A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (46 page)

Contemporary Englishmen who recorded the queen’s passing composed only the shortest of obituary notices, and what little they wrote was hardly positive. ‘A Spaniard by birth,’ said the annalist at Dunstable Priory, ‘she acquired many fine manors.’ As far as most people were concerned, there was not much more that could be said. Since her arrival in England thirty-five years earlier, Eleanor had made scant effort to cultivate popular affection. Medieval queens could endear themselves by the personal distribution of alms to the poor, and by interceding with their husbands on behalf of the needy, the oppressed or the condemned. But Eleanor had preferred to let others make donations on her behalf and – to judge from comments once made by Archbishop Pecham – was reckoned to have encouraged Edward to be more severe in his judgements, not less so. As the Dunstable annalist implies, foreignness was one part of her problem. Unlike the king, Eleanor had never learned to speak English. Acquisitiveness – the accumulation of ‘fine manors’ – was another. In the course of her career Eleanor had amassed lands worth a total of about £50,000 (or £2,500 a year). This was not simply a question of greed: at the time of her arrival in England the queen’s resources had been quite inadequate and required development. Yet the means employed by Eleanor and her officials to effect this expansion, especially the snapping up of estates encumbered by Jewish debts, had become notorious. So too had her methods of estate management, which inquests carried out after her death revealed to have been high-handed and ruthless. Not until her last moments did Eleanor seek to make amends. ‘After she had devotedly received the sacrament of the dying,’ wrote one chronicler, ‘she earnestly prayed her lord the king, who was listening to her requests, that everything unjustly taken from anyone by her or her ministers should be restored.’

Edward saw to this and much more besides. Indeed, his reaction to his wife’s death was such that it all but eclipsed the muted response of his subjects, and ultimately served to disguise the damage that the queen’s reputation had sustained during her own lifetime. It began with an elaborate funeral procession. From Harby Eleanor’s body was taken to Lincoln, where her viscera were removed and interred in the cathedral, while her heart, in accordance with her wishes, was reserved for later burial at the Blackfriars in London with that of her son Alfonso. Then, on 3 December, the king and his court set out to conduct the queen’s embalmed corpse south to Westminster – a slow, mournful progress that lasted the best part of a fortnight, and that ended on 17 December, when Eleanor was entombed near the high altar in Westminster Abbey.
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The king’s effort to honour his wife, however, was only just beginning. In the months and years that followed, a team of royal artists and artisans was commissioned to create what has been called ‘the most magnificent funerary display ever accorded an English monarch’. At Lincoln, Blackfriars and Westminster, three separate tombs were fashioned. Only the last survives, but it is a work of striking sophistication: the representation of Eleanor shows her with her hair unfastened and her eyes wide open. Cast in bronze and finished in gold, it took two years to produce and is rivalled only by the similar effigy created simultaneously for the tomb of Henry III.

