HISTORY

"I loved her dearly during her lifetime …… I shall not cease to love her now that she is dead”.

Queen Eleanor died on the 28th November 1290 in the Nottinghamshire village of Harby near Lincoln.

Her grieving husband, King Edward I, arranged for her body to be embalmed and her viscera to be entombed at Lincoln Cathedral before being carried on a funeral bier to London for burial at Westminster Abbey.

Each overnight stop was later marked with an elaborate stone cross in memory of his beloved wife. Crosses were built at Lincoln, Grantham, Stamford, Geddington, Hardingstone, Stony Stratford (Old Stratford), Woburn, Dunstable, St Albans, Waltham Cross and Charing (now Trafalgar Square). An additional cross was built at Cheapside, near where Queen Eleanor's heart had been left with the Blackfriars and where one of her sons was buried.

Only three of the original crosses survive; at Geddington, Hardingstone and Waltham Cross. A replica of the Charing Cross was built in the 19th Century and now stands in front of Charing Cross station near Trafalgar Square.

This final cross was originally built at the top of Whitehall near St Martin-in-the-Fields and the Royal Mews, on the spot now occupied by the King Charles I roundabout on the south side of Trafalgar Square.

Marc Morris' excellent biography of Edward I and the Forging of Britain: A Great and Terrible King is available from Hutchinson Publishing.