Representation of the demolishing of the cross in Cheapside, in the Year 1643.

John Evelyn recorded in his diary for the 2nd May 1643: ‘I went from Wotton to London, where I saw the furious and zealous people demolish that stately Cross in Cheapside.’

The cross was built in 1290 by Michael of Canterbury, by order of Edward I as one of 12 ‘Eleanor Crosses’: tall and lavishly decorated stone monuments marking the sites where the body of the King’s late wife, Eleanor of Castile, rested on its route from the East Midlands to Westminster Abbey.

Originally serving as a funerary monument and a point on royal processions, the symbolism of the cross changed over the following centuries and it lost its association with Queen Eleanor and accrued more generic associations with the monarchy, the papacy and Christianity. It was extensively rebuilt in 1441 with alterations made to its design, including the addition of figures of Edward the Confessor, St. Peter, the Virgin and Child, Diana, a pope, cardinal, and a gilded cross. Its position in Cheapside, London’s busy marketplace, thoroughfare, and place of public performance, violence, and punishment, also affected its multiple and contested meanings. In the 16th Century, the monument was repeatedly attacked by Puritans, who regarded it as a symbol of Catholic idolatry. It was finally demolished by workmen, protected by soldiers, on the orders of the Parliamentary Committee for the Demolition of Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry in order ‘to cleanse that great street of superstition’.

Two remaining fragments of the monument survive in the Museum of London’s collection (7240 and 7241). They were discovered in 1838 during reconstruction of the sewer in Cheapside.

This engraving, published in the Gentleman’s Magazine for December 1764, was probably based on an earlier etching by Wenceslaus Hollar, The pulling down of the cross in Cheapside, London, which appeared in various pamphlets and tracts between 1642 and 1660. See also 80.501/495 for another reworking of Hollar's Image.