his country, and had no idea of taking on him the cares and duties of royalty.
His young Queen encouraged all his natural failings. She was one of the four daughters of Beranger, last Count of Provence, highly accomplished young heiresses. One of them already was wedded to Louis IX., the son of Louis the Lion, who, by the death of his father and grandfather, had been placed on the throne of France nearly at the same age and time as Henry in England. Marguerite, whose device, the daisy, Louis wore entwined with his own lily, was a meek, peaceful lady, submitting quietly to the dominion exercised over her by Queen Blanche, her mother-in-law. Eleanor, the next sister, was the beauty and genius of the family; she was called La Belle, and, at fourteen, composed a romance in rhyme on the adventures of one Blandin, Prince of Cornwall, which was presented to King Henry's brother, Richard, Earl of Cornwall, when, on returning from pilgrimage, he passed through Provence.
Richard was struck with her beauty, and spoke of it to his brother, who, against the wishes of De Burgh, offered her his hand. Richard soon after married Sancha, another of the sisters, and Beatrix, the fourth, was the wife of Charles, Count of Anjou, brother of Louis IX. The two queens seem to have been proud of their dignity, for they used to make their countess sisters sit on low stools, while they sat on high chairs. Sancha and Beatrix pined to see their husbands kings, and in time had their wish. Four uncles followed Queen Eleanor, young brothers of her mother, a princess of Savoy. They were gay and courtly youths, and the King instantly attached himself to them, and lavished gifts and honors upon them, among others, the palace in London still called the Savoy.
Another tribe of his own relations soon followed. His mother's first love, Hugh de Lusignan, Count de la Marche, had been released from durance at Corfe Castle in 1206, and had offered his aid to John, on condition of the infant Joan, the child of his faithless Isabelle, being at once betrothed to him and placed in his own hands. Lodging her in one of his castles in Poitou, he went on a crusade, and, on his return, found her but seven years old, but her mother a widow, beautiful as ever, and still attached to him. They were at once married, and Joan was sent home to England, where she became the wife of Alexander II. of Scotland, and his sister, the Princess Margaret, was at the same time wedded to Hubert de Burgh.
The Lusignans were an old family, who had given a King to Jerusalem and a dynasty to Cyprus; but they were a wild race, and a fairy legend accounted for their family character.
Raymond de Lusignan, a remote ancestor, met, while wandering in a forest, a maiden of more than mortal beauty, named Melusine, and, falling at once in love, obtained her hand, on condition that he should never ask to behold her on a Saturday. Their marriage was happy, excepting that all their children had some deformity; but at last, in a fit of curiosity, Raymond hid himself, in order to penetrate into his lady's secret, and, to his dismay, perceived that from the waist downward she was transformed into a blue-and-white serpent, an enchantment she underwent every Saturday. For years, however, he never divulged that he had seen her in this condition; but at length, when his eldest son, Geoffrey (who had a tusk like a wild boar), had murdered his brother, he forgot himself in a transport of grief, and called her an odious serpent, who had contaminated his race. Melusine fainted at the words, lamented bitterly, and vanished, never appearing again except as a phantom, which flits round the Castle of Lusignan whenever any of her descendants are about to die.
In this haunted castle the Queen contrived to gain a reputation for sorcery and poisoning, and the connection brought no good on her royal son, for she involved him in a war with France on behalf of her husband. He met with no success, and his French domains were at the mercy of Louis IX.; but that excellent prince would not pursue his advantage. 'Our children are first cousins,' he said; 'we will leave no seeds of discord between them.' He even took into consideration the justice of restoring Normandy and Anjou, but concluded that they had been justly forfeited by King John.
Four young Lusignans, or, as they were generally called, De Valence, were sent by Isabelle to seek their fortune at the court of their half-brother, who bestowed on them all the wealth and honors at his disposal; and gave much offence to the English, who beheld eight needy foreigners preying, as they said, upon the revenues.
