Authors: Lisa Hilton
Brightness returned with the victory at Evesham, with which Henry III was restored and Edward and Eleanor reunited. Four more children, Joan, John, Henry and Eleanor, were born in rapid succession, though little Joan did not live out her first year. As the King and Queen worked to consolidate peace with the magnates, Eleanor and Edward were preparing for a real adventure: a crusade to the Holy Land. The crusader states in Outremer were still struggling on, but the ascendance of the Egyptian Mamluk dynasty signified a newly aggressive commitment to jihad, and in 1266 King Louis IX of France, who had already fought one crusade, resolved to embark on another, taking the Cross in March 1267. Ottobuono, the papal legate who had travelled to England with Eleanor of Provence, was promoting the crusade around the country throughout 1266, and in 1268, as Jaffa fell and the kingdom of Antioch collapsed, Edward decided that he, too, should take the Cross, in the face of the objections of both his father and Pope Clement IV. Despite his misgivings, Henry took the precaution of transferring lands and castles to his son for a period of five years which, in the event of the King’s death while the heir was abroad, could be held for him against his return.
Edward’s allegiances during the Lusignan-Savoyard disputes had illustrated the potentially troublesome relationships between royal parents and a new generation keen to establish their own rights, and his preparations for his crusade offer clues to his feelings about the direction of his future. Having chosen to take his wife with him to the Holy Land, he pointedly excluded his mother from the arrangements he made for their absence.
Edward and Eleanor gave their children into the care of their great-uncle Richard of Cornwall, rather than their grandmother. In comparison with the instructions of Edward’s younger brother Edmund, who was to accompany Edward on the expedition and made his mother the governor of his affairs for the duration, this plan suggests a residual anxiety about leaving the heirs to the throne in the care of a woman whose ‘foreign’ loyalties had been the cause of so much dispute. The danger of factionalism created by the importation of a queen’s relatives was one Eleanor of Castile treated more prudently than had her mother-in-law. The need for supportive royal kin had to be balanced against the sensitivities of the magnates, sensitivities to which Eleanor of Provence had shown herself imperiously oblivious. Eleanor of Castile had to find a means of promoting royal affinity without imposing her alien status too obviously on the English. She had already seen how easily that status could be negatively manipulated.
At the time of her marriage, the young Eleanor’s brother Sancho had advised Henry on how he could make her feel welcome, and the King, rather as he had done for his own wife, had kindly tried to make her apartments comfortably familiar, decorating them in Castilian style with rich carpets on the floors. This immediately led to accusations of extravagance, if not oriental depravity, and Eleanor showed herself attuned to English suspicions of Spanish ways in both her choice of attendants, nearly all of whom came from relatively modest, gentle families and in her match-making strategies. She did not involve herself in importing husbands for English heiresses, and though she did promote her Picard connections, finding English husbands for cousins from Ponthieu, she avoided provoking criticism among the chroniclers as Eleanor of Provence had done.
Eleanor did, however, remain close to her natal family; indeed, one of the reasons for her presence on the crusade was a plan to travel via Gascony to join Alfonso of Castile, but the project was prevented by the death of Boniface of Savoy. Instead, when she and Edward set off for France on 20 August 1270, their month-long journey south took them to Louis IX’s beautiful crusader port of Aigue-Mortes, where they embarked to rendezvous with the French forces who had mustered in Sardinia. En route Louis decided on an attack on Tunis, which he thought would be a strategic loss to the Mamluks, but five days after the English ships put out, the French King died, and Edward’s Uncle Charles of Anjou replaced him as commander. Much to Edward’s disgust, when he arrived a week later, Charles quickly came to an accommodation with the Tunisian emir, and
the French turned round and went home. Edward refused to make any treaty with a ruler he saw first and foremost as an infidel, and defiantly set off for Sicily, where he and Eleanor remained until the following May. With a small flotilla of thirteen ships they then sailed to Cyprus and on to Acre.
The crusade, which lasted a year, was a largely fruitless exercise that achieved very little beyond a small English garrison at Acre. What it did produce was a legend that contributed to Eleanor’s posthumous reputation. A fifteenth-century Spanish chronicler, Rodrigo de Arevalo, recorded an incident (retold in English by Robert le Bel in 1579), in which a Muslim assassin lurking in Edward’s tent managed to stab him with a poisoned dagger. Edward killed his assailant, but the wound rotted and Edward’s life was despaired of until ‘Queen Eleanor, who had accompanied him on that journey, endangering her own life, in loving affection saved him and eternalised her own honour. For she daily and nightly sucked out that rank poison, which love made sweet to her … to his safety, her joy, and the comfort of all England.’
