King Charles and his wife, Queen Camilla, may have been the first king and queen of England to visit the Vatican since the Reformation. But they were certainly not the first English rulers to do so; they were treading in what had once been a well-worn path. One of the more remarkable visits occurred in early April of 1191. The ruler in question was not a king, however, but a queen: the glamorous – and perhaps over-glamourised – Eleanor of Aquitaine.
She remains the only known queen of England to have made the journey to Rome on her own.
