Queens of the Crusades, page 37
On February 6, she went to her churching at Westminster, after which she presided over a lavish feast, which she had arranged herself. On April 2, Henry would command his treasurer to acquire “five handsome swaddling bands” of cloth of gold “and have them sewn together, and a handsome border fastened around them, with shields of the King’s arms, so that the King may find them ready the next time he comes to London. They are to be offered at Westminster for Katherine, the King’s daughter, in the manner in which he has formerly been accustomed to offer for each of his children.”11
On February 11, 1254, Alienor and Richard summoned another Parliament, which was to meet after Easter in London. Two days later, they wrote to the King from Windsor:
We had been treating with your prelates and the magnates of your kingdom of England about your subsidy, and the archbishops and bishops answered us that, if the King of Castile should come against you in Gascony, each of them will assist you [with money raised] from his own property, so that you will be under perpetual obligations to them; but, with regard to granting you an aid from their clergy, they could do nothing without the assent of the clergy; nor do they believe that that clergy can be induced to give you any help, unless the tenth of clerical goods granted to you for the first year of the crusade might be relaxed at once by your letters patent; and they will treat with the clergy to induce them to assist you with a tenth of their benefices, in case the King of Castile should attack you in Gascony. But, at the departure of the bearer of these presents, no subsidy had as yet been granted by the clergy.
Moreover, if the King of Castile should come against you in Gascony, all the earls and barons of your kingdom who are able to cross the sea will come to you in Gascony with all their power. But, from the other laymen who do not sail over to you, we do not think that we can obtain any help for your use, unless you write to your lieutenants in England firmly to maintain your great charters of liberties, and to let this be publicly proclaimed through each county, since, by this means, they would be more strongly animated cheerfully to grant you aid. For many persons complain that the charters are not kept by your sheriffs and bailiffs as they ought to be kept.
Be it known, therefore, to your lordship, that we shall hold a conference with the clergy and laity at Westminster about the aid, and we supplicate to your lordship that you will write us your good pleasure concerning these affairs with the utmost possible haste. For you will find us prepared and devoted, according to our power, to solicit the aid for your use and to do and procure all other things which can contribute to your convenience and the increase of your honour.
Urged by the King and Queen, Simon de Montfort had joined Henry in Gascony and offered his support. His presence was so intimidating to the rebels that many decided it was prudent to offer their allegiance to the King. By February, Henry had managed to calm the disturbances, and Alfonso had been diverted from his purpose by a rebellion at home, led by his brother Enrique. On February 11, John Maunsel and Peter of Aigueblanche were again sent to Castile, carrying peace proposals that were finally acceptable to Alfonso, although he insisted that, before the marriage of Edward and Eleanor went ahead, Henry must settle on Edward estates worth 15,000 marks (£7,350,000) and furnish Eleanor with a suitable dower. In March, Alienor would arrange for the conveyance of the lands awarded to her son.
On February 14, 1254, “mainly because of the Queen’s insistence,”12 Henry created the Lord Edward duke of Gascony and earl of Chester and granted him large estates in England, Wales, Ireland and Gascony, with the income Alfonso had demanded, a settlement that “mutilated” the King.13 Henry now sought the advice of Joan of Ponthieu, the widowed Queen of Castile, over arrangements for the marriage of her daughter, while Alienor, anticipating that she would soon be traveling to Castile for her son’s marriage, ordered the fitting-out of 300 ships.
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Early in 1254, Pope Innocent IV wrote to Henry III offering him the kingdom of Sicily for his ten-year-old son, Edmund, to be held as a Papal fief. The nominal ruler of Sicily, of whom the Pope was guardian, was an infant, Conradin of Hohenstaufen, grandson of the Emperor Frederick II, but there had long been conflict between the Papacy and the Hohenstaufens, whom the Pope regarded as usurpers in Sicily. Alienor desperately wanted a crown for her younger son, but the price would be a crippling 135,541 marks (£66,415,090), which Innocent needed to pay his debts. Nevertheless, in March, Henry accepted, promising to pay this exorbitant sum. His subjects were horrified, and the barons refused to sanction any grant of taxation to support the “Sicilian business,” as they called it, foreseeing that Henry’s championing of the Pope against the family of the Holy Roman Emperor would involve him in costly foreign wars that would bring no benefit to England.
