Presently the Queen began devising a set of hangings for a State bedchamber, the pictures to be scenes from the life of Charlemagne—the suggested comparison of this monarch with the King had its point. An Irish monk-bred lad with a knack at catching likenesses came by, and made the designs, under Queen Eleanor’s direction; and during this undertaking she learned much concerning the state of Ireland. That ended and the weaving begun, she took to questioning Cimarron the drawboy.
“I suppose,” she jibed, “men grow like that they live by, or you would never have been driven out of London like sheep. I may become lamblike myself some day.”
Cimarron’s white teeth gleamed. “I would not say that we went like sheep,” he retorted, and he told the story of their going. “There were the old folk and the little ones, your Grace,” he ended. “The master cares for his own people, and his work. He does not heed other folk’s opinions.”
The Queen laughed gleefully. “I wish I had been at that hunting—the wolves driven by their quarry. My faith, a weaver’s beam is not such a bad weapon after all.”
More than ten years after, when Richard I. was crowned King of England, one of his first acts was to make his mother regent in his absence. It was she who raised the money to outbid Philip of France when Cœur de Lion was to be ransomed. As one historian has said, she displayed qualities then and later, which prove that she spent her days in something besides needlework. She did not stay long at King’s Barton, but one of Cornelys Bat’s tapestries was always known as the Queen’s Maze. In one way and another during the sixteen years of her captivity she learned nearly all that there was to know of the temper of the people and the nature of the land.
