Page:The Queens of England.djvu/99

ELEANOR OF PROVENCE. 81 youthful and nattered beauty; and although she derived instruction from Romeo, according to Dante, one of the great- est Italian poets of his time, who was treated more as a friend than a retainer in the family of her father, it may be doubted whether a strict morality, not in those days considered of such vast importance as in our own, was inculcated. The morality of the troubadours was of an extremely lax kind. Exag- gerated notions of love and honor, formed only in a chivalrous point of view, pervaded society, and were nowhere more prev- alent than in the court of Raimond Berenger and his Countess Beatrice. The disparity of years between Henry and Eleanor, he being more than double her age, which might, had he possessed a firmer character, have given him an influence over her, pro- duced no good effect ; and the love of finery, less pardonable in a man of mature years than in a more youthful one, must have encouraged the natural taste for jewels and rich clothes evinced by the young queen. This passion of Henry the Third for personal finery is more to be wondered at when his love of money is taken into consideration, of which a strong and ungracious proof was given in his reiterated demands for an increase of the portion he expected to receive with his youthful and lovely queen, whose father's finances by no means enabled him to satisfy the inordinate cravings of his future son-in-law. Henry, however, was too much in earnest to forego the lady on account of the smallness of her dower. He wrote in great terror to his ambassadors, telling them to conduct the marriage at once, either with or without money, so that he had but the wife. The progress of Eleanor to England was a continued scene of splendor. Followed by a numerous train of high-born ladies, and noble lords and knights, with poets to sing her praises, and crowds to echo them, she was everywhere received with honor and distinction. Thibaut of Nassau, himself a poet, not only exercised a princely hospitality towards her and her stately train, but, attended by his court, escorted her to the frontier of France. Here her sister, the queen of Louis the Ninth, received her, nor left her until she embarkd for Eng- gland, where she landed in January, 1236, and the marriage was celebrated at Canterbury, whither Henry had proceeded to meet her, followed by a vast train of his lords and high clergy. The coronation of the queen, for which preparations on the