In overall terms, though, Eleanor’s commemoration has no equal. In addition to the tombs, Edward ordered the creation of no fewer than twelve additional memorials – a dozen monuments of stone and marble, one to mark each place that the queen’s body had rested on its journey from Lincoln to London. These were the celebrated Eleanor Crosses, so called because each was originally surmounted with a devotional cross. Memorial crosses, the primary purpose of which was to encourage prayers for the departed, were not unknown in thirteenth-century England, but nothing on this scale had even been seen before, nor would it be attempted again. The only precedent, and the probable inspiration, were the series of monuments, known as
montjoies
, built in France to mark the last journey of Louis IX. None of these survives, however, whereas – miraculously – three of the twelve crosses erected for Eleanor are still standing (at Hardingstone and Geddington in Northamptonshire, and at Waltham in Hertfordshire). The building accounts indicate that these are lesser examples – their vanished counterparts that once stood in Cheapside and Charing (hence Charing Cross) cost up to seven times as much. Nevertheless, the three survivors, weathered and damaged as they are, stripped of their paint and their gilding, are generally acknowledged to constitute a watershed moment in English art – a novel fusion of sculptural and architectural forms that heralds the beginning of the English Decorated style.
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An appreciation of their aesthetic qualities, though, and of the contribution they made to the prestige of the Crown, had led some commentators to downplay what was surely the primary motivation for the crosses’ construction, namely, the profound grief of the king. Edward and Eleanor had been married for thirty-six years, and during that time they had hardly ever been apart. Their tastes and interests – hunting, chess, chivalry and romance – appear to have coincided almost exactly. Above all, they had shared a sense of adventure. On all the king’s travels, on crusade or on campaign, the queen had been his most constant companion. Her fifteen or sixteen pregnancies are another testament to their closeness, and there is no credible evidence to suggest that either was anything other than faithful. The English may never have taken Eleanor to their hearts, but Edward had always adored her. After her funeral in December 1290 he retreated to Ashridge, a religious house in Hertfordshire, to spend Christmas in what must have been the deepest sorrow. He was still there in January when he wrote a letter to the abbot of Cluny in France, in which he referred to the wife ‘whom in life we dearly cherished, and whom in death we cannot cease to love’.
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Deep as the king’s desolation assuredly was, there is no reason to suppose that it diminished in any way his enthusiasm for the planned crusade. If anything, Eleanor’s death may have intensified Edward’s desire to return to the Holy Land: a picture on the side of the queen’s tomb shows a knight, believed to be Otto de Grandson, offering prayers for her soul there.
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The king
was
distracted from his declared purpose in the autumn of 1290, but not by the loss of his wife. Rather his plans were disrupted by the death of a seven-year-old Norwegian girl in the distant islands of Orkney.

To explain this cryptic comment, it is necessary to travel back in time, and north in space, and consider the career of Edward’s brother-in-law, King Alexander III of Scotland. Like Edward, Alexander was a strong and successful king. In the 1250s, still in his teens, he had asserted his independence in the face of aristocratic efforts to control him. In the 1260s – much as Edward would do in Wales a decade later – he turned his attention westwards and imposed his authority on a debatable frontier. The islands on Scotland’s western seaboard, nominally under the control of the king of Norway, were effectively independent; but by 1266 the Norwegians had been forcibly persuaded to bow out, and the locals were obliged to acknowledge the superior lordship of the Scottish royal house. So successful, in fact, was Alexander’s rule, that the latter part of his reign suffers from documentary silence. Contrary to the belief of Walter Scott, who once opined that everybody in medieval Scotland was too busy fighting to write anything down, the hush that descends on Scottish affairs in the 1270s is testimony to the peace that their king had succeeded in establishing.
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But, forceful and fortunate in politics, Alexander was far less lucky in his family. First, in 1275, came the death of his queen (and Edward’s sister), Margaret. Then, in the decade that followed, came the successive loss of all their children: their younger son David died in 1281, their only daughter, also Margaret, in 1283, and lastly their elder son, Alexander, in 1284. It was an incredible run of dynastic bad luck, and inevitably raised the question of who would succeed to the Scottish throne when Alexander himself died, for the king had neither brothers nor uncles who might step in and replace him. Prudently, therefore, Alexander – still only in his early forties – elected to remarry. In 1285 he took as his second queen a young Frenchwoman by the name of Yolande of Dreux. Imprudently, however, just a few months into their marriage, the king set out to meet his new wife in a terrible storm. On the evening of 18 March 1286 he rode from Edinburgh to Queensferry, crossed the Firth of Forth by boat, and continued along the coast towards Kinghorn, where Yolande was waiting. But she waited in vain. At some point during the last stage of his ill-advised journey, her husband lost his escort, tumbled over a cliff and broke his neck. Not until the next day dawned was his lifeless body found lying on the shoreline.
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At this point the king of England was readying himself to leave for France, a trip on which the peace of Europe and the fate of the Holy Land were seen to hinge. Discomforting as was the news from Scotland, therefore, it could not be permitted to disrupt or even to delay the urgent business on the Continent. In May Edward set sail from Dover, having heard of Alexander’s sudden death, but not of its drawn-out sequel.

