Eleanor of Castile: The Shadow Queen Read online

  For my parents, Lilian and Alan, with love

  First published 2014

  Amberley Publishing

  The Hill, Stroud

  Gloucestershire, GL5 4EP

  www.amberley-books.com

  Copyright © Sara Cockerill, 2014

  The right of Sara Cockerill to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-1-4456-3589-7 (HARDBACK)

  ISBN 978-1-4456-3605-4 (eBOOK)

  Map and table design by Thomas Bohm, User design.

  Typesetting and Origination by Amberley Publishing.

  Printed in the UK.

  Contents

  Maps and Family Trees

  Preface

  Acknowledgements

  1: The Backdrop

  2: Eleanor’s Early Years

  3: The English Side of the Equation

  4: The Marriage

  5: The First Years in England

  6: Dissent, Defeat, Victory

  7: Queen in Waiting

  8: The Crusade

  9: The Triumphant Return

  10: The Queen’s Work

  11: The Queen and Her Interests

  12: The Queen’s Family

  13: The Golden Years

  14: The Welsh Years

  15: Gascony

  16: The Last Year, Death and Remembrance

  17: Afterlives

  Picture Section

  Appendix 1: The Robert Burnell Letter

  Notes

  Bibliography

  List of Illustrations

  Maps and Family Trees

  Preface

  If you know anything at all about Eleanor of Castile, you may count yourself in the elite minority. By far the most common question I have been asked during the course of writing this book has been (with a puzzled frown) ‘Who was she, exactly?’ Perhaps one in ten of those asking has made the connection that Eleanor was the wife of England’s greatest medieval monarch, Edward I. And they are hardly alone. In a recent bestselling popular history a full-time historian and his editors managed to assign Philippa of Hainault to the first Edward, rather than the third; numerous other historians have also ‘lost’ Eleanor of Castile.1

  The second most common question has been why I decided to write this book at all. The real answer is that I was labouring under a misapprehension. I thought that the record on Eleanor needed to be put straight and the perception that everyone had of her corrected. But it seems in fact that ‘everyone’ did not have a perception of her at all. Few knew that for centuries Eleanor has been wrongly lauded as the epitome of quiet retiring queens, with Botfield and Turner, upon whose work that of Agnes Strickland was substantially based, describing her thus: ‘No equivocal reputation is associated with Eleanor of Castile. She never swerved from the position which fortune assigned to her, or failed to perform the gentle and peaceful duties which belonged to it. The memory of her unobtrusive virtues and worth passed away with those who witnessed, or were the objects of her care and solicitude.’2

  So why does Eleanor of Castile deserve to be rescued from the scrapheap of history? One very good reason is because she was far from unobtrusive; she was a remarkable woman for any era. Eleanor was a highly dynamic, forceful personality whose interest in the arts, politics and religion were highly influential in her day – and whose temper had even bishops quaking in their shoes. Highly intelligent and studious, she was incomparably better educated, and almost certainly brighter, than her husband. She was a scholar and an avid bookworm, running her own scriptorium (almost unique in European royal courts) and promoting the production of illustrated manuscripts, as well as works of romance and history. Equally unusually she could herself write and she considered it a sufficiently important accomplishment that her own children were made to acquire the skill.

  She also introduced numerous domestic refinements to English court life: forks, for example, first make their appearance in England in her household and carpets became sought after in noble circles in imitation of her interior design style. She was a pioneer of domestic luxury: she introduced the first purpose-built tiled bathroom and England’s first ‘fairy tale’ castle – both at her own castle of Leeds, in Kent. She revolutionised garden design in England, introducing innovations – including fountains and water features – familiar to her from Castile.

  Perhaps most interestingly she was also in many ways the obverse of the traditional mid-late medieval queen, who was expected to be humble and intercessory. She emphatically rejected the paradigm of submissive queenship, insisted on having a real job to do and was devoted to that work. As well as acting as part of Edward’s innermost circle of advisers, she also took on her own shoulders a whole department charged with accumulating properties for the Crown and acquired, through her own efforts, a major landed estate. In modern terms one might well see in Eleanor a parallel with Hillary Clinton – a real dynamic power behind the throne.

  At the same time Eleanor was still a highly effective and discreet matchmaker in the way expected of medieval queens. For anyone with an interest in later medieval history the feat she achieved of quietly inserting members of her family into most of the great houses in England is breathtaking: practically all the Wars of the Roses claimants descend from her wider family as well as the English royal family.

  Another powerful reason for bringing Eleanor into the limelight is that she had one of the most varied and interesting lives of any of England’s queens in any era.

  The daughter of a famed Crusader and international hero, Eleanor of Castile was brought up partly in the most intellectually and culturally sophisticated court in Europe and partly in the vicinity of the battlefield; for Castile was a country very actively engaged in military affairs, with her father and brothers constantly riding off to battle during her childhood. Eleanor’s childhood was, in effect, spent on campaign or among the work involved in the aftermath of a campaign. As a result she had imbibed first from her Crusader father and then from her academic prodigy of a brother much important theoretical and practical knowledge of war, government and the role of a king.