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What, asks Le Bel, ‘can be more rare than this woman’s expression of love?’ The whole story is more than likely to be apocryphal. One version casts the assassin as a turncoat spy whom Edward himself had employed, while
The Guisborough Chronicle
has Eleanor led sobbing from Edward’s tent by Edmund so as not to see the doctor cut out the putrefying flesh, though Edmund had in fact left the crusade by the time the incident supposedly took place. The preference of later writers for the Spanish version, which gives it as fact, rather than those of other chronicles, which mention it as a legend, is an example of the way Eleanor’s memory was consciously manipulated to her posthumous advantage.
The reference to Eleanor’s having endangered her life does contain some truth, however: she had become pregnant in the summer of 1271 and gave birth to a daughter, another Joan, at Acre in spring 1272. Childbirth was perilous in the best of circumstances, but in the ramshackle conditions of crusader quarters, hot and disease-ridden, it was terrifying. After Joan’s birth, Eleanor and Edward stayed on in Acre until September, when the baby was deemed strong enough to travel. Pausing at Trapani on Sicily on their return, they received the news that their son John had died and, shortly afterwards, that Henry III, too, was gone.
Edward returned to England as the only living king in Europe who had made the pilgrimage to the Holy Land, a distinction that hugely augmented his international standing. The expedition had cost a fortune which, as ever, the English crown didn’t have, but compared to the unrest
of the 1260s, it represented a certain political advancement. The subsidy of 30,000 pounds granted to Edward for the crusade, the first such since 1237, was an acknowledgement of the new authority obtained by Parliament in relation to the economy. Though Edward’s force had been small, about 1,000 men in total, 225 of them were knights, all drawn from families closely associated with the court, and the expedition served as a means of unifying the aristocracy after the divisions of the wars. And although Edward was no Lionheart, he could identify himself afterwards as that glorious figure, a crusading king, and proclaimed his eagerness to return to the Holy Land until his dying day.
Returning through Rome, Orvieto — where they met Pope Gregory X — Lombardy and Milan, Edward and Eleanor reached Savoy. Here they stayed at the castle of St Georges d’Esperande in the Isére with Edward’s great-uncle Philip, ruler since 1268. By July they were in Paris, where Edward performed homage for his French holdings to the new king, Philip III, and in August 1274 they finally arrived back in England after an absence of four years. It was a sad homecoming. Edward was deeply affected by his father’s death — he had rather callously remarked to Charles of Anjou that he mourned less for his son John than for Henry, as sons could be replaced. There was also a quarrel with Edmund about precedence rights at the coronation, which took place on 19 August. Edmund was so offended by the rebuttal of his claim to carry the Curtana, the ceremonial sword, that he stayed away. At least, Edward wrote to his uncle Charles, he felt a greater closeness to his mother since losing his father.
Eleanor had given birth to another son, named for her brother Alfonso, in 1273. Her three eldest children had died, but four were living at her coronation (Henry would be lost shortly afterwards). She would go on to have six more: Margaret in 1275, Berengaria (1276), an unnamed child who died in infancy in 1278, Mary (1279), Elizabeth (1282) and Edward (1284). Another baby whose name is not recorded had died in 1271, and there may have been a further daughter, born soon after Eleanor’s marriage, whom some sources name as Blanche. Eleanor’s fertility attests to a consistent sexual relationship with Edward, which confirms the closeness of their relationship. A family tradition was the ‘kidnapping’ of the King in his bed by seven of Eleanor’s ladies on Easter Monday morning. Sexual intercourse was forbidden during the period of Lenten abstinence, and Edward had to pay a fine of two pounds to his captors before he was released to indulge himself with the Queen. But if she was fortunate in her marriage Eleanor was very unlucky with her children, even in an age of high infant mortality. Eleanor, the second Joan, Margaret, Mary and
Elizabeth survived to adulthood, but of the boys only Edward reached his majority.
