Page:The Queens of England.djvu/71

ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE. 57 panied by his son Henry, he set out from England, resolved to subdue and punish his insurgent wife and children. Scarcely, however, had he set foot on the continent, when the young king, his companion, eloped from him, and, strange to say, fled to the court of Louis, where he was soon joined by his brothers Richard and Geoffrey, the former complaining bitterly against his father, because his wife, the Princess Alice, the daughter of Louis, was kept from him; and the latter demanding that his affianced wife, Constance, together with her dower, the duchy of Bretagne, should be given up to him. Eleanor, like her sons, unwilling to fall into the hands of the incensed king, fled also, resolving, like them, to throw herself under the protection of the king of France, and for this pur- pose, having as it would seem, but little faith in her own peo- ple, disguised herself in male attire, and set out. She had not proceeded far, however, when she was overtaken by the agents of her husband, and brought back to Bourdeaux — to the very city where twenty years before their nuptials had been per- formed with so much pride and pomp. Here she was made close prisoner till the arrival of her husband, and from this period a dark cloud of captivity and sorrow hangs for many years over the life of the once bright and beautiful Queen Eleanor. Henry returned to England, taking with him not only his queen as a captive, but also the young Marguerite, who, hav- ing dared to set her will in defiance to his in the matter of the coronation, was now to undergo humiliation and punishment. On his way to London, in company with his two captives, Henry performed his celebrated penance at the tomb of a Becket, which it may be supposed was no unpleasing spectacle to Marguerite, who, for her attachment to this great man, was now treated as a criminal. The young King Henry, through the intervention of Louis VII., to whom he had appealed, ob- tained his bride from his father, and the two were reconciled. Eleanor was placed in the palace of Winchester, under the dare of Randulph de Glanville, keeper of the treasure there, and here, with one short interval, she remained for sixteen years. 1 It was at the commencement of this long captivity that Rosamond Clifford died, -and it is in all probability from the circumstance of Queen Eleanor's disgrace and fair Rosamond's death occurring about the same period, that tradition has ascribed to the queen the murder of her rival.