Alienor made strenuous efforts behind the scenes, marshaling her countrymen to make the dream of Edmund’s kingship become reality. The Papal chaplain who acted as negotiator was a Savoyard associate of Peter of Savoy, and the Queen’s uncles, Peter, Philip and Thomas, were among the nine proctors appointed to ensure Edmund’s smooth succession, as was Peter of Aigueblanche. Thomas of Savoy was especially active in working with Alienor to secure Sicily for Edmund and, in 1255, she, in return, would impoverish herself, Henry and Archbishop Boniface to support Thomas’s ambitions in northern Italy. Her determination only served to unite Henry’s opponents and made her even more hated.
On May 14, 1254, the Pope confirmed Edmund as king of Sicily. A week later, Conradin died, and his bastard uncle, Manfred of Hohenstaufen, refused to surrender Sicily to the Papacy and set himself up as regent. Months of conflict followed, but, by December, Manfred had firmly entrenched himself as ruler of Sicily. Alienor’s dreams of a crown for Edmund now seemed hopeless, yet she would not relinquish them. She and Innocent’s successor, Alexander IV, were bent on war, for different reasons, but the Pope ordered that King Henry fund it out of the crusading tax imposed on the English clergy. Predictably, that was not popular.
When Parliament met after Easter 1254, it refused to grant the King any aid because Simon de Montfort, just back in England, had assured the assembly that there was now no threat from Gascony. Alfonso had realized that he could not win the duchy and that he needed the friendship of England. Even so, Henry believed that Edward’s marriage to Eleanor was a necessity, and the only way of protecting Gascony, should Alfonso have second thoughts.
Quelling the unrest in Gascony had left the monarchy impoverished. While Henry pawned some of his treasures to pay his soldiers and his debts, Alienor was forced to raise loans from Richard of Cornwall and foreign merchants.
On April 1, a treaty providing for the marriage of the Lord Edward to Eleanor of Castile was signed at Toledo. Under its terms, Alfonso renounced all claims to Gascony and confirmed Edward’s right to inherit Ponthieu and Montreuil from Eleanor’s mother. In turn, Henry promised to assist Alfonso in his conflict with Navarre and to ask the Pope to commute his vow to go on crusade to Jerusalem, so that he could join Alfonso on a crusade in Africa. This doubtless raised some eyebrows at Westminster, and few can have believed that Henry really meant to fulfil this obligation. Alfonso demanded that he knight Edward himself so that he could see that he was “worthy in mind and body” of Eleanor, and sent him a safe-conduct to travel to Castile. Edward, for his part, undertook to marry Eleanor and dower her well.
In England, the Castilian marriage was deeply unpopular. After experiencing an influx of the parasitic relations of two queens, the King’s subjects had come to detest foreigners and feared that this new royal bride would be no different from her predecessors.
In April 1254, Henry commanded Alienor to bring Edward to him in Bordeaux. After her departure, Richard of Cornwall was to be sole regent of England. When Parliament met at Westminster on May 4 and promised to send aid only in the unlikely event of the King of Castile invading Gascony, Alienor raised money for Henry by pawning the crown jewels to Richard.
On May 17, she was still at Windsor. Her departure was delayed because of a dispute between the rival fleets of Yarmouth and the Cinque Ports that had escalated into violence. The King, hearing of this, sent orders that Alienor was not to travel and threatened the barons of the Cinque Ports that, if they harmed her or interfered with her passage, he would “betake himself to the bodies of them, their wives and children, their lands and tenements, so that they shall forever feel themselves aggrieved.” By the time his letter arrived, Alienor, “concealing her annoyance at these circumstances,”14 had circumvented the dispute by refusing to use any ship from Yarmouth or the Cinque Ports.
Alienor and Richard were jointly attesting patents up until her departure on May 29, when she resigned as regent. That day, as she was about to embark at Portsmouth, the King’s messenger arrived with the order forbidding her to sail. Having just addressed Henry’s concerns, she ignored it and departed with her two sons, her daughter Beatrice, her sister Sanchia, Archbishop Boniface and forty knights. She took with her some of the King’s treasure and the money raised from putting the crown jewels in pawn.
