Page:The Queens of England.djvu/115

ELEANOR OF PROVENCE. 97 image of the Virgin in silver. Prince Edward, on assuming the cross, was accompanied by his princess and his brother Edmund, leaving his children in England ; and although Prince Edmund had only been some months wedded to a fair and youthful bride, the Lady Aveline, sole heiress to the Earl of, Albemarle, he could not be dissuaded from joining his beloved brother. The lovely Aveline lived not to behold the return of her husband, for she sank into a premature grave when only one year a wife. Death had been busy with the royal family during the first year of Prince Edward's absence from England ; for not only was Boniface, Archbishop of Canterbury, uncle to the queen, summoned to another world, but the King of the Romans ex- pired. This last blow fell so heavily on the king as greatly to impair his health, and shortly after he was seized by a fatal distemper when at Bury St. Edmund's, whither he had gone to restore tranquillity, some alarming riots having lately occurred in that neighborhood. Aware of his own danger, he insisted on being removed to London, and arrived there in a dying state; his thoughts still anxiously bent on the welfare of the absent heir to his crown, he compelled the Earl of Gloucester to bind himself by an oath to preserve peace and order in the kingdom during the absence of the prince. Henry departed this life on the night of November the 16th, 1272, after a reign of fifty-six years, and in his sixty-sixth year. Having appointed the queen regent, she, four days after the decease of her royal husband, caused the prince to be pro- claimed king, by the title of Edward the First. The remains of the late sovereign were interred with great state and grandeur in Westminster Abbey, and the funeral expenses, which amounted to a large sum, were defrayed by the Knights Templar. When the obsequies of Henry had been performed, the barons assembled before the high altar of Westminster Abbey, and swore allegiance to their new monarch — an allegi- ance strictly kept by them, as well as the rest of his subjects, during his protracted absence in the crusade. A new grief was added to that of Eleanor for her royal spouse, by the death of the Queen of Scotland, her daughter, to whom she was fondly attached. This amiable lady left an only child, who afterwards became Queen of Norway. Nor were these afflic- tions the only ones which Queen Eleanor had endured since the departure of Prince Edward ; for she was severely tried by