him derived from the laws first established by a British queen. "Martia, surnamed Proba, or the Just, was the widow of Gutiline king of the Britons, and was left protectress of the realm during the minority of her son. Perceiving much in the conduct of her subjects which needed reformation, she devised sundry wholesome laws, which the Britons, after her death, named the Martian statutes. Alfred caused the laws of this excellently learned princess, whom all commended for her knowledge of the Greek tongue, to be established in the realm." These laws, embracing trial by jury and the just descent of property, were afterwards collated and still farther improved by Edward the Confessor, and were as pertinaciously demanded from the successors of William the Conqueror by Anglo-Norman, as by Anglo-Saxon subjects.

Rowena, the wily Saxon princess, who, in an evil hour for the unhappy people of the land, became the consort of Vortigern in the year 450, is the next queen whose name occurs in our early annals. Guiniver, the golden-haired queen of Arthur, and her faithless successor and namesake, have been so mixed up with the tales of the romance poets and troubadours, that it would be difficult to verify a single fact connected with either.

Among the queens of the Saxon Heptarchy we hail the nursing mothers of the Christian faith in this island, who firmly established the good work begun by the British lady Claudia, and the empress Helena. The first and most illustrious of these queens was Bertha, the daughter of Cherebert king of Paris, who had the glory of converting her pagan husband, Ethelbert, the king of Kent, to that faith of which she was so bright an ornament, and of planting the first Christian church at Canterbury. Her daughter, Ethelburga, was in like manner the means of inducing her valiant lord, Edwin, king of Northumbria, to embrace the Christian faith. Eanfled, the daughter of this illustrious pair, afterwards the consort of Oswy king of Mercia, was the first individual who received the sacrament of baptism in Northumbria.

In the eighth century, the consorts of the Saxon kings were excluded by a solemn law, from sharing in the honours of royalty, on account of the crimes of the queen Edburga, who had poisoned her husband, Brihtric king of Wessex; and even when Egbert consolidated the kingdoms of the Heptarchy into an empire, of which he became the Bretwalda, or sovereign, his queen Redburga was not permitted to participate in his coronation. Osburga, the first wife of Ethelwulph, and the mother of the great Alfred, was also debarred from this distinction; but when, on her death, or, as some historians say, her

1 Holinshed's England, vol. i. p. 298; 4to. Although this infamous woman escaped the vengeance of human justice by fleeing to the continent, she was reduced to such abject

destitution, that Asser declares she was seen begging her bread at Pavia, where she died. -Note to Malmesbury, by Dr. Giles.

divorce, Ethelwulph espoused the beautiful and accomplished Judith, the sister of the emperor of the Franks, he violated this law by placing her beside him on the King's-bench, and allowing her a chair of state, and all the other distinctions to which her high birth entitled her. This afforded a pretence to his ungallant subjects for a general revolt, headed by his eldest son Ethelbald, by whom he was deprived of half his dominions. Yet Ethelbald, on his father's death, was so captivated by the charms of the fair cause of his parricidal rebellion, that he outraged all Christian decency by marrying her.

The beautiful and unfortunate Elgiva, the consort of Edwy, has afforded a favourite theme for poetry and romance; but the partisans of her great enemy, Dunstan, have so mystified her history, that it would be no easy matter to give an authentic account of her life. Elfrida, the queen of Edgar, has acquired an infamous celebrity for her remorseless hardness of heart. She did not possess the talents necessary to the accomplishment of her design of seizing the reins of government after she had assassinated her unfortunate step-son at Corfe-castle, and was entirely circumvented in her ambitious views by the political genius of Dunstan, the master-spirit of the age.

