Eleanor of Provence

Although Eleanor was completely devoted to her husband and staunchly defended him against the rebel Simon de Montfort, 6th Earl of Leicester, she was very unpopular among the Londoners.On one occasion, Eleanor's barge was attacked by angry Londoners who pelted her with stones, mud, pieces of paving, rotten eggs and vegetables.[1] Eleanor was probably born latest in 1223; Matthew Paris describes her as being "jamque duodennem" (already twelve) when she arrived in the Kingdom of England for her marriage She was well educated as a child and developed a strong love of reading, partly due to the influence of her tutor Romée de Villeneuve.[11] After riding to London the same day where a procession of citizens greeted the bridal pair, Eleanor was crowned queen consort of England in a ceremony at Westminster Abbey planned by Henry[12] which was followed by a magnificent banquet with the entire nobility in full attendance.[1] Despite the substantial age gap the historian Margaret Howell observes that the King "was generous and warm-hearted and prepared to lavish care and affection on his wife".[16] Though Eleanor and Henry supported different factions at times, she was a loyal and faithful consort and was made regent of England when her husband went to suppress a rebellion in Gascony in 1253,[17] although this was after a quarrel about the Gascon revolt that had lasted a year.Many Savoyards, probably including Eleanor, backed a 1258 coup d'état by a coalition of English barons who expelled the Poitevins from England,[26][27] reforming the royal government through a process called the Provisions of Oxford.[33] When her grandson Henry died in her care in 1274, Eleanor went into mourning and gave orders for his heart to be buried at the Dominican priory at Guildford, which she founded in his memory.[35] She became a nun[36] and retired in 1286 to Amesbury Priory in Wiltshire, eight miles north of Salisbury, as Henry II's widow, Eleanor of Aquitaine, had taken up residence at the mother abbey, Fontevraud.[1] Eleanor was renowned for her learning, cleverness, and skill at writing poetry,[38] as well as her beauty and antisemitism; she was also known as a leader of fashion, continually importing clothes from France.[4] She favoured red silk damask and often wore parti-coloured cottes (a type of tunic), gold or silver girdles into which a dagger was casually thrust, and decorations of gilt quatrefoil.Eleanor seems to have been especially devoted to her eldest son, Edward; when he was deathly ill in 1246, she stayed with him at the abbey at Beaulieu in Hampshire for three weeks, long past the time allowed by monastic rules.[c] The children spent most of their childhood at Windsor Castle and Henry appears to have been extremely attached to them, rarely spending extended periods of time apart from his family.