On the other hand, when the twenty-four had to swear to it, the most backward to do so was Simon de Montfort himself, who probably discerned that the pledge was likely to be a mere mockery. When he at length consented, it was with the words, “By the arm of St. James, though I take this oath, the last, and by compulsion, yet I will so observe it that none shall be able to impeach me.”
Prince Edward might have said the same; he even incurred the displeasure of his mother for refusing to elude or transgress his oath, and was for a time accused of having joined the Barons’ party. Meanwhile, the King and Queen were constantly and needlessly affronting their subjects. “What! are you so bold with me, Sir Earl?” said the King to Roger Bigod. “Do you not know I could issue my royal warrant for threshing out all your corn?”
“Ay,” returned the Earl; “and could not I send you the heads of the threshers?”
The hot-tempered, light-minded Queen Eleanor’s open contempt of the English drew upon her such hatred, that vituperative ballads were made on her, some of which have come down to our times. One attacks even her virtue as a wife, and another is entitled a “Warning against Pride, being the Fall of Queen Eleanor, who for her pride sank into the earth at Charing Cross, and rose again at Queenhithe, after killing the Lady Mayoress.” Unfortunately, popular inaccuracy has imputed her errors to the gentle Eleanor of Castile, her daughter-in-law, and thus the ballad calls her wife to Edward I., instead of Henry III. “A Spanish dame,” was a term that might fairly be applied to the Provençal Eleanor, whose language was nearly akin to Spanish, and whose luxury was sufficient to lead to the accusation of
“Bringing in fashions strange and new,
With golden garments bright;”
And that
“The wheat, that daily made her bread
Was bolted twenty times:
The food that fed this stately dame
Was boiled in costly wines.
The water that did spring from ground
She would not touch at all,
But washed her hands with dew of heaven
That on sweet roses fall.
She bathed her body many a time
In fountains filled with milk,
And every day did change attire
In costly Median silk.”
Eleanor of Provence, when “drest in her brief authority” as Lady
Chancellor, had arbitrarily imprisoned the Lord Mayor, and this the
ballad converts into a persecution of the unfortunate Lady Mayoress,
whom she sent”—into Wales with speed,
And kept her secret there,
And used her still more cruelly
Than ever man did bear.
She mude her wash, she made her starch,
She made her drudge alway,
She made her nurse up children small,
And labor night and day,”
and in conclusion slew her by means of two snakes.
Afterward her coach stood still in London, and could not move, when she was accused of the crime, and, denying it, sunk into the ground, and rose again at Queenhithe; after which she languished for twenty days, and made full confession of her sins!
The real disaster that befell Queen Eleanor in London was an attack by the mob as she was going down the Thames in her barge. She was pelted with rotten eggs, sheeps’ bones, and all kinds of offal, with loud cries of “Drown the witch!” and at length even stones and beams from some houses building on the bank assailed her, and she was forced, to return in speed to the Tower.