The Demolished London Church Where Four Medieval English Queens Were Buried Under Whose Bones Modern Newgate Street Now Runs

The Greyfriars Church — formally Christ Church Greyfriars — was the principal London church of the Franciscan Order from 1224 until the Henrician dissolution of 1538. It stood on the south side of Newgate Street, just inside the western gate of the City of London, on a site donated to the friars by the Holborn mercer John Iwyn in 1224. The original 13th-century structure was replaced between 1306 and 1348 by a substantially larger second church — approximately 90 metres long, the second-largest church building in medieval London after Old St Paul’s Cathedral.

The new church became one of the principal English royal burial sites of the 14th century, by a substantively specific royal preference: Queen Margaret of France, second wife of Edward I, had been a major Franciscan patron and was buried at Greyfriars at her death in 1318. The royal-burial tradition substantively followed.

Four royal women

Four substantially major medieval English royal women were buried at Greyfriars over the following century.

Margaret of France (1279–1318), Edward I’s young second queen, was buried in front of the high altar in March 1318. Her tomb was the foundational royal burial and substantively established the precedent.

Eleanor of Provence (c. 1223–1291), the wife of Henry III, had been buried at Amesbury Priory in Wiltshire, but her heart had been removed at her death and was substantively interred separately at Greyfriars (the medieval royal practice of multiple-site burial allowed body, heart, and entrails to go to different places).

Isabella of France (c. 1295–1358), the queen who had invaded England with Roger Mortimer in 1326 to depose her husband Edward II, was buried at Greyfriars on 27 August 1358 in front of the high altar, beside Margaret of France. The choice of Greyfriars was Isabella’s own and was made in her will of 1357; she was substantively buried in the wedding dress of her 1308 marriage to Edward II, which she had kept for fifty years. The grave was reportedly furnished with the small silver casket that contained Edward II’s heart (sent to her after his death at Berkeley Castle in 1327) — substantively a curious specific funerary gesture that has occasioned a literature of its own.

Joan of the Tower (1321–1362), Isabella’s daughter who had been married off to the Scottish king David II as a child, returned to England after David’s 1357 capture and lived in London until her death of a fever in September 1362. She was buried beside her mother at Greyfriars.

The dissolution

Greyfriars was dissolved in November 1538 under the Henrician suppression of the friaries. The substantial church furnishings — vestments, plate, relics, royal tomb fittings — were confiscated by the Crown. Henry VIII gave the church building itself to the City of London in 1546 for the establishment of Christ’s Hospital — a new royal foundation for the education of poor London orphans, which used the church and adjacent cloister buildings as its primary teaching premises.

The royal tombs were partly preserved and partly destroyed in the dissolution. The 17th-century antiquarian John Stow’s Survey of London (1598) records that the high-altar tombs of Margaret of France and Isabella of France were still visible in his lifetime, but that the inscriptions and brasses had been substantively stripped during the dissolution. The substantively standing physical fabric of the church survived through the dissolution and the substantively early Stuart period.

The Great Fire and the lost burials

The Great Fire of London of September 1666 destroyed the Greyfriars church entirely. The fire levelled the medieval church fabric, incinerated the surviving wooden monuments, and substantively buried the underlying medieval royal-tomb chambers under approximately three metres of fire debris.

The post-Fire reconstruction of the area by Christopher Wren produced a smaller replacement church (Christ Church Newgate Street, 1677–1691) on only the western half of the original Greyfriars site. The eastern half — where the high-altar tomb chambers had been — was built over by the Christ’s Hospital school buildings. Modern Newgate Street and King Edward Street were laid out across the original church footprint in the 19th century.

The Wren replacement church was gutted by German bombing in December 1940; the post-war ruins are now a public garden. The Greyfriars royal burials are beneath the modern street pattern, unrecovered, substantively unexcavated, and substantively not currently planned for archaeological investigation.

Isabella of France, Margaret of France, Eleanor of Provence’s heart, and Joan of the Tower remain under Newgate Street.