Three Queens at Eltham
For over 300 years, Eltham was an important royal residence, a rural retreat favoured by medieval and Tudor kings and queens. Thanks partly to the restoration works completed by the Courtaulds in the 1930s, it is one of only a few medieval royal homes in England where substantial remains can still be seen.
Historians usually link Eltham’s many expansions and renovations to particular kings. Yet the queens who also spent time there were powerful, confident women, who almost certainly influenced Eltham’s development. This article explores the lives of three foreign queens of England – Isabella of France, Margaret of Anjou and Katherine of Aragon – who had close ties with Eltham.
Isabella: ‘the She-Wolf of France’
Isabella (about 1295–1358) was the daughter of King Philip the Fair of France and Joan of Navarre. When she married King Edward II of England (reigned 1307–27) in January 1308, she was just 12 – then not an unusual age for aristocratic women to marry.
She was well educated, but spoke English poorly and was not completely fluent even 50 years later. This was never a serious problem, because at that time other royals and most English aristocrats also spoke French as their first language.
The newly-weds stayed at Eltham before Isabella’s coronation at Westminster Abbey on 25 February 1308.
In the early years of their marriage, Edward, who was about 11 years older than Isabella, showed her limited respect. She had to tolerate his open affection for Piers Gaveston, an arrogant and flamboyant soldier. The king’s barons hated the relationship and eventually executed Gaveston, in June 1312.
In her late teens, Isabella began to take an active role in the power struggle between the king and his barons. As she asserted herself, Edward effectively bought her loyalty by giving her property, including Eltham.
Isabella turned Eltham (which before 1933 was still called a manor, rather than a palace) into one of England’s largest and most frequently used royal residences. Parts of the moat walls that she rebuilt in 1315 still survive. She also probably ordered two existing deer parks to be enclosed with walls.
Aged 17, Isabella gave birth to a son, Edward – later King Edward III – who spent much of his childhood at Eltham. His younger brother, who was born there in August 1316, became known as John of Eltham. For his baptism in the queen’s chapel at Eltham, Isabella decorated the font with silk and cloth-of-gold and wore a dress of white velvet.
Soon after, her husband began a new relationship, with Hugh Despenser. A series of incidents damaged the marriage further, culminating in 1324, when Despenser confiscated Isabella’s properties and separated the queen from her children and French companions.
It was while she was on a diplomatic mission to France in 1325 that Isabella probably began a relationship with Sir Roger Mortimer, a powerful English baron who was one of her husband’s opponents. By the following year it was widely believed that they were lovers.
They gathered an army and in September that year invaded England. Within three months they had captured Edward II and Hugh. Despenser was brutally executed and Edward died in captivity soon after, possibly on Isabella’s orders.
The queen’s brave decisions and ruthless actions led later (male) writers to portray her as manipulative and vengeful. In 1757, an English poet vilified her as ‘the She-Wolf of France’, borrowing an insult Shakespeare had aimed at Margaret of Anjou. French historians proudly adopted this epithet.
Isabella’s son Edward was only 14 when he became king on his father’s death, so Isabella and Mortimer effectively ruled for the next four years. From 1330 onwards, Edward III’s own eldest son, yet another Edward (later called the Black Prince), also often spent time with his grandmother at Eltham. Isabella saw less of her eldest granddaughter, who was named after her. In the era of the Black Death, Edward III encouraged his mother to enjoy Eltham’s rural setting ‘whenever her health required a change of air’.
In 1356, the warlike Black Prince captured King John II of France, the son of Isabella’s cousin. They met, but by this time she was over 60 and had largely lost contact with her French relatives. Consequently, she was probably proud of her favourite grandson’s victory for England. She died on 23 August 1358 and was buried wrapped in her wedding mantle. The effigy on her tomb, now lost, showed her holding Edward II’s heart.
Margaret of Anjou: ‘A Great and Strong Laboured Woman’
Margaret (Marguerite) of Anjou (1430–82) was born in the Duchy of Lorraine, now part of France. She arrived at Portchester Castle on England’s south coast in April 1445, aged 15, to marry King Henry VI (reigned 1422–61, 1470–71). Their wedding took place a fortnight later at Titchfield Abbey in Hampshire.
The Hundred Years War with France was ending and huge crowds watched Margaret’s procession to her coronation in London on 30 May. Once crowned, she behaved as the ideal medieval queen: supporting her husband, charming his nobles, and contributing to English cultural life.
Margaret spent at least a week at Eltham just before her coronation, and in the year of their marriage Henry VI added new buildings at Eltham for her, including a hall and service rooms.
But her visits to Eltham ended two years later, when she acquired Bella Court, a house in nearby Greenwich built by her brother-in-law. She renamed it the Palace of Placentia and it became her main residence.
Eight years into the marriage, Henry, aged 31, suffered a mental health crisis and fell into a catatonic state. When 23-year-old Margaret gave birth to Edward – a long-awaited and all-important heir to the House of Lancaster – the king did not react, even when the baby was presented to him.
