(M. Ha.)
INGEBORG [Ingeburge, Ingelburge, Ingelborg, Isemburge, Dan. Ingibjörg] (c. 1176-1237 or 1238), queen of France, was the daughter of Valdemar I., king of Denmark. She married in 1193 Philip II. Augustus, king of France, but on the day after his marriage the king took a sudden aversion to her, and wished to obtain a separation. During almost twenty years he strained every effort to obtain from the church the declaration of nullity of his marriage. The council of Compiègne acceded to his wish on the 5th of November 1193, but the popes Celestine III. and Innocent III. successively took up the defence of the unfortunate queen. Philip, having married Agnes of Meran in June 1196, was excommunicated, and as he remained obdurate, the kingdom was placed under an interdict. Agnes was finally sent away, but Ingeborg, shut up in the château of Étampes, had to undergo all sorts of privations and vexations. The king attempted to induce her to solicit a divorce herself, or to enter a convent. At last, however (1213), hoping perhaps to justify by his wife’s claims his pretensions to England, Philip was reconciled with Ingeborg, whose life from henceforth was devoted to religion. She survived him more than fourteen years, passing the greater part of the time in the priory of St Jean at Corbeil, which she had founded.
See Robert Davidson, Philip II. August von Frankreich und Ingeborg (Stuttgart, 1888); and E. Michael, “Zur Geschichte der Königin Ingelborg” in the Zeitschrift für Katholische Theologie (1890).
INGELHEIM (Ober-Ingelheim and Nieder-Ingelheim), the name of two contiguous market-towns of Germany, in the grand-duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt, on the Selz, near its confluence with the Rhine, 9 m. W.N.W. of Mainz on the railway to Coblenz. Ober-Ingelheim, formerly an imperial town, is still surrounded by walls. It has an Evangelical church with painted windows representing scenes in the life of Charlemagne, a Roman Catholic church and a synagogue. Its chief industry is the manufacture of red wine. Pop. (1900) 3402. Nieder-Ingelheim has an Evangelical and a Roman Catholic church, and, in addition to wine, manufactories of paper, chemicals, cement and malt. Pop. 3435.
Nieder-Ingelheim is, according to one tradition, the birthplace of Charlemagne, and it possesses the ruins of an old palace built by that emperor between 768 and 774. The building contained one hundred marble pillars, and was also adorned with sculptures and mosaics sent from Ravenna by Pope Adrian I. It was extended by Frederick Barbarossa, and was burned down in 1270, being restored by the emperor Charles IV. in 1354. Having passed into the possession of the elector palatine of the Rhine, the building suffered much damage during a war in 1462, the Thirty Years’ War, and the French invasion in 1689. Only few remains of it are now standing; but of the pillars, several are in Paris, one is in the museum at Wiesbaden and another on the Schillerplatz in Mainz. Inside its boundaries there is the restored Remigius Kirche, apparently dating from the time of Frederick I.
See Hilz, Der Reichspalast zu Ingelheim (Ober-Ingelheim, 1868); and Clemen, “Der Karolingische Kaiserpalast zu Ingelheim,” in Westdeutsche Zeitschrift, Band ix. (Trier, 1890).
INGELOW, JEAN (1820-1897), English poet and novelist, was born at Boston, in Lincolnshire, on the 17th of March 1820. She was the daughter of William Ingelow, a banker of that town. As a girl she contributed verses and tales to the magazines under the pseudonym of “Orris,” but her first (anonymous) volume, A Rhyming Chronicle of Incidents and Feelings, did not appear until her thirtieth year. This Tennyson said had “very charming things” in it, and he declared he should “like to know” the author, who was later admitted to his friendship. Miss Ingelow followed this book of verse in 1851 with a story, Allerton and Dreux, but it was the publication of her Poems in 1863 which suddenly raised her to the rank of a popular writer. They ran rapidly through numerous editions, were set to music, and sung in every drawing-room, and in America obtained an even greater hold upon public estimation. In 1867 she published The Story of Doom and other Poems, and then gave up verse for a while and became industrious as a novelist. Off the Skelligs appeared in 1872, Fated to be Free in 1873, Sarah de Berenger in 1880, and John Jerome in 1886. She also wrote Studies for Stories (1864), Stories told to a Child (1865), Mopsa the Fairy (1869), and other excellent stories for children. Her third series of Poems was published in 1885. She resided for the last years of her life in Kensington, and somewhat outlived her popularity as a poet. She died on the 20th of July 1897. Her poems, which were collected in one volume in 1898, have often the genuine ballad note, and as a writer of songs she was exceedingly successful. “Sailing beyond Seas” and “When Sparrows build” in Supper at the Mill were deservedly among the most popular songs of the day; but they share, with the rest of her work, the faults of affectation and stilted phraseology. Her best-known poem was the “High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire,” which reached the highest level of excellence. The blemishes of her style were cleverly indicated in a well-known parody of Calverley’s; a false archaism and a deliberate assumption of unfamiliar and unnecessary synonyms for simple objects were among the most vicious of her mannerisms. She wrote, however, in verse with a sweetness which her sentiment and her heart inspired, and in prose she displayed feeling for character and the gift of narrative; while a delicate underlying tenderness is never wanting in either medium to her sometimes tortured expression. Miss Ingelow was a woman of frank and hospitable manners, with a look of the Lady Bountiful of a country parish. She had nothing of the professional authoress or the “literary lady” about her, and, as with characteristic simplicity she was accustomed to say, was no great reader. Her temperament was rather that of the improvisatore than of the professional author or artist.