When she arrived in Bordeaux around June 10–11, Henry was so overjoyed to see her that he overlooked her disobedience. That week, they celebrated Edward’s fifteenth birthday. On July 18, it was agreed that his marriage would take place five weeks after Michaelmas. Alfonso would knight him on October 13, the feast of St. Edward the Confessor. Before signing the betrothal contract, Edward declared that he had agreed “willingly and spontaneously” to marry Eleanor, “of whose prudence and beauty we have heard by general report.”
On July 20, in Edward’s name, Henry assigned to Eleanor of Castile a dower of lands, manors and castles in England and Gascony that would bring her an annual income of £1,000 (£730,000); this would increase to £1,500 (over £1,000,000) “when she is raised to be queen.”
Early in August, while the King and Queen were in Bordeaux, they received a visit from the mother of the bride, Joan of Ponthieu, Queen Dowager of Castile, who was traveling north, having angered Alfonso by supporting his rebellious brother Enrique. He had banished her to Ponthieu, obliging her to miss her daughter’s wedding. Henry and Eleanor were not going either. Their presence was needed to keep Gascony stable.
2
“Like Brothers and Sisters”
Toward the end of September, Edward set off for Castile later than expected, attended by a modest retinue, with a journey of 290 miles ahead of him. Astrologers had predicted that the most auspicious date for him to arrive at Burgos, the capital of Castile, was October 5, but he did not get there until the eighteenth, too late to be knighted on St. Edward’s feast day. But Alfonso declared himself well satisfied with his future brother-in-law and introduced him to his bride. Eleanor was now twelve. She spoke Castilian and some French, so they could communicate.
Little is recorded of her appearance. She was described as “fair and elegant,” but there are no adulatory tributes to her beauty, and we do not know if she was dark or blonde. Her tomb effigy (made some time after her death by a craftsman who may never have seen her), the statues of her on the Eleanor crosses and the one, with Edward, on Lincoln Cathedral (the heads being Victorian restorations) are formal images of a queen, not true likenesses; likewise the figures of Eleanor and Edward, with their arms, on a heraldic clasp now in the Walters Art Museum at Baltimore. Thirteenth-century corbel heads of a king and queen in the chancel of St. Mary Magdalene’s church, Whatlington, Sussex, probably represent the couple, but these too are in no sense portraits. The head of a queen on a fifteenth-century bell in the tower of Sundon Church, Bedfordshire, is said to represent Eleanor. There is a nineteenth-century statue of her on All Saints’ Church at Harby. Various manuscript illustrations of her survive, but were probably drawn by monks who had never set eyes on her and were not intending realistic portrayals.
Edward’s initial opinion of his bride is not recorded. She may have found him an attractive youth. His hair, which had been silver-blond in childhood, was now much darker. He was handsome and grew to be six-feet-two-inches tall—his skeleton was measured when his tomb was opened in 1774—towering head and shoulders above the average and earning himself the nickname “Longshanks.” “His brow was broad and the rest of his face regular, except that his left eyelid drooped, like his father’s. His long arms were in proportion to his supple body; it was said that no man was ever endowed with greater muscular strength for wielding a sword. The length of his legs ensured that he was never dislodged from his seat by the galloping and jumping of horses.”
Some found Edward intimidating. He had inherited his forceful character from his mother, and was growing up to be autocratic, short-tempered and intolerant. He could also be violent, lawless and cruel. There were tales that he and his aristocratic friends disturbed the peace of religious houses, mugged travelers and stole food from the common people. Yet his “great courage and daring” were also virtues, for he was fearless and energetic and had vision and a gift for leadership, and he was a great exponent of the cult of chivalry, with a passion for the Arthurian legends. He also had a sense of humor. Despite a lisp, he was not lacking in eloquence when persuasive arguments were needed.1
His great passion from his youth was for tournaments. He was “the most renowned combatant on steed”2 and gained a reputation as “the best lance in the world.” At Burgos, he excelled himself and won great acclaim at the jousts held in honor of his marriage. After these triumphs, in a splendid ceremony, King Alfonso conferred upon him the accolade of knighthood.
