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science of physiognomy must be a dream, and those who trust it visionaries; and, that she was one of the best disguised and sweetest fiends that ever cozened men of their affections. quote the following passage for the information of such of our readers as are fond of an etymology.

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Matilda, the wife of William the conqueror, was the first consort of a king of England who was called Regina. Cwene or quen, was anciently used as a term of equality, indiscriminately applied to men or women. In the old Norman chronicles and poems, instead of the duke of Normandy and his peers, the phrase used is the duke of Normandy and his quens; likewise the quen di Flandres, the quen di Leicestre. So late as the 13th century, a collection of poems, written by Charles of Anjou and his courtiers, is quoted as the songs of the quens of Anjou. Also in a chant of the 12th century, enumerating the war cries of the French provinces, we find,

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And the quens of Thibaut,

Champagne' and passavant' cry.'-vol. i. p. 2.

The life of Eleanor of Acquitaine is the most stirring in the series; but having noticed it in our review of Miss Lawrance's volume, we shall only say, that Miss Strickland asserts, we know not on what authority, that the proposal for the divorce of Eleanor from the king of France, certainly originated from the queen,' and that the marriage was declared invalid, but not dissolved on 'account of the queen's adultery, as is commonly asserted.'vol. i. p. 319.

We do not know where it is commonly asserted; we have always understood that the divorce took place because the parties were related within the prohibited degrees; and that the conviction of Eleanor's adultery was merely the motive which induced the king to rake up the plea of that consanguinity, of which he must of course have been as well aware before he married her as he was afterwards.

Of Berengaria of Navarre-the gentle queen of Richard Cœur de Lion, there is little to be said; but that little is well worth the saying. Her marriage with Richard was one of pure affection, and she was a model of domestic virtue in a station peculiarly unfavourable for its development. Gentle, constant, and affectionate to her husband, she bore his temporary neglect with patience, and received his returning love with joy. She followed him in all his campaigns, and was with him at his death. Having been deprived of him and of all the friends that rendered life delightful in quick succession, she retired to the Orleannois, where she founded the abbey of L'Espan, in which she died and was buried. Peace be with her!

The ruling passion of Isabella of Angoulême, the consort of King John, appears to have been ambition. Betrothed to Hugh de Lusignan, she violated her engagement to marry the felon 'king,' although she secretly preferred her former lover. In her fifteenth year she became the wife of John; and, although her influence over him was perhaps as great as could have been expected, it did not 'mend his manners; he became notoriously worse after his union with her.' We must give a specimen of the manner in which he sometimes treated her (for his ill usage does not appear to have been constant), and bad as that was, she might probably congratulate herself that it was no worse.

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The passion of John for his queen, though it was sufficiently strong to embroil him in war, was not exclusive enough to secure conjugal fidelity; the king tormented her with jealousy, while on his part he was far from setting her a good example, for he often invaded the honor of the female nobility. The name of the lover of Isabella has never been ascertained, nor is it clear that she was ever guilty of any dereliction from rectitude. But John revenged the wrong that, perhaps, only existed in his malignant imagination, in a manner peculiar to himself. He made his mercenaries assassinate the person whom he suspected of supplanting him in his queen's affections, with two others supposed to be accomplices, and secretly hung their bodies over the bed of Isabella. After this awful tragedy, the queen was consigned to captivity, being conveyed to Gloucester Abbey under the ward of one of her husband's foreign nobles.'-vol. ii. p. 55.

'He was afterwards reconciled to her, but the queen, soon after her return to England in 1214, was superseded in the fickle heart of her husband by the unfortunate beauty Matilda Fitz-Walter, surnamed the Fair. The abduction of this lady, who, to do her justice, thoroughly abhorred the royal felon, was the exploit which completed the exasperation of the English barons, who flew to arms for the purpose of avenging the honor of the most distinguished among their class, lord Fitz-Walter, father of the fair victim of John.

'The unfortunate Matilda, who had roused the jealousy of the queen, and excited the lawless passion of John, was supposed to be murdered by him in the spring of the year, 1215.'*—vol. i. p. 59,

60.

They were again reconciled, and John consigned his heir, Prince Henry, to the care of his queen, and sent her to the strong city of Gloucester, just before the invasion of Prince Louis of France. He soon after died at Swinestead Abbey, most probably of intermittent fever.

After the death of her husband, and the coronation of her young son Henry, the widowed queen betook herself to her native city

*The authority for this statement is the Book of Dunmow.'

of Angoulême; and afterwards meeting with her old lover, Hugh de Lusignan, now Count de la Marche, she became his wife, in the year 1220, according to Matthew, of Westminster. Nothing is alleged against her domestic conduct, but her pride and ambition involved her husband in a war with Louis IX. of France, from whom she had persuaded him to withdraw his allegiance, and to transfer it to her son, Henry III. of England. In the progress of this disastrous war, her husband and herself were stripped of nearly all their dominions, and were fain at last to throw themselves on the mercy of the king of France, who, with his characteristic mildness and generosity, forgave them. withstanding this,

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'Soon after, in 1244, the life of King Louis was twice attempted: the last time the assassins were convicted, and before their execution, confessed that they had been suborned by Queen Isabella, to poison the good king of France. Isabella gave color to the accusation by flying for sanctuary to the Abbey of Fontevraud, where she was hid in the secret chamber, and lived at her ease,' says Matthew Paris; though the Poitevins and French, considering her as the origin of the disastrous war with France, called her by no other name than Jezebel, instead of her rightful appellation of Isabel. Her son and husband were about to be tried on this accusation of poisoning, when the Count de la Marche made appeal to battail, and offered to prove in combat with his accuser Alphonse, brother to St. Louis, that his wife was belied. The prince refused to meet him, because he was treasonspotted,' and afterwards, for the same reason, declined the challenge of his son. This affront offered to her brave young son, seems to have broken the heart of Isabella, she never came out of the secret chamber again, but assuming the veil, died of a decay, brought on by grief, in the year 1246.'-vol. ii. p. 71.