The circumstances of Edward’s birth allowed the rival House of York to accuse Margaret of adultery, and to challenge her rule during her husband’s incapacity. This was just one symptom of the rising tension between the Houses of York and Lancaster that pushed England gradually – and then rapidly – into the Wars of the Roses, a dynastic struggle that lasted nearly 40 years.
Margaret, who had strong role models in her mother and grandmother, fought relentlessly to protect the rights of her husband and son. She recovered from devastating military defeats and twice rescued the king from imprisonment.
The queen’s determination and aggressiveness shocked England’s male nobles. In 1456, she was described as ‘a great and strong laboured woman, for she spareth no pain to [pur]sue her things to an intent and conclusion to her power’. But for all her energy and strength of character, she decided to take refuge in Kenilworth Castle later that year.
Later writers portrayed Margaret as a ‘woman gone bad’: manipulative, spiteful and power-hungry. In Shakespeare’s Henry VI, she recognises the likely consequences of her actions: ‘Ay me, unhappy! To be a queen, and crown’d with infamy!’ Shakespeare, of course, was helping to make her ‘prediction’ come true.
After 17-year-old Edward was killed at the Battle of Tewkesbury in May 1471, and her husband was murdered in the Tower of London a few days later, Margaret’s spirit finally broke. After four years under house-arrest in England, she was returned to Anjou, where she died in relative poverty, aged 52.
Katherine of Aragon: ‘The King’s True and Legitimate Wife’
Katherine, or Catharina (1485–1536), was born near Madrid, the daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. She spoke Spanish, French and Latin, but not English at first, though her ancestors included English royalty. Before she turned three, she was engaged to marry Henry VII of England’s eldest son, Arthur Tudor, to cement an Anglo-Spanish alliance.
In April 1502, just 20 weeks after their wedding, Prince Arthur fell ill and died. This disaster proved a crucial turning-point. Only 16, but a widow in limbo, Katherine asked to be appointed ambassador to England – the first recorded female ambassador in European history.
She was still ambassador seven years later when she married Arthur’s younger brother, who had just become King Henry VIII. Their relationship was happy for over ten years, and the queen’s religious faith and support for good causes made her popular with the English.
Katherine first stayed at Eltham a few weeks after the wedding and she and Henry stayed there at least twice a year until 1531. The happy couple celebrated Christmas, New Year and Twelfth Night there three times, in 1515–16, 1522–3 and 1525–6.
Henry was a talented and energetic architect, and this was reflected in the amount of building work in progress at Eltham by the 1520s. While Katherine may have influenced Eltham’s wider development behind the scenes, she left no evidence for her direct involvement, but she must have adapted and furnished her own apartments. Moving from one residence to another involved a great deal of baggage, and in 1520 a covered wagon bringing her things to Eltham broke down on the way from Windsor – a cart had to be hired to replace it.
After the miscarriage of a daughter in 1510 and the death of a baby boy in 1511, the queen became pregnant several more times. Henry wanted a son to continue the Tudor dynasty, but the couple’s only surviving child was Mary, born in 1516. Princess Mary was mostly brought up at Eltham, and Katherine invested heavily in her education.
By 1529, Katherine was over 40 and Henry was still desperate for a male heir. He began to look for a way of marrying Anne Boleyn, who was much younger than his wife. Katherine fought back against his bullying, insisting that she was ‘the king’s true and legitimate wife’.
In 1531, Henry excluded Katherine from court, separating her from her much-loved daughter. After secretly marrying Anne in January 1533, he allowed her to use the queen’s apartments in the royal residences. He offered to reunite Katherine and Mary if they would acknowledge Anne as queen, but both refused.
Determined to get his way, Henry annulled his marriage to Katherine without the Pope’s approval, four months after his wedding to Anne. He then broke from the Catholic Church; created the Protestant Church of England; shut down all England’s monasteries; and fortified the coastline, expecting the Pope to authorise a French or Spanish invasion.
In 1534, Henry stopped Katherine from nursing her daughter when she fell seriously ill. That same year, Anne was told that she had failed to notice that Mary had bowed to her in the chapel at Eltham. When Anne wrote to the princess to thank her for her respectful gesture, Mary replied angrily that she had done no such thing, because she would never acknowledge Anne as queen.
Before she succumbed to cancer in January 1536, Katherine wrote Henry a final, heart-wrenching letter, expressing her continuing devotion to him and asking him to look after Mary. But the king insulted her even in death and prevented Mary from attending her mother’s funeral.
Katherine’s marriage to Henry had lasted 23 years – twice as long as all five of his subsequent marriages added together. His cruel treatment of the well-respected queen caused widespread anger.
These three queens all valued Eltham as a residence. They also undoubtedly influenced its development – although evidence for their impact is usually even scarcer than it is for the work undertaken by their husbands. But their life stories share two characteristics that stand out clearly.
The first is the strength and determination they showed in fighting for the rights of their children – sometimes literally. This could, however, be seen as a form of self-interest.
Secondly, though these three foreign queens all arrived in England as teenagers, speaking very little English, they all showed huge resilience and strength of will in the face of adversity, ill-treatment and extremely challenging marriages.
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