  She married the future Edward I aged twelve and bore her first short-lived child aged only thirteen. By the time she reached England a year later, the marriage alliance was considered a liability by her father-in-law, Henry III, and her position at court was extremely difficult. This was hardly improved by the arrival at court of a landless brother seeking subsidies from her new family; or the fact that she and her mother-in-law, Eleanor of Provence, never formed a warm bond as they battled for influence over Edward – a battle that Eleanor of Castile won. From her earliest days as a wife to the English heir, her hand can be traced guiding him in asserting his independence from his mother’s tutelage and in assembling the skills he would need to be both a great king and an outstanding military man.

  In the Barons’ Revolt, which ensued soon after her arrival, Eleanor chose to stay in England when the queen and the ladies of the court fled to France, preferring to face the chances of war with her husband, to whom she was completely devoted. She oversaw the defence of Windsor Castle on her husband’s behalf and, once forced to yield it, she suffered a terrible
year in effective captivity; a time that encompassed the deaths of her next two children, complete destitution and real fears for Edward’s own life.

  After the war, Eleanor encouraged Edward to go on Crusade to the Holy Land, and accompanied him, leaving her young children behind for three years and encountering the physical hazards that killed a number of the crusading party, including the King of France and one of her childhood friends. While in the Holy Land she almost certainly witnessed a violent assassination attempt on her husband and reputedly (though not in fact) saved Edward’s life after it. She bore still further children in Acre while effectively on campaign, losing one of them. All in all she was to bear Edward somewhere in the region of sixteen children, of whom only six survived to adulthood.

  Towards the end of the Crusade, news arrived of the deaths of both the King of England and Eleanor’s own eldest son. The new king and queen, however, took two years to return home, enjoying a prolonged and triumphant reception as they passed through Italy and a lengthy stay in Gascony where a new son was born.

  As queen, Eleanor was placed by Edward in charge of one of his central policy goals – the reinvigoration of the Crown property, which had been much dissipated under his father. She therefore turned property developer, building up by her own direct endeavours a massive property empire equivalent to a major noble landholding. Her property interests often directed the movements of the court, since she was a ‘hands on’ manager but would not stray from Edward’s side.

  Eleanor also accompanied Edward again throughout his Welsh campaigns, bearing her final child, the future, catastrophic, Edward II, amid the building site that was Caernarfon Castle, assisting in the resettlement of Wales and promoting the ‘Arthurian’ myth that surrounded Edward’s court in this period of triumphant conquest.

  Eleanor encouraged the plan for the marriage of their eldest daughter to the King of Aragon, a project that carried the royal couple to Gascony in the late 1280s and kept them there for three years – again without their children. To save the marriage they had to bring about the King of Aragon’s rehabilitation in the eyes of the papacy following the European war that had flared up between Aragon, France and the papacy. During this time, although her health was failing, Eleanor played an active diplomatic role internationally, and acted personally as a mediator in disputes between local noble houses, in the same way that a prince might.

  Ultimately it seems likely that she worked herself to death; with her health failing, she was still pushing on with her habits of active acquisition and management of property and superintending litigation, as well as organising weddings for her family and dependents. She died, aged only forty-nine, in a stranger’s house, having been taken so ill on her travels that the house of friends, a mere four miles distant, could not be reached.

  Her death blindsided the formidable Edward, who had throughout their marriage loathed being parted from his wife. A part – but only a part – of the extensive tribute by which he marked his grief for her loss is the series of ‘Eleanor crosses’, the most complete and ornate set of monuments to a beloved spouse ever seen in this country and very possibly in Europe at large. To this he added a tomb in Westminster Abbey, which is considered by many to be the high-water mark of the English Decorated style, along with two other lesser tombs and a myriad of other charitable and religious memorials.

  Still the reasons for telling Eleanor’s story are not exhausted. For one thing, through the details of her property empire we can catch rare glimpses of the more humble lives of medieval people. There are the servants rewarded with smallholdings, the farmers caught between the clashes of great nobles and great abbeys, and unsure to whom to pay their rent; there are the fat bullyboy bailiffs who would not be out of place in a modern tabloid, turfing families out of their houses to weep by the side of the road. We can also catch some sense of the academic climate; we can see at close range, through Eleanor’s own links to one school of thought, the beginnings of religious controversies that would rumble on until the Reformation; and religious practices, such as the rosary, which hold sway to this day.