Feasts and frolics, songs, dancing, and pageantry, were the order of the day; romances were dedicated to the King, histories of strange feats of chivalry recited, the curious old lays of Bretagne were translated and presented to him by the antiquarian dame, Marie. Italian, Provencal, Gascon, Latin, French, and English, were spoken at the court, which the English barons termed a Babel, and minstrels of all descriptions stood in high favor. There was Richard, the King's harper, who had forty shillings a year and a tun of wine; there was Henry of Avranches, the 'archipoeta,' who wrote a song on the rusticity of the Cornishmen, to which a valiant Cornishman, Michael Blampayne, replied in a Latin satire, politely describing the arch-poet as having 'the legs of a sparrow, the mouth of a hare, the nose of a dog, the teeth of a mule, the brow of a calf, the head of a bull, the color of a Moor!' There was poor Ribault the troubadour, whose sudden madness had nearly been fatal to Henry. Imagining himself the rightful King, he rushed at midnight into a chamber he supposed to be the King's, and was tearing the bed to pieces with his sword, when Margaret Bisset, one of the Queen's ladies, who was sitting up reading a book of devotions, heard the noise; roused the guard, and he was secured. There, too, was the half-witted jester, who, we are sorry to say, was a chaplain, with whom the King and his brother Aymer were seen playing like boys, pelting each other with apples and sods of turf.
The King was fond of ornamenting his palaces with curious tapestry and jewelry, worthy of the wedding-gift his wife had received from her sister, Queen Marguerite, namely, a silver ewer for perfumes, in the shape of a peacock, the tail set with precious stones. He adorned the walls with paintings; there were Scripture subjects in his palace at Westminster; and at Winchester, his birthplace, were pictures of the Saxon kings, a map of the world, and King Arthur's round table, inscribed with the names of the knights, and Arthur's full-length figure in his own place. It has survived all changes; it was admired by a Spanish attendant at the marriage of Philip II. and Queen Mary; it was riddled by the balls of the Roundheads, and now, duly refreshed with paint, hangs in its old place, over the Judge's head in the County Hall.
To do Henry justice, he spent as freely on others as on himself; he clothed and fed destitute children; and when in his pride, at the goodly height of his five-year-old boy, he caused him and his little sisters to be weighed, the counterpoise was coined silver, which was scattered in largesse among his lieges.
Henry's special devotion was to a Saxon saint, the mild Confessor, to whom his own character had much likeness, and whose name he bestowed on his eldest child, while he presented a shrine of pure gold to contain his relics, and devoted L2,000 a year to complete the little West-Minster of St. Peter's, the foundation and last work of St. Edward. He rendered it a perfect specimen of that most elegant of all styles, the early-pointed, and fit indeed for the coronation church and burial-place of English kings.
There was soon an end of Henry's treasure, however; and no wonder, when, besides his own improvidence, the Pope was sucking out the revenues of the country. _Talliages_, of one tenth or one-twentieth of their property, were demanded of the clergy; the tax of a penny, usually called Peter-pence, was paid to him by every family on St. Peter's Day, and generally collected by the two orders of begging friars, who rode about on this errand in boots and spurs, and owning the rule of no one but the Pope, were great hindrances to the bishops and parish clergy. Still worse was the power the Pope assumed to himself of seizing on Church patronage, and thrusting in Italian clergy, often children or incapable persons, and perfectly ignorant of the language. At one time 7,000 marks a year were in possession of these foreigners, one of whom held seven hundred places of preferment at once!
Innocent IV., who was chiefly guilty of these proceedings, was engaged in a long struggle with Frederick II. of Germany, respecting the kingdom of the two Sicilies, and the Guelf and Ghibelline struggle forever raging in Italy, and it was this apparently remote quarrel which was in reality the cause of the oppression and simony that so cruelly affected England.
The English bitterly hated the foreign clergy, and quarrels were forever breaking out. When Otho, the legate, was passing through Oxford, and lodging at Osney Abbey, a terrible fray occurred. The students, a strange, wild set, came to pay him their respects; but his porter, being afraid of them, kept them out, and an Irish priest, pressing forward to beg for food, had some scalding water thrown in his face by the clerk of the kitchen, the brother of the legate, who, used to Italian treachery, entrusted to no one the care of his food. A fiery Welsh scholar shot the legate's brother dead with an arrow, and a great riot ensued. Otho locked, himself up in the church-tower till night, then fled, through floods of rain, hunted by the students, all yelling abuse, and getting before him to the fords, so that the poor man had to swim the river five times, and came half dead to the King at Abingdon. Next morning the scene was changed. Earl Warenne and his bowmen came down upon Oxford, forty of the rioters were carried off in carts like felons, interdicts and excommunications fell on the university, and only when doctors, scholars, and all came barefoot to ask the legate's pardon, was the anger of the Pope appeased.
Moreover, there was a widespread confederation among the gentry against these Italians, and rioters arose