Emma of Normandy, the beautiful queen of Ethelred, and afterwards of Canute, plays a conspicuous part in the Saxon annals. There is a Latin treatise, written in her praise by a contemporary historian, entitled, "Encomium Emma;" but, notwithstanding the florid eulogiums there bestowed upon her, the character of this queen must be considered a doubtful one. The manner in which she sacrificed the interests of her children by her first husband, Ethelred, to those by her second marriage with the Danish conqueror, is little to her credit, and was certainly never forgiven by her son, Edward the Confessor; though that monarch, after he had witnessed the triumphant manner in which she cleared herself of the charges brought against her by her foes, by passing through the ordeal of walking barefoot, unscathed, over nine red-hot plough-shares in Winchester cathedral, threw himself at her feet in a transport of filial penitence, implored her pardon with tears, and submitted to the discipline at the high altar, as a penance for having exposed her to such a test of her innocence.1

Editha, the consort of Edward the Confessor, was not only an amiable, but a learned lady. The Saxon historian, Ingulphus, himself a scholar at Westminster-monastery, close by Editha's palace, affirms that the queen used frequently to intercept him and his school-fellows in her walks, and ask them questions on their progress in Latin, or, in the words of his translator, "moot points of grammar with them, in which she oftentimes posed them." Sometimes she gave them a piece or two of silver out of her own purse, and sent them to the palace-buttery to

1 Milner's Winchester.

breakfast. She was skilful in the works of the needle, and with her own hands embroidered the garments of her royal husband, Edward the Confessor. But well as the acquirements and tastes of Editha qualified her to be the companion of that learned prince, he never treated her with the affection of a husband, or ceased to remember that her father had supported the Danish usurpation, and imbrued his hands in the blood of the royal line.

The last Anglo-Saxon queen, Edith, or Alfgith, surnamed the Fair, the faithful consort of the unfortunate Harold, was the sister of the earls Morcar and Edwin, so celebrated in the Saxon annals, and the widow of Griffin, prince of North Wales. The researches of Sir Henry Ellis, and other antiquaries of the present day, lead to the conclusion that the touching instance of woman's tender and devoted love,-the verification of Harold's mangled body among the slain at Hastings, generally attributed to his paramour, belongs rather to queen Edith, his disconsolate widow.

Such is the brief summary of our early British and Anglo-Saxon queens. A far more important position on the progressive tableau of history is occupied by the royal ladies who form the series of our mediæval queens, commencing with Matilda of Flanders, the wife of William the Conqueror, the mother of a mighty line of kings, whose august representative, our liege lady queen Victoria, at present wears the crown of this realm. The spirit of chivalry, born in the poetic South, was not understood by the matter-of-fact Saxons, who regarded woman as a very subordinate link of the social chain. The Normans, having attained to a higher grade of civilization, brought with them the refined notion, inculcated by the troubadours and minstrels of France and Italy, that the softer sex was entitled, not only to the protection and tenderness, but to the homage and service of all true knights. The revolution in popular opinion effected by this generous sentiment elevated the character of woman, and rendered the consort of an AngloNorman or Plantagenet king a personage of scarcely less importance than her lord.

"There is something," observes an eloquent contemporary, "very peculiar in the view which we obtain of history in tracing the lives of queens-consort. The great world is never entirely shut out: the chariot of state is always to be seen,-the sound of its wheels is ever in our ears. We observe that the thoughts, the feelings, the actions of her whose course we are tracing are at no time entirely disconnected with him by whose hand the reins are guided, and we not unfrequently detect the impulse of her finger by the direction in which it moves.” Whether beloved or not, the influence on society of the wife and companion of the sovereign must always be considerable; and for the honour of womankind be it remembered, that it has, generally speaking, been

exerted for worthy purposes. Our queens have been instruments, in the hands of God, for the advancement of civilization, and the exercise of moral and religious influence; many of them have been brought from foreign climes to plant the flowers and refinements of a more polished state of society in our own, and well have they, for the most part, performed their mission.

William the Conqueror brought the sword and the feudal tenure. He burned villages, and turned populous districts into his huntinggrounds. His consort, Matilda, introduced her Flemish artisans, to teach the useful and profitable manufactures of her native land to a starving population: she brought her architects, and set them to build the stately fanes, which gave employment to another class of her subjects, and encouraged the fine arts,-sculpture, painting, and needlework. Above all, she bestowed especial regard and honours on the poets and chroniclers of her era.

