There was little about Eleanor that was conventional or ordinary. Born around 1223 to Ramon Berenguer, Count of Provence (1198-1245), and Beatrice of Savoy, she was one of four sisters who would all become queens: her elder sister Margaret married Louis IX of France, and her younger sisters Sanchia and Beatrice married, respectively, Richard of Cornwall (Henry III’s brother), who would become king of Germany, and Charles of Anjou, who would take the throne of Sicily. The sisters were also renowned for their beauty, Eleanor no less than the others: when she arrived in England for her marriage to Henry III in 1236, at just 12 years old, the chronicler Matthew Paris was much impressed by her. For contemporaries, beauty was not simply about looks but about deportment, and even at such a young age Eleanor had grace and poise. At the same time, she was unusually astute, strong and courageous: in her subsequent life as queen of England she would become one of her husband’s most trusted counsellors, and more than once prove herself his superior in intelligence, political judgement, strength and determination.

Henry III’s marriage to his Provençal bride may have been arranged, the two meeting for the first time when she arrived in England for their wedding, but it became one of great devotion on both sides. Already 28, Henry was late to marry, and the mismatch in age between the two might easily have been a problem; the beautiful Eleanor with her fine eyes and dark hair was, after all, still a child when she became his wife as well as 16 years his junior.

Yet Henry was determined to love and guide her, ensuring that many of her relatives (the so-called ‘Savoyards’) were welcomed in England and formed part of her household, and carefully choosing companions and guides for her. One of these was his sister’s beloved former companion, Margaret Bisset, who later saved the king’s life by alerting him to an assassination attempt, while another was Nicholas de Farnham, the future Bishop of Durham, who proved a trusted spiritual guide for the young queen. Nothing was too much trouble for Eleanor’s comfort, with Henry embarking on renovations and decoration of her quarters in all their principal residences, usually incorporating the creation of herb gardens, of which she was particularly fond. At Windsor, her favourite castle, the royal quarters, including the chapel, were completely rebuilt.

The devoted king and queen regularly appeared in matching attire: at one Pentecost both dressed in gold cloth, and for the marriage of their daughter Margaret they wore the same robes as each other. This was a taste that extended to items of furniture, too: in 1247 Henry ordered beds with scarlet covers at Winchester for both. In their residences Henry took care to ensure that their apartments were either side by side or, where that was not possible, connected by a covered walkway (as he also did for her apartments and the chapel), expressing concern that Eleanor should be able to walk between them without getting her feet wet. Like her husband, Eleanor had a keen sartorial interest. She was a woman of exquisite taste and refinement, regularly importing clothes from abroad and even introducing a new style of wimple to England. She was known for her love of red fabric for her dresses.

The two were spiritually as well as sartorially well-matched. Henry was notably intense in his devotion, and eager to instil the same attitude in his wife, especially in respect of Edward the Confessor, his most revered saint. He even commissioned Matthew Paris to produce a life of the Confessor for her. Eleanor’s devotion as she grew into adulthood was similarly intense. In 1250, she joined Henry in making a vow to go on crusade, and would end her life after Henry’s death by retiring to the nunnery at Amesbury in Wiltshire. Characteristically, however, she went in her own decidedly intellectual direction, developing a special affinity with the Franciscan friars and strong connections with some of the most important religious thinkers of the age, Robert Grosseteste, scholastic theologian and Bishop of Lincoln, among others. Her sharp mind was reflected not only in the intellectual flavour of her spirituality, but in her love of reading. She possessed many books, particularly enjoying romances and histories, which she had specially imported from France.

