A Collection of Old Ballads, i. 97.
"I never was more surprised," says the editor of the Collection of 1723, "than at the sight of the following ballad; little expecting to see pride and wickedness laid to the charge of the most affable and most virtuous of women: whose glorious actions are not recorded by our historians only; for no foreign writers, who have touched upon those early times, have in silence passed over this illustrious princess, and every nation rings with the praise of Eleonora Isabella of Castile, King Edward's Queen. Father Le Monie, who (in his Gallérie des Femmes Fortes) has searched all Christendom round, from its very infancy to the last age, for five heroines, very partially bestows the first place upon one of his own country-women, but gives the second, with a far superior character, to this queen."
In this absurdly false and ignorant production, the well-beloved Eleonora of Castile is no doubt con
founded with her most unpopular mother-in-law, Eleanor of Provence, the wife of Henry the Third, whose luxurious habits, and quarrels with the city of London, might afford some shadow of a basis for the impossible slanders of the ballad-singer. Queenhithe was a quay, the tolls of which formed part of the revenue of the Queen, and Eleanor of Provence rendered herself extremely odious by compelling vessels, for the sake of her fees, to unlade there. Charing-cross was one of thirteen monuments raised by Edward the First at the stages, where his queen's body rested, on its progress from the place of her decease to Westminster. In the connection of both these places with the name of a Queen Eleanor may be found (as Miss Strickland suggests in her Lives of the Queens) the germ of the marvellous story of the disappearance at Charing-cross and the resurrection at Queenhithe.
That portion of the story which relates to the cruelty exercised by the queen towards the Lord Mayor's wife is borrowed from the Gesta Romanorum. See Madden's Old English Versions, &c. p. 226, Olimpus the Emperour. Peele's Chronicle History of Edward the First exhibits the same misrepresentations of Eleanor of Castile. See what is said of this play in connection with the ballad of Queen Eleanor's Confession, vol. vi. p. 209. The whole title of the ballad is:—
A Warning Piece to England against Pride and Wickedness:
Being the Fall of Queen Eleanor, Wife to Edward the First, King of England; who, for her pride, by God's Judgments, sunk into the Ground at Charing-cross and rose at Queenhithe.
When Edward was in England king,
The first of all that name,
Proud Ellinor he made his queen,
A stately Spanish dame:
Whose wicked life, and sinful pride,5
Thro' England did excel:
To dainty dames, and gallant maids,
This queen was known full well.
She was the first that did invent
In coaches brave to ride;10
She was the first that brought this land
To deadly sin of pride.
No English taylor here could serve
To make her rich attire;
But sent for taylors into Spain,15
To feed her vain desire.