In the past, one of the commonplace assumptions about medieval childhood was that parents were less attached to their offspring because the prospect of losing them was so great, and though as a generalisation this was manifestly untrue, Eleanor does seem to have had a cooler relationship with her children than several of her predecessors. Six-year-old Henry died at Guildford in 1274 while the King and Queen were in London, no great distance away, yet there is no evidence that they visited him. Great hope was held out for Alfonso, who survived until he was ten, but there is no mention in the household accounts of a Mass for his death in 1284, or of anniversary Masses for his lost brothers and sisters. The quarrel with her mother-in-law about Mary’s early enclosure at Amesbury demonstrates that Eleanor was not indifferent to her children’s welfare, but what little evidence there is presents a broad picture of a dutiful rather than a loving mother.
Early matrimony was one area where Eleanor did show exceptional concern. As has been noted, she lobbied with Eleanor of Provence to postpone the marriage of her eldest daughter, Eleanor, and Joan of Acre, who became the wife of Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, and Elizabeth, who married Count John of Holland, did so at the relatively late ages of eighteen and fifteen respectively (Elizabeth remained at court for a further nine months after her wedding). Eleanor’s children were brought up with all the privileges of their rank, yet their father and mother were thoroughly occupied elsewhere, which is entirely typical of the period, if not an especially sympathetic approach to child-rearing. Some evidence of parental interest is shown in the miniature castles and siege engines ordered for Alfonso and Edward, and the King indulged the girls in the matter of dresses, carriages and jewels, but the Queen’s emotional priority was very much the King.
Both duty and inclination meant Eleanor was often away from her children as she accompanied Edward on his travels. Indeed, with the exception of his military campaigns and her lyings-in, they were rarely separated. Royal excursions were no more comfortable than they had been in Eleanor of Aquitaine’s time, and Eleanor, who was almost permanently pregnant, was beset by overturning carts, lost baggage and accidents such as the fire that nearly killed the royal couple at Hope Castle in 1283. She was renowned for her Castilian addiction to comfort, which might be better figured as an objection to freezing. Where the Queen went, glazed windows and lead roofs quickly followed. She stayed loyal to her carpets,
buying seven in 1278, paying five pounds to the carpet-maker John de Winton in 1286 and ordering 26s 8d-worth of painted cloths from Cologne in 1290. Eleanor tried to make her lodgings cheerful with colourful candles, Venetian glass, ivory mirrors and brightly painted walls, and she shared a southern love of scented gardens with Eleanor of Provence. Food was another connection to her native culture. Most eccentrically, the Queen ate lots of fresh fruit: English pears, apples and quinces and exotic pomegranates, figs, raisins and dates. Her cooks used olive oil and citrus fruit, and cheeses were ordered from Brie and Champagne. It is tempting to suggest, though impossible to prove, that the distinctly Arabic flavour that characterised grand English cookery in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries may have been influenced by Eleanor’s household, as she had grown up with the flavours of Moorish cuisine. Keeping up standards in the travelling circus of the court, she ate from silver or gold plate using knives with gold and jasper handles.
Like her mother-in-law, Eleanor loved gardens. Just as she was true to the flavours of her childhood, she may also have tried to recreate the sophisticated, Islamic-influenced gardens she had known in Castile. At Westminster, a system of pipes from the Thames filled the Queen’s pond, surrounded by a lawn set with vines and roses, while a herb garden wafted scents through the window of her chapel. At Langley, which she bought in 1275, Eleanor employed Aragonese gardeners to create wells, perhaps for fountains. Her partiality to fragrant blossom and fruit led her to send for French apple cuttings to be spliced by her vine-tender, the aptly named James Frangipane.
Eleanor and Edward had several interests in common. Both were keen hunters, though Eleanor preferred hounds, keeping her own pack, while Edward’s passion was falconry. The King’s hawks had a marvellous mews in London, with a garden and a bath fed by a fountain. For Eleanor, there was an aviary with nightingales and Sicilian parrots. They were also avid chess players, and Edward, certainly, played for money. A gift to Eleanor of jasper and crystal chessmen was eventually inherited by her daughter-in-law Isabella of France. Eleanor’s brother Alfonso was an enthusiast who commissioned a chess manual; Eleanor borrowed one from Cerne Abbey and became competent enough to manage ‘Four Kings’, the four-player version of the game.