Eleanor’s determined and indeed formidable character came to the fore during the great crisis of Henry’s reign, in 1258-65. In November 1259, a newsletter to Provence made it clear that ‘the queen is lady as she was, and all things are done with her knowledge and at her will’. This was not how people spoke about Henry at the time. Later, in 1263, it was he, not Eleanor, who gave up in the face of opposition: while Henry remained in the Tower of London (where he had retreated for safety), preparing to surrender to Simon de Montfort, the queen refused to be cowed, setting forth from the Tower and making a bold attempt to reach her son Edward by boat at Windsor Castle. An attack on her barge by a London mob, who pelted her with all manner of foodstuffs, prevented her from achieving her goal, and necessitated a rescue by the Mayor of London, but her refusal to surrender was an impressive demonstration of her indomitable will. It contrasted sharply with Henry’s own cowardice: even his son Edmund felt the indignity of being asked to surrender Dover Castle at the same time, and initially refused.

As the crisis progressed, Eleanor’s strength and ability became crucial to the king’s survival on the throne. When Henry was defeated by De Montfort at the Battle of Lewes in 1264, it was Eleanor, in France at the time, who amassed a large army in Flanders to go to his aid. The invasion on her husband’s behalf was only thwarted by a failed final attempt at a diplomatic solution; the delay it caused made it impossible for her to sustain the pay of her troops. Undeterred, she went to Gascony to ensure possession of the duchy in the face of the potential threat from Simon de Montfort, who was now dominant in England. There, she continued her efforts on Henry’s behalf, playing a significant role in getting enough troops to England to help secure the escape from captivity of her eldest son Edward, and enable a successful royalist revanche. Eleanor’s surviving letters from the period are testament to the diplomatic efforts she made on the Continent, levering all her connections in her husband’s service during a civil war that saw him almost unseated from the English throne.

The strength of Eleanor’s personality meant that she did not always see eye to eye with Henry. In 1251-2, they were at very public odds both over the appointment of a cleric to the church of Flamstead in Hertfordshire, and a dispute between one of Eleanor’s relatives from Savoy and one of Henry’s Lusignan relatives from Poitou. The row saw Henry temporarily confiscate Eleanor’s revenues and banish her from the royal court. The argument reflected a wider factional fall-out between the Savoyard relatives of the queen (who had largely arrived in the years after 1236, and whose interests she protected vigorously), and the Lusignan relatives of the king (who had arrived in the 1240s and were much championed by Henry) that came also to envelop many members of the English nobility, and formed a significant backdrop to the crisis of 1258-65. Early in that crisis, Eleanor and Henry were again at odds, the queen favouring the banishment of the Lusignans, which the reformers, who included her uncle Peter of Savoy, were demanding, while the king sought to defend them.

In the early 1250s, it was Henry who relented, not the queen. In 1252 he quickly recalled Eleanor to the royal court, and he gave up the legal case over Flamstead. There is no evidence that their relationship was in any way damaged by their disagreements; it seems that the depth of their love could quite easily withstand a difference of opinion no matter how angry Henry was about it initially. Perhaps their relationship also reflected Henry’s wider tendency to placate those with whom he found himself at odds and the extent to which the king was dependent on his wife. It was she, for example, who was made regent when Henry was in Gascony in 1253-4. Although the king’s brother Richard of Cornwall stood alongside her, the records indicate clearly that he was to counsel her; this was not a joint regency. It was therefore Eleanor who did the bulk of the work, including sending out the summons to Parliament in December 1253, less than a month after the birth of her daughter Katherine. Before his departure, Henry had also made provision that in the event of his death abroad, Eleanor should become keeper of the Lord Edward (their eldest son) and their other children, as well as of the realm and the king’s lands elsewhere. The aim was clear: to give her power during any Edwardian minority.

