Of all the royal suitors that ever stooped to woo the love of woman, Henry III. son of John Lackland and Isabella of Angoulême, appears to have been the most luckless and unfortunate. He first fixed his affections upon the Princess of Scotland, who was dissuaded from listening to his suit, by her brother’s assurance that the king was a squint-eyed fool, deceitful, perjured, more faint-hearted than a woman, and utterly unfit for the company of any fair and noble lady.
Disappointed in Scotland, the monarch next offered his hand to the heiress of Brittany, but the rugged Bretons, too well remembering the cruelty of his father, to their beloved Prince Arthur, returned a haughty refusal.
He then proposed to confer the honor of his alliance upon a daughter of Austria, but the fair descendant of Leopold inherited all her grandfather’s enmity to the princely house of Plantagenet, and rejected his addresses with disdain.
The Duke of Bohemia, to whom he next applied, civilly answered that his child was already plighted to another, and it was not until Henry reached the mature age of thirty that he received a favorable response to his matrimonial proposal; and when at last the marriage contract was signed between himself and Joanna, daughter of Alice of France, the roving affections of this royal Cœlebs were beguiled from their allegiance by the sweet strains of the youthful poetess of Provence.
Eleanor la Belle, second daughter of Count Berenger, perhaps the youngest female writer on record, attracted the attention of the fickle King of England, by a poem which she composed on the conquest of Ireland.
Dazzled by her genius and personal charms, Henry’s vows to Joanna were forgotten, and his ambassadors received orders to break off the negotiations, while his obliging counsellors recommended a union with the very lady he so ardently admired.
His habitual covetousness intruded however into the courtship, and had well-nigh subjected him to a sixth disappointment. He intrusted his seneschal to demand twenty thousand marks as the dower of Eleanor, but privately empowering him to lessen the sum if necessary to fifteen, ten, seven, five or three thousand. He quite disgusted the haughty count her father, by his sordid bargaining, and at last wrote in great terror, to conclude the marriage forthwith, either with money or without, but at all events to secure the lady for him and conduct her safely to England without delay.
In the splendid festivities with which Henry welcomed his young bride to London, and in the preparation of her coronation robes, he displayed a taste for lavish expenditure altogether inconsistent with the state of his finances, and in ridiculous contrast to his former penuriousness.
Like his father the greatest fop in Europe, but not like him content with the adornment of his own person, he issued the most liberal orders for apparelling the royal household in satin, velvet, cloth of gold and ermine, expending in the queen’s jewelry alone a sum not less than one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
About the same time he bestowed his sister Isabella upon the Imperial widower Frederic II., and personally designated every article of her sumptuous wardrobe.