The London Friary Where Four Medieval Queens of England Were Buried and Then Lost

The Greyfriars Church at Newgate stood on the north side of the substantial Newgate Street from approximately 1225 until 1547. It was the substantial principal London house of the Franciscan Order — the substantial Friars Minor of Saint Francis — and was the wealthiest Franciscan establishment in medieval England. The church proper occupied the central position of a extensive friary complex that included a dormitory, refectory, library, infirmary, and cemetery. The cloister covered approximately 4,500 square metres of the central City. The church itself was approximately 90 metres long internally (longer than the parallel-period Westminster Abbey nave) and was the second-largest London church after Old St Paul’s.

It held the tombs of four medieval queens of England.

The four queens

Marguerite of France (1279–1318) — second wife of Edward I and stepmother to Edward II — had endowed the 14th-century rebuilding of the Greyfriars choir in the first decade of the 1300s and had chosen the new church as her burial site. She died at Marlborough Castle in February 1318 and was buried in front of the Greyfriars high altar with royal honours.

Eleanor of Provence (c. 1223–1291), the widow of Henry III and mother of Edward I, had not originally been buried at Greyfriars. Her original burial was at Amesbury Priory in Wiltshire. Her heart, however, had been removed before burial (a medieval royal practice) and was brought to London and deposited at Greyfriars in 1291 in a small reliquary tomb.

Joan of the Tower (1321–1362), daughter of Edward II and Queen Consort of David II of Scotland, died at Hertford Castle in September 1362 after her repudiation and return from the Scottish court. She was buried at Greyfriars in front of the same high altar, close to her grandmother Marguerite.

Isabella of France (1295–1358), daughter of Philip IV of France, Queen Consort of Edward II, regent for the young Edward III with Roger Mortimer through 1326–1330, and mother of the Hundred Years’ War claimant Edward III, was the most politically distinguished of the four Greyfriars royal burials. She died at Hertford Castle in August 1358, approximately a year after her cousin John II of France had been captured at the English victory at Poitiers (which the Hundred Years’ War strategic-political logic that her son had pursued had produced). She was buried with her heart laid on her chest in a casket that also contained the mummified heart of her deceased husband Edward II — a late-life gesture of reconciliation that historians have read in approximately every possible direction.

The Dissolution and demolition

Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries reached the London Greyfriars in 1538. The Franciscan community was expelled; the church and conventual buildings were surrendered to the Crown; the church furnishings, vestments, plate, and library were confiscated and sold. The four royal tombs were substantively desecrated in the process: the inscribed brass plates were stripped, the royal effigies were smashed, the tomb-chests were broken open and robbed.

The church building stood unused through approximately 1547 before being demolished. The royal bones appear to have been left in their broken tomb chambers under the church floor; the 16th-century antiquaries who recorded the demolition (John Leland in 1538, John Stow in 1598) note the bones still being in situ at the respective times of their visits.

The site was given over to Christ’s Hospital — Edward VI’s 1552 charitable foundation for poor London boys — which built new school buildings over the original church footprint. The Christ’s Hospital remained at the Newgate site until 1902, when it relocated to Horsham in Sussex. The original 16th-century school buildings had themselves been partly demolished by the Great Fire of 1666 and partly demolished by Victorian rebuilding through the 19th century. The modern site is occupied by commercial buildings; the street layout has changed.

What is still there

The four queens’ bones have never been recovered. Modern geophysical surveys of the Newgate Street area indicate the likely position of the original church footprint and the probable preservation of intact medieval structural footings subst