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FRANCIS LANCELOTT, ESQ. Queens of England. Vol.1.

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FRANCIS LANCELOTT, ESQ.
Queens of England. Vol.1.
page 136



on the twenty-seventh of February, 1275. Her remains were ceremoniously interred in Dumfernline church, near to those of King David of Scotland. Beatrice, who, with her sister, hadheen present at King- Edward's coronation, had scarcely reached Brittany, when death put a period to her existence. She died on the twenty-fourth of March, 1275, in the thirty-first year of her age, and in compliance with her desire, her remains were brought to England, and buried in Christ's church at Newgate, London. Her heart was taken out, and deposited by her deeply dejected husband in the Abbey of Fontevraud. From this period, Eleanora appears to have retired from public life. She resided at Guildford, Waltham, and other places till 1280, when she retired to Ambresbury, where she took the veil in 1284, or, according to some writers, in 1287. Previous to taking the veil, she obtained permission from the Pope to retain her valuable dower as Queen Dowager of England. From King Edward sho received all the attention of an affectionate son, He paid her frequent visits, and on one occasion, when going to France on a friendly visit to the French King, and advanced as far as Canterbury on his journey, he, on hearing she had been suddenly seized with an alarming illness, desisted from his purpose, and hastened to alleviate her sufferings, by all the aid and comfort his presence could afford. Klcanora's uncle, Philip, Count of Savoy, who died childless, named her and her son, King Edward, his executors, to nominate his successor, and divide his personal effects between his nephews and nieces. When Philip died, Eleanora and King Edward chose Amadeus, son of Thomas of Savoy, as his successor. Eleanora of Provence, after devoting the closing years of her life to devotion and charity, breathed h er last about Midsummer, 1291, nineteen years after the death of her royal lord, Henry the Third. When King Edward, who was then in the north fighting the Scotch, returned to England, ho went to Ambresbury, where he arranged the imposing obsequies, and with a sorrowing heart superintended the intombing of hismothei in the church of Ambresbury nunnery, on the second of the following September. Edward had the heart of his mother enclosed in a golden case, carried to London, and buried with becoming solemnity in the church of the i'riars Minors, now known as the Minories. Leland asserts she was interred in the Monastery of the Grey Friars, whilst other authors name Westminster Abbey as her last home ; but it is now generally believed that these writers are mistaken, as Ambresbury is named as her burial place in the chronicle of Dunstable, and by other contemporary authorities. Few Queens of England were more detested by their subjects than Eleanora of Provence. Her partiality to her foreign relations, and her desire to enrich the kindred and friends of herself and her feeble-minded husband, at the expense of the nation at large, engendered and fostered in the minds of the clergy, the barons, and the people, a contempt towards her which soon grew into hatred. Uut although not a perfect model of queenly perfection, her vices were neither great nor many, and her unpopularity may be attributed more to the unsettled times in which she lived, and to the unfitness of herself and her beloved husband to fill the station of royalty, than to any real atrocity or baseness of character. Tradition has impugned her conjugal fidelity. In an ancient ballad, which represents her on a sick bed, confessing to her husband, disguised as a friar of France, she is made to declare that the most beloved of her offspring were the children of the Earl Marshal and other nobles. These black imputations, cast against the character ot the Queen, are, however, without foundation, and doubtless originated in the detestation in which she was held by the nation at large. The first instance of a Poet Laureate is met with in this reign, in the person of Master 11 enry, the versifieator, whose appointment was probably procured by Eleanora. About the year 1240, another


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