The Prince and the Page: A Story of the Last Crusade

Transcribed from the 1909 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
A STORY OF THE LAST CRUSADE
BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE HEIR OF REDCLYFFE,” ETC.
WITH A FRONTISPIECE BY ADRIAN STOKES
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON 1909
Richard Clay and Sons, Limited, BREAD STREET HILL, E.C. AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.
First Edition printed 1865 ( Pott 8 vo ). Reprinted 1873, 1875, 1877, 1878, 1881 ( Globe 8 vo ), March and November 1883, 1886. Second Edition 1891 ( Crown 8 vo ) Reprinted 1893, 1898, 1899, 1901, 1903, 1906, 1909. Shilling Edition , 1908.
In these days of exactness even a child’s historical romance must point to what the French term its pièces justficatives . We own that ours do not lie very deep. The picture of Simon de Montfort drawn by his wife’s own household books, as quoted by Mrs. Everett Green in her Lives of the Princesses, and that of Edward I. in Carte’s History, and more recently in the Greatest of the Plantagenets, furnished the two chief influences of the story. The household accounts show that Earl Simon and Eleanor of England had five sons. Henry fell with his father at Evesham. Simon and Guy deeply injured his cause by their violence, and after holding out Kenilworth against the Prince, retired to the Continent, where they sacrilegiously murdered Henry, son of the King of the Romans—a crime so much abhorred in Italy that Dante represents himself as meeting them in torments in the Inferno , not however before Guy had become the founder of the family of the Counts of Monforte in the Maremma. Richard, the fourth son, appears in the household books as possessing dogs, and having garments bought for him; but his history has not been traced after his mother left England. The youngest son, Amaury, obtained the hereditary French possessions of the family, and continued the line of Montfort as a French subject. Eleanor, the only daughter, called the Demoiselle de Montfort, married, as is well known, the last native prince of Wales, and died after a few years.