89.] Greatly honoured by her son, Richard I. 199 ird nestling, since Richard, her third son, honoured her with all verence after releasing her from prison." If Matthew would imply at Henry confined Eleanora for impropriety of conduct, he is not suparted by other authors. King Richard I. landed at Portsmouth, August the 12th, 1189. Three days after, he arrived at his mother's court at Winchester, where ds first care was directed to his father's treasure. After he had conerred with his mother, he ordered before him Ranulph de Glanville, who gave him so good an account of the secrets of the Winchester treasure-vault, that he set him at liberty, and ever after treated him with confidence. Either Ranulph de Glanville had behaved to the queen, when his prisoner, with all possible respect, or Eleanora was of a very magnanimous disposition, and forebore prejudicing her son against her late castellan. Glanville gave up to the king the enormous sum of nine hundred thousand pounds, besides valuable jewels. At his first seizure, only 100,000 marks were found in the treasure-vault, which, it seems, possessed some intricacies only known to Glanville. The king's next care was to settle the revenue of the mother he so passionately loved, and whose wrongs he had so fiercely resented. Her dower was rendered equal to those of the queens Matilda Atheling and Matilda of Boulogne. Richard returned to England with the full intention of immediately joining the crusade, now warmly preached throughout Christendom. In furtherance of this cherished purpose, preparations were instantly made for his early coronation, which took place on the 3rd of September, 1189, three weeks only after he reached the shores of his future kingdom. As the etiquette of the queen-mother's recent widowhood prevented her from sharing in this splendid festival, all women were forbidden to be present at its celebration. Richard issued a proclamation the day before, debarring all women and Jews from entering the precincts of Westminsterabbey at the time of his inauguration,-a classification of persons greatly impugning the gallantry of the lion-hearted king. The Provençal alliance had produced a prodigious influx of this usurious race into England. As they enjoyed high privileges in the hereditary dominions of queen Eleanora, they supposed they were secure under her son's government. Believing money would buy a place everywhere, they flocked to the abbey, bearing a rich present; but the populace set upon them and Rog. Hov. Brompton. Tyrrell. M. Paris. The singular employment of warlike barons as justiciaries, and the combination of the offices of general and of lawyer in one man, are strange features in the Norman and Angevin domination in England. This Ranulph de Glanville is an instance; he was Henry's great general, who defeated and took Prisoner William the Lion of Scotland; but he is only known to our gentlemen of the bar as the author of Glanville's Institutes,' -this steel-clad baron being the first who reduced the laws of England to a written code. To make the contrast with modern times still stronger, the great legalist died crusading, having, either to please Cœur de Lion, or to atone for his sins both as lawyer and general, taken up the cross, for the purpose of battling " Mahoun and Termagaunt." 2 Rog. Hov. Brompton. M. Paris. slaughtered them, being excited to religious mania by the preaching of the crusade. The massacre of these unfortunate money-brokers was not perpetrated with the connivance of either king Richard or the queen-mother. The ringleaders were, by the king's orders, tried and pat to death. Alice, the long-betrothed bride of Richard, was neither married nor crowned. On the contrary, she was committed to the same species of restraint, by the orders of the queen, in which she herself had been so long held captive. The princess Alice had been twenty-two | years without leaving England; and as she was the only person on whom Eleanora retaliated any part of her wrongs, the inference must be drawn that she considered Alice as the cause of them. Eleanora departed for Aquitaine as soon as her son had settled her English dower, and Richard embarked at Dover, for Calais, to join the crusade, taking with him but ten ships from the English ports. His troops were disembarked, and he marched across France to his mother's dominions, where he formally resigned to her the power he had exercised, during his father's lifetime, as her deputy. Richard appointed the ren dezvous of the crusade at Messina, and directing his mother to meet him there, he set sail from Marseilles for Sicily; while Eleanora undertook a journey to Navarre, to claim for him the hand of Berengaria, the daughof king Sancho. Richard had much to effect at Messina, before he commenced the crusade. Before he struck a blow for Christendom, he was obliged to right the wrongs of his sister Joanna, queen of Sicily, the youngest daughter of Eleanora and Henry II. William the Good, through the recommen ations of Peter of Blois (who had formerly been his tutor), became the husband of Joanna Plantagenet. The Sicilian ambassador granted Joanna an immense dower; and, when the aged bridegroom found that his young queen was still more beautiful and sweet-tempered than her father's chaplain, Peter, had set forth, he greatly augmented her jointure. The king of Sicily died childless, leaving his young widow immense riches in his will. King Tancred robbed her of these, and of her dower and, to prevent her complaints, enclosed her in prison at Messina. I was this outrage Richard hastened there to redress. But the list of goos the fair widow directed her brother to claim of Tancred, could surely have only existed in a catalogue of Aladdin's household furniture:-| arm chair of solid gold;1 footstools of gold; a table twelve feet long, with trestles of gold; besides urns and vases of the same precious met These reasonable demands were enforced by the arm of the migh Richard. Tancred compounded for dower and legacy with the enormous par ment of 40,000 ounces of gold. This treasure, with the royal widow 1 Rog. Hov. and Vinisauf; likewise Piers of Langtoft, who mentions many other curious articles. 190.] Richard I. appoints her Queen-Regent. 