That news reached him sporadically during his stay in Gascony. In the summer of 1286 it was hopeful: Yolande of Dreux, the new and newly widowed Scottish queen, was pregnant. King Alexander, it seemed, had not failed after all. His subjects were now preparing themselves for a long minority, at the end of which the late king’s as-yet unborn child would succeed him. Until that time, Edward learned, Scotland was to be governed by a regency council. By common consent, power had passed to six ‘Guardians’ – two earls, two bishops and two barons – who had sworn to protect the kingdom for Alexander’s heir.
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The following year, however, the intelligence was altogether more desperate. The queen’s pregnancy had ended unsuccessfully with the delivery of a stillborn child. As a result, Scotland had been thrown into confusion. Rebellion had been raised in the south-west of the country, and although the Guardians had suppressed the rising, their authority was now weak and the peace they maintained fragile. What they needed, and what they sought above all, was Edward’s assistance. The Scots would remain on anxious alert until the English king could come there and help them solve their succession crisis.
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The terrible and tragic turn that events had taken in Scotland concerned Edward in more ways than one. Obviously, as king of England, he was bound to take an interest, if only from the point of view of security, in any disarray north of the Border. But far more disturbing were the general ramifications of the Scottish crisis, for it held up a mirror to Edward’s own domestic situation, and presented an alarming future vision of England overtaken by a similar dynastic disaster. Alexander’s untimely end emphasised that death was no respecter of high office and that even vigorous and active kings might be struck down in their prime. Edward’s luck was already legendary. He had emerged unscathed from two bloody battles, survived storms at sea, and had miraculously recovered from the seemingly deadly wound inflicted by an assassin’s blade. But such luck could not last forever. The broken collarbone that the king sustained in Gascony could easily have been a broken neck.

Had that been the case, the English crown would have passed to Edward of Caernarfon, a child barely two years old at the time of his parents’ departure for France. Needless to say, it would have been quite unwise, given the fate of all his other sons, for Edward to have pinned too much hope on the boy’s survival. By the same token, it must have been equally clear by 1287 that he and Eleanor could expect no more children. Little Edward, their only surviving son, would also be their last.

It was almost certainly with the example of Scotland uppermost in his mind that Edward set about formalising the arrangements for the English succession soon after his return from Gascony. In the spring of 1290 the king summoned a special meeting of counsellors, including the archbishop of Canterbury and five other bishops, to assemble at Amesbury in Wiltshire. The choice of location is revealing. In 1285, as we have seen, the priory at Amesbury had received Edward’s daughter, Mary, as a nun. But, more significantly, the priory had in the meantime also become home to the king’s mother. Eleanor of Provence was also making preparations for the end of her life, and had quietly followed her granddaughter in taking the veil during her son’s absence. Now in her late sixties, the dowager queen had lived a far less conspicuous and controversial life in the West Country since the death of Henry III some eighteen years earlier. Gone were the days of plotting revenge on her enemies and raising armies to rescue her husband’s realm. Mindful of the divisive and unpopular figure his mother had once been, Edward, while according her great personal respect, had allowed Eleanor no role in politics, just as he had marginalised the political position of his own queen.
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When it came to family matters, however, the king was wont to consult both women, and the question of the succession, although a political concern of the highest order, was ultimately a family affair. For this reason, Edward, his wife and his mother were joined at Amesbury not only by a crowd of senior churchmen, but also by Edmund of Lancaster, the king’s brother, and William de Valence, his half-uncle. Also in attendance was Gilbert de Clare, earl of Gloucester, who was about to enter this family circle by virtue of his impending marriage to Edward’s daughter, Joan. Indeed, Earl Gilbert’s presence, as the promissory documents he was induced to issue make plain, was most important, for the king’s daughters were revealed to be his back-up plan. All those gathered at Amesbury agreed that, in the event of Edward’s death, and the premature death of his only son, the kingdom would pass to the eldest of his five surviving daughters.