If the traveller does not know what to expect on approaching Waltham Cross, then the cross, standing in the centre of the road, must needs be a pleasant surprise to him, even though he presently discovers that they have done a great deal in recent times to spoil it; "they" meaning the usual pastors and masters, the furbishers and titivators of things ancient and worshipful, applying to such things their own little nostrums and programmes. But, woefully re-restored though it be, its crockets and pinnacles and panellings patched with a stone whose colour does not match with that of the old work, one can still find it possible to look upon it with reverence, for among the ancient wayside memorials of our storied land the beautiful Eleanor Crosses stand foremost, both for their artistic and their historic interest. More than any others, they hold the sentiment and the imagination of the wayfarer, and their architecture is more complex. The story that belongs to them is one long since taken to the warm hearts of the people, and cherished as among the most touching in all the history of the realm—a realm rich in stories of a peculiarly heart-compelling kind.

It is that of Eleanor of Castile, Queen of Edward the First, who accompanied him to Palestine in 1270, on his Crusade against the Infidel. History tells how, on the evening of June 17, 1272, the King was seated alone and unarmed in a tent of the camp before Acre. It was his birthday, but birthdays find scant celebration in the tented field, and Edward on that day was engaged in the sterner business of receiving proposals of surrender from the besieged. He had given audience to a messenger from the Emir of Jaffa, who, having delivered the letter he had brought, stood waiting. Bending low, in answering a question the King had put to him, he suddenly put his hand to his belt, as though to produce other letters; but, instead, drew a poisoned dagger and struck at the King with it. Edward endeavoured to shield himself, but received a deep wound in the arm; then, as the man endeavoured to strike again, giving him a kick that felled him to the ground, he wrenched away the would-be assassin's dagger and plunged it into his body. When the King's attendants came rushing in, the man was dead. Fortunate for him it was that he died so simply, for the imaginations of those who dispensed the rough justice of the time were sufficiently fertile to have devised many novel and exquisitely painful variations of torture for such an one.

The King's wound was serious, and although all the drugs and balsams in the limited pharmacopœia of those times were administered, it grew worse. Then it was, according to the pretty story universally received, that the Queen, finding the efforts of physicians vain, sucked the poison from the wounded arm of her lord to such good purpose that he recovered, and sat his charger again within fifteen days.

Medical criticism on this recorded action of the poison could scarce fail of being destructive, and indeed it is not to be expected that the story of Eleanor of Castile would be left unassailed in these days, when history is treated scientifically, and when all the old and gracious stories are being explained away or resolved into something repellent and utterly commonplace. Modern historians have told us that William Tell is a myth, and that, consequently, the famous incident of the apple could never have occurred. Robin Hood, they say, was equally imaginary, or if any real person existed on whom that figure of endearing romance was built up, he had more the attributes of a footpad than those of the chivalrous outlaw those legends have made him. They would even take from us Dick Whittington and his cat. In fact, all these romantic people are classed with King Arthur, Jack the Giant Killer, and Little Red Riding Hood. It is not a little cruel thus to demolish these glamorous figures, but historians since Macaulay have been merciless. It is, therefore, not surprising to read that Eleanor, instead of being heroic was a very woman, and was led "weeping and wailing" from the scene when the surgeons declared that the King's hurt was incurable, unless the whole of the poisoned flesh were cut away. The cure, says an old chronicler, was effected by the surgeons, and the romantic story has in recent times been declared "utterly unworthy of credit."

Alas! too, for the gentle and tender character that has ever been ascribed to Eleanor of Castile; for we read that "though pious and virtuous, she was rather grasping," causing scandal by taking part with Jewish usurers in cozening Christians out of their estates. Ancient records, done on rolls of sheepskin in mediæval dog-Latin, and preserved in the Record Office for all men to see—and read if they can—tell how hard a landlord she was, and how Archbishop Peckham interfered on behalf of her unfortunate tenants, telling her that reparation for wrongs done must precede absolution.

And yet, although we allow this to be truth, to some she must have been winsome and gracious. Not to the lower herd, almost certainly, for people below the rank of knights or dames were never, in those times, thought worthy the least consideration. To those who more nearly approached her own rank she may have been the generous personality she has ever been pictured, although for a true Castilian to be other than insufferably haughty and arrogant would seem, if traditions do not lie, to be against nature. To the King she was evidently all in all, or how explain the existence of so long and elaborate a series of crosses raised to the memory of his chère reine? Eighteen years after the famous incident of the poisoned wound the Queen died, on November 28, 1290. She breathed her last on the evening of that day at the village of Harby, in Nottinghamshire, whither she had accompanied the King on a royal progress he had been making through the Eastern Counties during the three preceding months. Parliament in those times was a perambulating body of lawgivers, following of necessity the footsteps of the monarch. The King, therefore, having arranged to stay at his Royal Palace of Clipstone, in Sherwood Forest, at the end of October, Parliament was summoned to meet there on the twenty-seventh of that month. Meanwhile, however, the Queen fell ill of a lingering fever, and for sake of the quiet that could not be obtained in the neighbourhood of the Court she was housed at Harby, twenty miles distant. But not all the care that was hers, nor the syrups and other medicines detailed in the old accounts, procured in haste from the city of Lincoln, five miles away, availed to avert the fatal conclusion of that wasting sickness.

