Charing Cross, built to commemorate the last resting-place of the Queen's body before it reached Westminster Abbey, occupied, as the detail from a prospect, by Ralph Agas (_c._ 1560), of London and neighbourhood shows (Fig. 135), approximately the same site where Herbert Le Sueur's superb equestrian statue of Charles I. now stands. The original cross (Fig. 136) is described as having been the finest and stateliest of all the Eleanor crosses. It was the work of Richard Crundale, who, dying in 1293, was succeeded by Roger Crundale; and Alexander, of Ireland, carved the statues of the Queen for the cross, which is computed to have cost nearly £800. By 1590 it had become much weather-beaten and defaced with age. It may have been about this time that the old cross was entirely rebuilt, the Gothic work disappearing, and a monument of new design, in the current fashion of the day, being erected in its place (Fig. 137). The Parliament having decreed the destruction of the cross in 1643, it was finally demolished in the summer of 1647. Lilly, writing in 1715, says that some of the stones of the old fabric were used for the pavement in front of Whitehall, while others were cut up and polished to make knife handles and other small objects as souvenirs. With Eleanor crosses there should be classed a small group of crosses, which, though erected neither for the same purpose nor at the same time as the Eleanor crosses, yet closely resemble the latter in being fashioned in the graceful shape of a spire of diminishing stages. [Illustration: 138. GLOUCESTER HIGH CROSS] The old cross at Gloucester (Fig. 138) stood on elevated ground at the meeting of Northgate, Southgate, and Westgate Streets. It was raised on steps, and was octagonal on plan. The ground storey, and the next above it, dated apparently from about 1320. But the uppermost storey, consisting of a cluster of turrets with little vanes, the central turret or shaft surmounted by an orb and fourways cross, can hardly have been any earlier than the sixteenth century. Coventry Cross (Fig. 8) had similar vanes which (called _girouettes_ in French, because of their gyrating or revolving with the wind), being gilt, and glittering gaily in the sunlight, imparted additional charm to the stone crosses whereto they were attached. The total height of Gloucester Cross was 34 ft. 6 in. When drawn in 1750, on the eve of its demolition, the cross contained, in the niches of its middle storey, statues of the following kings and queens of England:--King John, Henry II., Queen Eleanor, Edward III., Richard II., Richard III., Queen Elizabeth, and Charles I. The whole was surrounded by an iron railing of obviously later date than the cross itself. [Illustration: 139, 140. TOTTENHAM, MIDDLESEX HIGH CROSS, BEFORE AND AFTER "RESTORATION"]