201 merself, were consigned to Richard forthwith. Thus was a companion rovided for Richard's expected bride, the elegant and refined Berenaria, who, under the conduct of Eleanora of Aquitaine, was daily expected. Richard was so well pleased with the restoration of his sister End her treasures, that he asked Tancred's daughter in marriage for his hen acknowledged heir, Arthur of Bretagne. Eleanora arrived in Messina, bringing with her Berengaria; she tarried out four days in the company of her daughter Joanna, and sailed for Rome; her errand was to settle a dispute which had arisen between king Richard and Geoffrey, the son of Rosamond, whom the king had apointed archbishop of York, according to his father's dying request, but equired an enormous sum from the revenues of the archbishopric. Queen Eleanora returned to England in 1190. Thus did Eleanora pass rom captivity to the high authority of queen-regent. In every emergency uring the king's absence, she was the guiding power. She placed the overnment of Aquitaine in the hands of her grandson, Otho of Saxony, nd “governed England with great wisdom and popularity.” "1 Queen leanora, when thus arduously engaged in watching over the interests her best-beloved son, was approaching her seventieth year,-an age hen rest is imperiously demanded by the human frame. But years of il still remained before her; and these years were laden with sorrows, hich drew from her that pathetic alteration of the regal style, on the ccasion of the captivity of Cœur de Lion, where she declares herself— Eleanora, by the wrath of God queen of England." Other traits of e subdued spirit of Eleanora are to be discovered; for the extreme obility of her spirits diffused itself even over the cold records of state. Then swayed by calmer feelings, she styles herself" Ælienora, by the ace of God humbly queen of England." 2 Eleanora of Aquitaine is nong the very few women who have atoned for an ill-spent youth by a ise and benevolent old age. As a sovereign, she ranks among the reatest of female rulers.3 1 Peter of Blois' Epistles. 2 Rymer. 3 To prevent repetition, the rest of er life is comprehended in the memoirs of her daughters-in-law, Berengaria and Isabella. BERENGARIA OF NAVARRE, QUEEN OF RICHARD CŒUR DE LION. [1 BERENGARIA, the beautiful daughter of Sancho the Wise, king Navarre, was first seen by Richard Coeur de Lion, when count Poitou,1 at a grand tournament given by her gallant brother at Pa peluna, her native city. Richard was then captivated by the beauty Berengaria, but his engagement to the fair and frail Alice of Fran prevented him from offering her his hand. Berengaria may be consider a Provençal princess by language and education, though she was Spanis by descent. Her mighty sire, Sancho the Wise, had for his immedia ancestor Sancho the Great, called the emperor of all Spain, although h inherited but the little realm of Navarre. He married Beatrice daughter of Alphonso, king of Castile, by whom he had three children Berengaria, Blanche, and one son, Sancho, surnamed "the Strong,"hero celebrated by the Provençal poets for his gallant exploits against the Moors; for he defeated the Miramolin, and broke with his battleaxe the chains that guarded the camp of the infidel, which chains were afterwards transferred to the armorial bearings of Navarre. An ardent friendship had subsisted from boyhood between Richard and Sancho the Strong, the gallant brother of Berengaria. A similarity of pursuits strengthened the intimacy of Richard with the royal family Navarre. The father and brother of Berengaria were celebrated for their skill and judgment in Provençal poetry. Berengaria was herself learned princess; and Richard, who was not only a troubadour poet, but as acting sovereign of Aquitaine, was the prince and judge of all troubadours, became naturally drawn into close bonds of amity with a family, whose tastes and pursuits resembled his own. No one can marvel that the love of the ardent Richard should be strengthened when he met the beautiful, the cultivated, and virtuous Berengaria, in the familiar intercourse which sprang from his friend ship with her gallant brother; but a secret engagement, replete with 1 See the preceding biography. 2 Richard and his nephew, the troubadour count of Champagne, who afterwards married Blanche, the younger sister of Berengaria, on the most were, with Sancho the Strong, 89.] Demanded in marriage by Cœur de Lion. 203 hope deferred," was the fate of Richard the Lion-hearted and the fair wer of Navarre, before the death of his father, in 1189, placed him at erty to demand her hand. Richard had another motive for his exeme desire for this alliance; he considered that his beloved mother, neen Eleanora, was deeply indebted to king Sancho, the father of erengaria, because he had pleaded her cause with Henry II., and obained some amelioration of her imprisonment. Soon after Richard ascended the English throne, he sent his mother, queen Eleanora, to the court of her friend, Sancho the Wise, to demand he princess Berengaria in marriage; "for," says Vinisauf, “he had long oved the elegant girl." Sancho the Wise not only received the proosition with joy, but entrusted Berengaria to the care of queen Eleanora. The royal ladies travelled from the court of Navarre ogether, across Italy to Naples, where they found the ships belongng to Eleanora had arrived in the bay. But etiquette forbade Berengaria to approach her lover till he was free from the claims of Alice; and the dissolution of that engagement was tedious; therefore she sojourned with queen Eleanora at Brindisi, in the spring of 1191, waitng the message from king Richard, announcing that he was free to receive her hand. It was at Messina that the question of the engagement between the princess Alice and the king of England was debated with Philip Augustus, her brother; and more than once, the potentates assembled for the crusade expected that the forces of France and England would be called into action, to decide the right of king Richard to give his hand to another lady than the sister of the king of France. Piers of Langtoft recapitulates these events, "Then spake king Philip, and in grief said, My sister Alice is now forsaken, Since one, of more riches, of Navarre hast thou taken.' When king Richard understood what king Philip had sworn, Before clergy he stood, and proved on that morn, That Alice to his father a child had borne, Which his sire king Henry held for his own; A maiden child it was, and now dead it is. 'This was a great trespass, and against mine own witte If I Alice take."" King Philip contended that Richard held in hand his sister's dower, the good city of Gisors. Upon this the king of England brought the matter to a conclusion in these words: |