while she was still so young.
* * *
—
The hospital of St. Katherine by the Tower had been founded around 1148 by Matilda of Boulogne, the wife of King Stephen. She had placed it in the perpetual custody of the priory of the Holy Trinity in Aldgate, founded by Henry I’s consort, Matilda of Scotland. Each succeeding queen, including Alienor, had become a patron of the hospital. In 1253, without informing her, the Prior of Holy Trinity had installed one of his own canons as master to curb the drinking and quarreling among the inmates. They appealed to the Queen, who complained to the Bishop of London. Faced with such formidable opposition, the Prior had conceded defeat, but his canons, asserting that Alienor was the King’s “night bird” who exercised undue influence on him in bed, complained to the Pope, who censured her. In 1255, she tried to wrest custody of the hospital from the priory, but the court of the Exchequer ruled that the priory had established its claim.
In 1257, Alienor would again enlist the support of the Bishop of London, who removed the master appointed by the canons and ordered the Prior of Holy Trinity to refrain henceforth from interfering in the affairs of the hospital. The dispute would drag on until 1261, when the Prior made a formal surrender of the hospital to the Queen. In 1273, Alienor refounded the decayed hospital with a new charter of endowment, providing for a master, three brethren to act as chaplains, three sisters, ten poor beadswomen and six poor clerks. Her foundation still survives today, bequeathed to all her queenly successors down to Elizabeth II.
Henry III had enlarged the nearby Tower of London, building a curtain wall with defensive towers. In 1240, he had had the keep painted white, after which it was known as “the White Tower.” He improved the Norman royal lodgings and built the aisled King’s Hall, and the Wakefield and Lanthorne towers to provide private apartments for himself and Alienor. In 1239, her chamber was wainscoted and painted white with a design of roses of Provence and trompe l’oeil pointing imitating decorative stonework.
* * *
—
In the late summer of 1255, Henry and Alienor had concerns about two of their daughters. In August, the infant Katherine was not with her siblings at Windsor, but living at Swallowfield, Berkshire, with the kid she had been given as a pet. It is likely that she was being brought up separately because she needed special care. In 1257, Matthew Paris described her as “speechless and helpless, but very beautiful in appearance,” suggesting that she was dumb and disabled in other ways.
It has been credibly suggested that Katherine developed a rare genetic disorder called Rett syndrome, which affects about one in 12,000 girls. She would have grown normally for at least six months before her development slowed down and she began to regress, losing her speech and motor function. In the final stage of the illness, she may have suffered muscle weakness and become unable to walk and totally dependent. The syndrome is caused by a mutant gene and is not inherited or passed down to future generations.
Henry and Alienor were also disturbed by reports that, in Scotland, the young King and Queen were being treated as pawns by the Earl of Menteith and the Justiciar, who were rivals for the regency, and that Menteith was keeping them captive in Edinburgh Castle, subject to the tyrannical guardianship of Robert de Ros.
An anxious Alienor sent the renowned Reginald of Bath, her physician, to Scotland to discover the true situation. He found fifteen-year-old Margaret pale, agitated, full of complaints and anxious at being “forbidden the comfort of mutual embraces” with her husband. It was afterward said that, when Reginald expressed his indignation, he was poisoned, but he was actually dying of tuberculosis. Before he succumbed to it on the way south, he wrote to the King stating that Margaret was being “unfaithfully and inhumanely treated by those unworthy Scots.”11
Henry did not hesitate. He marched north at the head of an army, taking Alienor with him, condemning what he termed treason and vowing to aid Alexander, whom Alienor “loved like an adoptive son.”12 By the time they reached the castle at Wark-on-Tweed, Northumberland, Alienor was so alarmed for her daughter that she fell ill and there were fears for her life. Henry sent envoys to Edinburgh, who spoke with the young Queen and established that her complaints were genuine, whereupon Ros was dismissed and punished. At Henry’s demand, Margaret and Alexander visited him and Alienor at Wark. When they arrived, the King and Queen saw that their daughter had grown into a young woman of great beauty and humility. Amicable talks took place and, a day later, when Alexander was taken to Roxburgh, Margaret was allowed to stay with her parents.
Henry again sent representatives to Scotland to resolve the situation and, at length, Alexander was freed, a new council of regency was established and English influence in Scotland was restored. On September 20, Henry wrote to the young King: “The Queen of Scotland is to remain with the sick Queen, her mother, his beloved consort, at Wark Castle, until the Queen is sufficiently recovered to be capable of travelling southward.” Alexander’s council agreed that Margaret might accompany Alienor, on condition that she be returned to him when her mother was better. On Alienor’s recovery, Margaret returned to Scotland. The King and Queen visited her and Alexander at Roxburgh, then rode south to London, visiting religious houses on the way and, according to Matthew Paris, fleecing them.