  Why, if the story is in itself so interesting and there is scope to correct the received picture this radically, has there been no biography to tell the true story? This has often astounded me during the course of my research. However, the answer is simply this: Eleanor has proved a highly elusive character. The materials that mention Eleanor specifically are so fragmentary as to give one little to get hold of. The Canadian historian John Carmi Parsons spent years in research apparently in preparation for such a work, but appears ultimately to have considered the project impossible. In connection with one of the best remaining sources, Eleanor’s Liber Garderobe of 1289–90, which provides a day-to-day account for that period of all messengers sent and items purchased, he completed an exhaustive examination of the materials but concluded that the materials did not enable a picture to be brought to life, lacking any sense of her actual thoughts or reactions.3

  While I would not entirely endorse these views – I think there are numerous points when Eleanor does vividly peek out of the records – there is certainly force in them. Moreover, even the limited ‘Eleanor-specific’ evidence that exists is difficult to use with confidence. What exists is a fairly complete Liber Garderobe relating to the final eighteen months of Eleanor’s life, a near-illegible roll of household expenses for 1287–8, a partial roll of household expenses for 1288–9, an account of the inquest into her properties after her death, and casual mentions in the ‘chronicles’ and in Edward’s records. One can therefore readily see that what remains in any detail relates to small portions of her life, so that there is a real danger that those portions (and particularly the inquest) get magnified out of all proportion, producing a distorted image. Thus the one modern popular historian to have attempted a short pen portrait of Eleanor concluded that she was a horrible woman with a vile temper, whom no one but her husband liked.4

  However, more general material can do much to fill the gaps. The amount of writing which went on at the Castilian court about events, theories of kingship, education and the upbringing of princes is considerable, and I have concluded that a reasonable picture of the circumstances of Eleanor’s life up until her marriage can be discerned, even if it rests on inference from the general to the specific in some places. In the years prior to the Crusade her moves have to be traced through Edward, but the inference that Parsons was prepared to tentatively make as to her role in positioning Edward can be supported by some specific personal links between events or people and Eleanor. After Edward’s accession the material becomes slightly fuller, but I have made one important assumption. Although itinerary material for Eleanor only survives from the short period covered by the Liber Garderobe, I have inferred that, except where she is vouched for as being elsewhere, or it is obvious that she must have been elsewhere (e.g. when Edward was on active duties during the Welsh War), Eleanor was with Edward. I regard this as a permissible inference based on their notorious devotion, the almost complete correlation between the two itineraries for the period where itineraries for both Eleanor and Edward exist, and the fact that where Eleanor is vouched for by the chronicles, by surviving correspondence, or by Edward’s wardrobe records, she is almost always to be found with Edward. I also consider that this inference is supported by the fact that so much of Edward’s itinerary seems to dovetail with Eleanor’s properties. One of the oddities of Edward’s itinerary has always been that he travelled to some very out-of-the-way places. However, a cross check between the itinerary and Eleanor’s properties very often reveals that the court was actually staying at one of Eleanor’s properties or a few miles from a prospective purchase.

  In researching this book I have found not only a very different picture to that which is generally seen, but also a very different one to that which I originally imagined I would find. I certainly expected to find Eleanor far more interesting and more dynamic than her press allows; maybe that she would even be a worthy f
oil to the greatness of Edward. What I did not expect was the sheer range of Eleanor’s talents and influence. Nor did I anticipate the full extent of the dynamism or the hardness which she plainly had. To give one example, I had thought it likely that, given her background, coming from Castile where Christian–Jewish relations were very much more friendly, enlightened and sophisticated than in England, she had acted as an intercessor for the English Jewish population; the more so since the Jewish expulsion occurs in the year of her death. The reality has proved markedly less attractive. There is in fact no sign of any closeness to the Jewish community or real empathy with their problems. Eleanor used her familiarity with Jewish religionists in being happy to deal with the Jews (as some other magnates in England were not), and blithely acquired numerous debts from them while resolutely defying disapproval from the Church – characteristically on well-thought-out doctrinal grounds. But there is no sign of any meaningful intercession by her or promotion of her Jewish business partners’ interests unless they were hers too. Her relations with her Jewish colleagues were strictly business; and in business she played hardball. Ultimately it would appear that she had no compunction about expulsion once an economic case for the Jewish population ceased to be compelling.

  The result of my review is perhaps a less attractive figure in conventional terms than I had expected, but it is certainly more attractive than either Strickland’s milk-and-water heroine or Hilton’s grasping harpy. The picture, as it presents itself to me at least, is a startlingly modern one. Eleanor emerges as a woman of many interests and many talents, which she pursued with energy, while nonetheless embracing her role as a wife above all others. She was a woman who would not be penned in by the circumstances of her birth and marriage to a particular destiny, but who tried – to a large extent successfully – to utilise her abilities and education to carve out an interesting and demanding role for herself. One might say that seven hundred years before the feminist movement made this a goal, she succeeded in having it all: a strong, devoted marriage, an extensive family and a fulfilling high-level job. Hilton regards her as an awful woman. I beg to differ. After several years’ acquaintance with Eleanor, the word that springs to my mind is awesome.