The consort of Henry I., Matilda of Scotland, familiarly designated by her subjects "Maude, the gode quene,” not only excelled in personal works of piety and charity, and in refining the morals and manners of the licentious Norman court, but exerted her influence with her royal husband to obtain the precious boon of a charter for the people, which secured to them the privilege of being governed by the righteous laws of Edward the Confessor. Her graceful successor, Adelicia of Louvaine, was, like herself, a patroness of poetry and history, and did much to improve the spirit of the age by affording a bright example of purity of conduct.

Our third Matilda, the consort of Stephen, was the founder of churches and hospitals, and the friend of the poor. It is certain that her virtues, talents and conjugal heroism, did more to preserve the crown to her husband than the swords of the warlike barons who espoused his cause. Eleanora of Aquitaine, though defective in her moral conduct, was a useful queen in her statistic and commercial regulations.

Berengaria, the crusading queen, of whom so much has been said and so little known, before the publication of her biography in the first edition of this work, was only influential through her mild virtues, her learning, and her piety; but she never held her state in England, which, during the greater portion of her warlike husband's reign, was suffering from the evils of absenteeism.

Isabella of Angoulême, the consort of John, was one of the few queens who have left no honourable memorials, either on the page of history or the statistics of this country. Neither can any thing be said in praise of Eleanor of Provence, the consort of Henry III., whose selfishness, avarice and reckless extravagance, offended all ranks of the people, especially the citizens of London, and precipitated the realm into the horrors of civil war.

The moral beauty of the character of Eleanor of Castile, the consort of Edward I., her wisdom, prudence and feminine virtues, did much to correct the evils which the follies of her predecessors had caused, and restored the queenly office to its proper estimation. Her amiable successor, Marguerite of France, has left no other records than those of compassion and kindliness of heart.

For the honour of female royalty be it noticed, that Isabella of France is the only instance of a queen of England acting in open and shameless violation of the duties of her high vocation, allying herself with traitors and foreign agitators against her king and husband, and staining her name with the combined crimes of treason, adultery, murder and regicide.

It would, indeed, be difficult to parallel, in the history of any other country, so many beautiful examples of conjugal devotedness as are to be found in the annals of the queens of England. Much of the statistic prosperity of England during the long, glorious reign of Edward III., may with justice be attributed to the admirable qualities and popular government of queen Philippa, who had the wisdom to establish, and the good taste to encourage, home manufactures, and never failed to exert her influence in a good cause.

Under the auspices and protection of the blameless Anne of Bohemia, the first queen of Richard II., we hail the first dawn of the principles of the Reformation. The seeds sown under her gentle influence, though apparently crushed in the succeeding reigns, took deeper root than shallow observers suspected, and were destined to spring up in the sixteenth century, and to produce fruits that should extend to the ends of the earth, when, in the fulness of time, the gospel should be preached by English missionaries to nations, of whose existence neither Wickliffe nor his royal patroness, queen Anne of England, in the fourteenth century, were aware. Isabella of Valois, the virgin widow of Richard II., whose eventful history has been, for the first time, recorded in this work, had no scope for queenly influence in this country, being recalled at so tender an age to her own.

Rapin has been betrayed by his vindictive hatred of his own country to assert, that every king of England who married a French princess was unfortunate, and came to an untimely end; but how far this assertion is borne out by facts, let the triumphant career of Edward I., whose second wife and queen was Margaret of France, and of Henry V., the husband of Katherine of Valois, daughter of Charles the VI. of France, answer. The calamitous fate of Henry VI. resulted, not from his marriage with Margaret of Anjou, but was brought about by a concatenation of circumstances, which inevitably prepared the way for the miseries of his reign long before that unfortunate princess was born. The fatal deviation from the regular line of the regal