Page:The Queens of England.djvu/111

ELEANOR OF PROVENCE. 93 deposited money and valuables both for safety as well as for loans, the prince, unable to discharge the long arrears of pay due to his army during the campaign in Wales, and anxious to retain them in force for anticipated emergencies which the troubled state of the kingdom menaced, bethought him of demanding of the head of the establishment of the treasury of the knights, to be shown the queen's, jewels, alleging, as an excuse, a doubt of their being in safe custody. He entered the bank, forced open all the chests deposited there, and possessing himself of the queen's jewels and ten thousand pounds in cash, he carried off his booty to Windsor. The historians of those times give us no reason to believe that this reprehensible conduct on the part of the heir to the crown met with any censure from the king or queen ; while a contemporary chron- icler, Matthew Paris, gives but too many instances of the faults committed by Eleanor and her son, whenever opportuni- ties were afforded them of interfering in the government, which the queen had helped to render so unpopular. Never was her unbounded influence over her weak and infatuated husband exercised for any good purpose ; while, on the con- trary, it was opposed to the maintenance of those charters which could alone preserve a good understanding between the sovereign and his subjects, and the violation of which exposed the throne to frequent danger, and the kingdom to fearful commotions. The exactions and cruelties perpetrated on the Jews during the reign of Henry cannot be perused without indignation and horror. The desire of plundering them was the incitement to many an outbreak ; nor were leaders, even among the nobles, found wanting to head an infuriated mob, bent on pillage against an unoffending people, who were robbed and, in many instances, murdered It was on one of those occasions that the queeen was so grossly insulted by an infuri- ated rabble, when the terrible onslaught on the Jews, led on by Baron Fitz-John and Bucknell, took place, in which the lives of several hundreds of those unfortunate victims, many of whom were among the most opulent of their persuasion, were sacrificed. Appalled by the shouts of the murderers and cries of the murdered, Eleanor, then inhabiting the Tower of London, accompanied by the ladies of her court, fled into the royal barge, and attempted to proceed to Windsor by water. The barge was no sooner descried by the maddened crowd, than they rushed in a dense mass to the bridge, uttering the