The Queen's body was at once removed to Lincoln Cathedral, and the funeral procession seems to have set out from Lincoln city for Westminster on the fourth day of December. London was not reached until eleven days later, and the entombment at Westminster did not take place until the seventeenth of the month. Travelling was a slow and tedious process then, but not necessarily so slow as this. The reasons for the length of time consumed between Lincoln and Westminster were two, and are found both in the pompous circumstances of the journey and in the circuitous route taken. The ordinary route was by Stamford, Huntingdon, Royston, Puckeridge, and Cheshunt; but it was determined that the august procession should pass through a more frequented part of the country, and through districts where the Queen had been better known. Another object was to take some of the great religious houses on the way, and thus have suitable places at which to rest. The route chosen, therefore, included Grantham, Stamford, Geddington, Northampton, Stony Stratford, Woburn, Dunstable, St. Albans, Waltham Abbey, West Cheap, and Charing. At each of these places the Queen's body rested, and at each one was subsequently erected a memorial cross. This is no place for recounting the almsgiving, the endowments of charities and monasteries, and the payments for tapers and masses for the repose of her soul. Let it be understood that all these things were done on a scale of the greatest magnificence, and that the erection of these twelve great crosses was but one feature among many in the means employed to keep her memory alive and her soul in bliss unending. This last, indeed, was the principal reason of their building. In these days one regards the three crosses, that the rage of rabid men and the slower but scarce less sure fury of the elements between them have alone left us of the twelve, as merely beautiful specimens of the wedded arts of Sculpture and Architecture; or as affecting memorials of conjugal love. Those, however, would be erroneous regards. The crosses were to attract by their beauty, no doubt; but their higher purpose was to inspire the devotional sentiment; their presence by the wayside was to implore the passers-by to remember the "Queen of Good Memory," as documents of the time call her, that they might pray for her. Although they bore no inscription, they silently bade the traveller "Orate pro animâ," and were, accordingly, consecrated with full religious ceremonies.

The crosses were not of a uniform pattern, although many of them seem to have borne strong likenesses to each other. Nine have so utterly disappeared that not a single stone of them is discoverable at this day, but old prints serve to show, in conjunction with the still existing building accounts, their relative size and importance. The three remaining are those of Geddington, Hardingstone near Northampton, and this of Waltham. Waltham Cross stands seventy feet in height. It cost £95, equal to £1000 of our present money, and was originally built of stone from the quarries of Caen, in Normandy, as the lower stage of the work still shows. The two upper stages and the spirelet were restored and reconstructed in 1832 at a cost of £1200, and again, as recently as 1885-92, at an almost equal expense.

The beautiful old engraving of 1806, reproduced here, proves into what a dilapidated condition the Cross had at that time fallen. It would appear to have been even worse in 1720, when Dr. Stukeley was commissioned by the Society of Antiquaries to see that posts were placed round for its protection; and in 1757 it was in danger of falling, for Lord Monson, the then Lord of the Manor of Cheshunt, was petitioned to build some brickwork round the base and to set up some other posts. A later Lord of the Manor, a certain Sir George Prescott, in 1795, with colossal impudence endeavoured to remove it to his park at Theobalds, and would have done so had not his workmen found the stone too decayed to be displaced.

In the old print already referred to, and in the coaching print of some thirty years later, it will be noticed that a portion of that old coaching hostelry, the Falcon, actually abutted upon the Cross. The inn, indeed, occupied the site of a chantry chapel adjoining, where prayers for the soul of the Queen had been said for some two hundred and fifty years after her death. It may be suspected that those prayers, endowments notwithstanding, had grown somewhat perfunctory after that lapse of time, and the Queen herself little more than a legend; and so, when all Chantries were dissolved under Edward the Sixth, their revenues seized and the mumbling priests ejected, the world was well rid of a hoary piece of humbug. The Falcon was demolished when the latest restoration was brought to a conclusion, and a portion of its site thrown into the roadway, so that the Cross stands once more free from surrounding buildings.

In choosing a stone for those parts to be restored, the gross mistake was made of selecting a brownish-red stone from the Ketton quarries, in Northants. The reason for making this selection was that Caen stone is perishable and that of Ketton particularly durable; but in the result the restored Cross wears to-day a sadly parti-coloured appearance.