Both Eleanor and her husband were devoted parents to their five children. The future Edward I was born in 1239, when Eleanor was just 15. He was followed by Margaret in 1240, Beatrice in 1242 and Edmund in 1245. A gap ensued, during which time it is possible that there were miscarriages, before Katherine, their final child, was born in 1253. The royal children were based at Windsor, and Eleanor spent a good deal of her time there with them, as did Henry. We know that Eleanor oversaw her children’s upbringing and education, but her active maternal role was in many other ways also more like modern times than might be imagined. When the young Edward fell ill at Beaulieu Abbey in 1246, Eleanor ignored the rule that women should not remain in the abbey and stayed with him for three weeks while he recovered. Similarly, when concerns were raised about the well-being of their daughter Margaret after her marriage to Alexander III of Scotland (Alexander was still a minor at the time and Margaret was in the care of the Guardians of Scotland), both mother and father went to her in Scotland. In 1261 Margaret would stay near her mother for the birth of her own child. The depth of parental love felt by both Eleanor and Henry is demonstrated by their reaction to the loss of her final child Katherine in 1257 when she was just three years old. Possibly disabled from birth, Katherine’s death devastated her parents, with Eleanor becoming ill and remaining bedridden for a period thereafter.

Later, she was to play a role in raising some of her grandchildren, particularly two of Edward I’s children, and was also entrusted with keeping her son Edmund’s estates while he was on crusade with his elder brother in the 1270s. As she aged, Eleanor indicated in her letters to Edward that she felt her eldest son did not always give her the attention she should have had, a familiar lament of many parents: ‘Know, dear son’, she wrote, ‘that we are in good health, after our fashion, but we will be much better when we hear good news from you.’

By the end of Henry III’s reign, the queen had matured into a strong and determined character, who acted as the king’s and her children’s stay and strength, a devoted mother and wife. She was also a significant political player in her own right, whose actions had a clear and important impact on Henry’s reign; her actions were essential in enabling Henry’s victory in the civil war. But, for all her immense strengths, Eleanor cut a controversial figure in the 13th century, and in some respects now, too. Her antisemitism, which saw her expel all Jews from her estates, was extreme in its expression even for the time. She was also known as a vigorous exploiter of her estates, and in revenge on the Londoners for what happened to her when she tried to travel to Windsor in 1263, she was determined to extract every penny of ‘Queen’s Gold’ back-payments from them.

Perhaps most importantly, during the civil war Eleanor was assigned some blame for the disturbances that divided the kingdom: the Melrose Chronicler even called her ‘the root, the originator and the sower of all the discord’. This is certainly unfair, ‘a nonsense’, as Eleanor’s biographer Margaret Howell has observed: there is no doubt that it was Henry’s own policies that prompted rebellion. However, as Howell has shown, Eleanor was associated with the ‘aliens’ (foreigners) who were vilified during the civil war as enjoying undue favour from the king. Her Savoyard relatives, who had arrived in significant numbers in the 1230s and 1240s, had worked to integrate into English society better than Henry’s Lusignan kin, but Eleanor’s own social network did not extend beyond them in any meaningful way, and she was known to work tirelessly to protect their interests above those of others. In 1264-5, her efforts to raise a large army on the Continent also played into the populist rhetoric from the reform movement about an influx of ‘aliens’ at the expense of native Englishmen.

Eleanor’s dedication to the interests of her Savoyard family even prompted a degree of estrangement from the future Edward I in the late 1250s. As she sought to control her son through her own following, her actions contributed to his rebellion against his parents and temporary association with the reform movement in the late 1250s. The two were very similar in the strength of their personalities and the future king resented his mother’s interference in his choice of associates. While the quarrel was ultimately settled, and we can be in no doubt of Edward’s love for his mother and appreciation of her staunch devotion to her children, in later life Eleanor was careful to moderate her attempts to hold sway over him. She could not dominate and steer him in the way that she had done with Henry III.

As both a queen and a woman, Eleanor of Provence was a formidable force. Able, intelligent, quick, determined, devoted and staunchly loyal, she was indispensable to Henry III in practical and personal terms, and proved a loving mother to her children. But, while her strong focus on the financial and other interests of her immediate and wider family, often defined of course in her own terms, played a large role in saving Henry III in the 1260s, at times it created significant difficulties and fissures that a more emotionally sensitive person would have understood. Like so many other determined and single-minded personalities, she was a hugely influential but controversial figure.