Note 1. These lines are (or were) to be seen, written with a diamond upon a pane of glass in a window of the Hôtel des Pays-Bas, Spa, Belgium, with the date 1793. I do not know whether they are to be found in the writings of any poet.
Chapter Six.
The New Confessor.
“Had the knight looked up to the page’s face,
No smile the word had won;
Had the knight looked up to the page’s face,
I ween he had never gone:
Had the knight looked back to the page’s geste,
I ween he had turned anon,—
For dread was the woe in the face so young,
And wild was the silent geste that flung
Casque, sword, to earth as the boy down-sprung,
And stood—alone, alone!”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Nobody enjoyed the spring of the year 1236. Rain poured down, day after day, as if it were the prelude to a second Deluge. The Thames overflowed its banks to such an extent that the lawyers had to return home in boats, floated by the tide into Westminster Hall. There was no progress, except by boat or horse, through the streets of the royal borough.
Perhaps the physical atmosphere slightly affected the moral and political, for men’s minds were much unsettled, and their tempers very captious. The King, with his usual fickleness and love of novelty, had thrown himself completely into the arms of the horde of poor relations whom the new Queen brought over with her, particularly of her uncle, Guglielmo of Savoy, the Bishop of Valentia, whom he constituted his prime minister. By his advice new laws were promulgated which extremely angered the English nobles, who complained that they were held of no account in the royal councils. The storms were especially violent in the North, and there people took to seeing prophetic visions of dreadful import. Beside all this, France was in a very disturbed state, which boded ill to the English provinces across the sea. The Counts of Champagne, Bretagne, and La Marche, used strong language concerning the disgraceful fact that “France, the kingdom of kingdoms, was governed by a woman,” Queen Blanche of Castilla being Regent during the minority of her son, Saint Louis. It is a singular fact that while the name of Blanche has descended to posterity as that of a woman of remarkable wisdom, discretion, and propriety of life, the popular estimate of her during her regency was almost exactly the reverse.
Meanwhile, the royal marriage festivities went on uproariously at Canterbury. There was not a peacock-pie the less on account either of the black looks of the English nobles, or of the very shallow condition of the royal treasury. To King Henry, who had no intention of paying any bills that he could help, what did it signify how much things cost, or whether the sum total were twenty pence or twenty thousand pounds?
The feasts having at last come to an end, King Henry left Canterbury for Merton Abbey, and Earl Hubert accompanied him. What became of the Queen is not stated: nor are we told whether His Majesty thus went “into retreat” to seek absolution for his past transgressions, or from the lamentable necessity of paying his debts.