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Her second husband, Count Hugh, was killed in the crusade three years afterwards.

We look in vain for one redeeming trait in the character of John: the chief, the absorbing quality of his mind, appears to have been intense uncalculating selfishness. A thoroughly spoiled child, his parents were of course the first to suffer from his vices; though, unfortunately, the world at large was doomed to suffer from them too. Attracted by the personal beauty of his wife, he snatched her from her affianced husband, a brave and worthy man, and no contemptible enemy. He used her ill, and even clothed her meanly; though his own person was decorated with the most lavish splendor. Miss Edgeworth has somewhere said, 'There is some good in all God's creatures.' She forgot

• After all, Mr. Jezebel M'Neile is but a copyist.

John Lackland, when she wrote the sentence. Of paternal, filial, and brotherly affection, he was entirely destitute: he was father, son, and brother, to himself. Deeds of lust and cruelty are the only landmarks in his journey through this world. It appears to us that there was a dash, not only of imbecility, but of insanity in his character; and this is the most charitable thing that can be said of him.

We quote the following passages, because they are found in the Ypodigma Neustria (though Miss Strickland has not told us where) and Walsingham, is a good authority.

Robert de Vaux gave five of his best palfreys, that the king might hold his tongue about Henry Pinel's wife.'

Here is a monarch making himself a party to the vices of his subjects, for the sake of a bribe.

Richard de Neville gave twenty palfreys to obtain the king's order to make Isolda Bisset take him for a husband.'

To the bishop of Winchester is given one tun of good wine, for not putting the king in mind to give a girdle to the countess of Albemarle.'-vol. ii. p. 58, 59.

That combination of vices is rare indeed, which causes one and the same individual to be both contemned and dreaded-John was both.

There is one circumstance, which we believe is not generally known even to historians, viz. that the Commons of England are indebted to John for the commencement of their liberties. When the barons-caring only for themselves-had wrung from him an acknowledgment of, and a security for, their own particular privileges, he added, probably for the sake of annoying them, 'We will, 'that the privileges which we grant to you, be also secured to your dependents,' or words to that effect:* and the barons, who professed to be striving for justice and the rights of man, could not refuse that to others which they were contending for themselves.

The long reign of Henry the Third was marked by internal troubles, which in part were his misfortune and in part his fault. The barons, who had found their power, were well disposed to use it. Haughty, captious, and ambitious, they would have created grievances, if they could not have found them ready made. knowledging individually and theoretically the king as their superior, they were ready collectively and actually to treat him

* Vide Magna Charta.

as somewhat less than an equal: and the utmost prudence and firmness would have been required in the monarch, to keep them in their proper sphere. Their feudal power was then in its palmy state, and the only way to neutralize their influence, was to play them off against each other, and the church against them all. The Londoners, too, constituted at that day a separate power, which was well worth conciliating: they both furnished the sinews of war and fought in person; and their weight would frequently have turned the scale.

No man could have been more unfit to control and reduce to order these jarring elements than Henry the Third, and unfortunately the course pursued by him, and in which Queen Eleanor appears to have done her best to help him forward, was only calculated to make confusion worse confounded.

King Henry was made up of negatives; he was not good looking; he was not talented; he was not firm; he was not prudent; he was not absolutely bad. His very pleasures were not of an active kind; fondness for dress and show, and for luxurious living, appears to have been his ruling passion-in which his queen too well agreed with him.

The two principal faults of their government seem to have been their preference and advancement of foreign relatives (time out of mind a sore subject with Englishmen), and their oppressive measures for raising money, which, when procured, was wasted in thriftless pleasure.

The queen, very young, very beautiful, very clever, and very thoughtless, was of a much more active, or rather violent, disposition than her husband; he was very fond of her, and she ruled him. Indeed, she was furnished with an argument in her own favor, which, if we may judge of what was done in former days by what is done in ours, she was likely enough to use whenever it would serve her purpose. He-king as he was-had been five times refused by as many different princesses, and she-Eleanor la Belle-had done him, a very plain gentleman, the honor of marrying him. Could he do less than allow her to have her own way in all things? She was, however, very faithful to him; and, sooth to say, her way, except with regard to providing for some of her poor relations, was generally his.

He commenced his married life as follows:

The expenses of Eleanor's coronation were enormous. So great was the outlay beyond the king's resources, that Henry expended the portion of his sister Isabella, just married to the Emperor of Germany, for the purpose of defraying them.

Great offence, it seems, had already been taken by the nation at the number of foreigners, especially Italians, who had accompanied or followed Queen Eleanor to England. Among these was her uncle,

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