On November 1, 1254, Edward and Eleanor were married at the Cistercian abbey of Las Huelgas, just outside the walls of Burgos, which had been founded by Leonor of England in 1187. On the wedding day, Alfonso formally renounced all claim to Gascony. Great celebrations attended the wedding.
By November 21, the young couple was back in Bordeaux, where Edward was received “with the greatest rejoicings, as though he had been an angel of God.” The King and Queen had already left to travel north toward Paris, and he would now reign in Gascony “as prince and lord,”3 with his own establishment.
Edward and Eleanor spent most of the first year of their married life at Bordeaux. He was evidently pleased with his bride and paid her the compliment of wearing a Castilian gown and biretta when they were relaxing in private. Eleanor’s household was relatively small: she had a steward, a keeper of her wardrobe, a knight, several ladies and menial servants. Her marriage brought the desired peace to Gascony, at least to begin with, although Gaston de Béarn would remain an irritant for some time to come. Eleanor’s own brother, Alfonso, would threaten to invade the duchy in 1256, breaking the terms of her marriage contract, and only desisted on account of her being Edward’s wife.
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Henry III “had for some time felt a great longing to visit the kingdom of France and to see his brother-in-law, King Louis, and his wife’s sister, Marguerite.”4 He wanted to observe the way the French dressed and behaved, and to visit the churches of the land, especially the King’s splendid chapel at Paris, the Sainte-Chapelle, with its unrivaled collection of holy relics, including the crown of thorns Christ had worn on the cross. He sent envoys to Louis, who was keen to forge a rapport with him and not only granted a safe-conduct, but—at Queen Marguerite’s request—invited the King and Queen to Paris, whereupon Henry “assembled his household and set off for Orléans with a noble entourage.” Louis ordered all his lords and citizens in the places Henry and Alienor would visit “to clear away mud, sticks and all other eyesores and to put out as many flowers, leaves, flags and other adornments as they could, decorating the fronts of their houses and churches with garlands. They must welcome [King Henry] with respect and joy, going out to meet him in their best clothes, with bells pealing, lights and singing.”5
On November 15, on his way north, Henry visited Fontevraud to pay his respects at the tombs of his forebears and his mother, Queen Isabella. He was appalled to find that she had been buried in a common grave. Although it was explained to him that it had been her wish to be interred there, in expiation of her sins, he had her body exhumed, himself assisting in the task, and helped to carry it to a new burial place in the church, next to the tombs of Henry II, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Richard I. He commissioned a tomb, promising to pay for it presently, “thus fulfilling the Lord’s commandment, Honour thy father and thy mother.”6 A wooden effigy was made, smaller than the stone royal effigies at Fontevraud, and painted in bright colors. It shows Isabella in death, crowned and lying on a bier, her hands crossed piously on her breast. She wears a blue belted gown with passements (decorative trimmings) at the neck and wrists, a red cloak, a wimple and a chin-barbe. The face and costume were clearly inspired by the effigy of Eleanor of Aquitaine.
The Plantagenet tombs had an interesting afterlife. In 1638, they were placed side by side in a new vault in the bay at the western entry to the choir. This “King’s vault” was embellished with pediments, urns, stone lions, stained glass and statues, with the kneeling figures of Joanna and Raymond VII at either end. The bones were moved when the vault was broken into in 1744 to make way for the burial of a daughter of Louis XV who died while being educated with her sisters at Fontevraud. They were reburied elsewhere in the abbey. Despite extensive searches, their location remains unknown.
In 1793, during the French Revolution, the abbey of Fontevraud was sacked and the tombs disturbed and vandalized; those of Joanna and Raymond VII were destroyed. In 1806, the abbey was converted into a prison and four remaining tombs were placed in the cellar of an outbuilding. They were still there in 1816, when Charles Stothard made drawings of them and complained that they were subject to continual vandalism by the prisoners, and that Queen Eleanor’s left hand and the book it was holding were missing.