3
“The Disseminator of All the Discord”
In the autumn of 1255, Eleanor of Castile traveled to England, leaving the Lord Edward in Gascony. “The King of England gave orders that his eldest son’s wife should be received with the utmost honour and respect, especially in London, with processions, illuminations, bells, singing and every conceivable demonstration of ceremonial rejoicing.”1 But the welcome the King intended was marred before Eleanor ever set foot in England by the behavior of her half-brother, Sanchez, Bishop-elect of Toledo, who had preceded her to negotiate a marriage between one of his brothers and Henry’s daughter Beatrice, a plan that came to nothing. In a land seething against rapacious foreigners, the haughty and extravagant Sanchez and his party had flung their weight about and made themselves unpopular. Therefore, when Eleanor landed at Dover “with great pomp and circumstance” around October 9, bringing with her a huge retinue of Castilians, she was “looked upon with suspicion by all England.”2 It was variously rumored that these foreigners would be the latest in the procession of royal parasites, that they intended to overrun and seize the realm, or that they would press the King to support the war to liberate the Spanish kingdoms from the Moors and drain England dry. According to Matthew Paris, they were all adulterers, fornicators and murderers.
At Dover, Eleanor was received by Reginald de Cobham, the castellan of Dover Castle, where she was “lodged with honour.” He had been commanded by the King to escort her to London, but was dismayed when he saw how badly provided for she was. For all her great retinue, she had barely anything to wear, no decent mount and no money for necessities. He immediately notified the King, who sent 100 marks (£49,000), a gift of jewels and a fine palfrey. By the time these arrived, Eleanor had reached Canterbury, where her offerings at the shrine of Thomas Becket—silken palls, a silver alms dish and two gold brooches—had also been provided by the King, as she had nothing of her own to give. Decked out in her new finery, she visited other shrines on the way to London, Henry having ordered that she be provided with more lengths of cloth of gold and silk as offerings.
He had intended that she should make her state entry into London on the feast of St. Edward, October 13, but this proved impossible because of the delay caused by providing her with a suitable wardrobe. On October 17, “the citizens of London went out to meet her dressed up in their best clothes.”3 Outside the gates of the City, Eleanor was received by King Henry, the princes of church and state, and leading citizens. Riding a new palfrey, she processed through the torchlit streets of the capital, past windows hung with painted cloth, and was greeted by church bells, songs and music. The fountains spouted wine and the windows rained gold coins. As soon as she arrived at Westminster, the King, eager for her to make her acquaintance with his favorite saint, gave her a gold clasp to offer at the Confessor’s shrine and a copy of La Estoire de Seint Aedward le Rei in English, now owned by the University of Cambridge. She could not read it herself because she never learned English.
She stayed that night at the lodgings of Bishop Sanchez in the Temple, but soon moved into the apartments prepared for her in the Palace of Westminster by the King and Queen, who had consulted Sanchez about Castilian decor, while Alienor had appointed one of her clerks to establish a wardrobe for her daughter-in-law. Henry had expended much money and care on Eleanor’s suite of rooms, and no effort had been spared to make her feel at home and well cared for. Her chambers boasted glazed windows, a raised hearth with a chimney and an adjoining oratory. She found them furnished with silken hangings and tapestries, “so that the place looked more like the inside of a church,” the floors being “carpeted after the Spanish fashion”—a luxury virtually unheard of in England, where carpets were very rare and used only to cover tables. “The Spaniards had done this, perhaps following the custom of their country, but the excess of luxury caused muttering and jeering among the people,”4 especially from those who feared an influx of Spaniards or resented the King’s extravagance.
It was not a good beginning. Eleanor was unwelcome, alone in a strange and hostile land, and must have felt some trepidation. “Serious-minded folk with an eye to the future sighed inwardly, weighing up in detail the extravagant welcomes King Henry kept lavishing on so many foreigners. Everyone considered the great show put on for the benefit of the Spaniards impressive, even stunning, and no wonder. But the English lamented the fact that, in the eyes of their own King, they themselves appeared to be the least important of all nations.”5 The muttering ceased, however, when it became clear that most of the Spaniards were being sent home.
* * *
—
In October 1255, ten-year-old Edmund, wearing Sicilian dress, was crowned king of Sicily in Westminster Abbey by the Bishop of Bologna, representing the Pope. Then Henry III knelt before the high altar, vowing to wrest Sicily from Manfred. “The King’s heart was elated with pride and full of exultation.”6
In November, Thomas of Savoy was seized while trying to quell an uprising by his subjects and imprisoned in Turin. A ransom was demanded, and the Queen and Peter of Savoy made efforts to raise it, yet most of Alienor’s resources had been expended on the Sicilian project and she had little to offer. So she borrowed money from her tailor and other merchants, offering the revenues of five religious houses as security. Henry, for his part, imposed punitive taxes on an already overburdened and simmering populace.
The Lord Edward returned to England to a rapturous welcome. On November 29, he joined Eleanor at Westminster and shortly afterward took her to Windsor, which became her chief residence for the next few years. She led a sheltered life there while her husband completed his military training and took on adult duties. Sources for the period 1255–9 show that she was associated more with the King and Queen than with Edward in these early years of her marriage. There is no record of her accompanying him when he visited Scotland and Wales in 1256.
