Charing Cross – the romance of Eleanor and Edward
Charing Cross is named for the ‘Eleanor cross’ that stood here from 1290, in what was then the hamlet of Charing. A Gothic style ‘cross’ – really more of a pinnacle - still stands in front of the Charing Cross Hotel, on the Strand, though it’s a Victorian replacement designed by E M Barry, who also designed the hotel and assisted his father on the Houses of Parliament. The original was demolished by Purtians in the 1640s as a symbol of both royalty and ‘popery’.
The story of the Eleanor crosses is rather touching. Edward I’s marriage to Eleanor of Castile was a standard medieval royal marriage, arranged for reasons of state rather than sentiment, but the couple seem to have come to care deeply for one another. (Unusually for an English king of the day Edward seems not to have had any other families besides the one he had with Eleanor!) When she died, near Lincoln, on a journey with her husband, he had her body eviscerated and embalmed, and brought to London to be buried at Westminster Abbey. (Her heart was buried at Blackfriars in the City of London, her entrails in Lincoln Cathedral – not an unusual way of dealing with royal or noble bodies at that time.)
Everywhere that the funeral cortege stopped, Edward erected a fine cross in her memory. There were originally twelve – only three now remain. This Victorian version is probably rather more decorative than the original, to judge by the relative plainness of the surviving three (at Geddington, Northampton and Waltham). The crosses were a moving testimony to his regard for his dead wife – and though he married again, he attended a memorial services for her to the end of his life.
If you want to carry on with the story of Eleanor, you can see her tomb in Westminster Abbey – with a marvellous gilt bronze effigy of the queen by William Torel, who had also made the effigy of Henry III.
By the way, this isn’t the original site of the cross. If you look over the road to Le Sueur’s fabulous statue of Charles I on horseback, that’s where the cross would originally have stood – and it’s ‘point zero’ for London, the place from which all road distances are measured.
Photo credit: Mark Shirley’s photo on flickr shows the Eleanor Cross at Geddington, which probably gives us a good idea of what the original Charing Cross would have looked like.
Comments Off