The Three Edwards by Thomas B. Costain Read Free Book Online

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Romaunt de Guillaume de Conquerant
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    The last named might have interested the members of the family had they been able to get it into their hands; but not very much, because it was made up of very foolish and incredible tales.
    It is on record that both the king and queen played chess. One of the dignitaries of the Knights Templar in France presented Edward with a chessboard made of jasper and men of crystal. The king gave it in turn to Eleanor. The royal couple were inclined to the game, no doubt, by the commonly accepted but erroneous belief of that day that King Solomon had invented it. Chess was, of course, a far different game from the perfectdiversion it was to become in later centuries. If the piece now called the queen bore that same name in those early days, Eleanor might have been disposed to demur because it could be moved one square only diagonally and was the weakest piece on the board.
    There is a story that one day Edward was playing a game with one of his knights. Suddenly he sprang from his chair, impelled by a motive he could not later explain. As he moved away, a stone from the ceiling fell on the exact spot where he had been sitting. The safety of Edward was ascribed, of course, to divine intervention. If the incident occurred at Windsor, it might easily have been the work of the uncertain chalk ridge.
    Eleanor strove to become a patroness of the arts and was willing to make personal grants, as large as forty shillings, for literary efforts such as translations from the Latin. An even more useful contribution to the cultural side of life in the country was her introduction of the fork. It has been assumed that this most useful of table articles was not known in England until a much later date, but in a list of the queen’s plate there is mention of forks of crystal and of silver, with handles of ebony or ivory. A later item in the Record Commission includes forks among the domestic articles used by the king.
    The king not only endeavored to keep pace with the cultural activities of his queen but was as amenable to household customs as the most humble of husbands. It was the rule on Easter Monday for the women in all large establishments to surround the master and hoist him, willy-nilly, in a chair and not let him down until he paid them a proper gratuity. This was popularly called “heaving.” One year seven of the queen’s high-placed young ladies took Edward in hand and “heaved” him in his chair amid much laughter and clapping of hands. The king took it with good grace and paid them the handsome sum of fourteen pounds for his release.
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    The histories of three of the princesses, Eleanor, Joanna, and Margaret, seem to run in a pattern. In an age when marriages, particularly in royal families, were arranged when the principals were little more than infants, these three daughters of England’s greatest king seem to have found some belated happiness. When the queen died in 1290, Eleanor, as the oldest daughter, became the most important woman of her father’s court. Here, that same year, she was to find sympathy and solace in a Frenchman of great charm, the Duke of Bar-le-Duc, a new and well-considered friend of Edward. He became a constant visitor to the court and they, Eleanor and the duke, had the opportunity of close association. In her babyhood Eleanor had been affianced to the future King Alfonso of Aragon, but theynever met and destiny gathered him to his royal fathers. Three years passed and Eleanor happily married the Duke of Bar-le-Duc.
    In April 1290 the fiery-spirited, sloe-eyed Joanna of Acre married England’s most powerful peer, second to the king in importance, Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester. Joanna, too, had been given in betrothal at the age of five, to Prince Hartman, son of the king of the Romans. Edward seems to have arranged future marriages for his daughters with no idea of permitting their consummation but as perhaps a help toward some political expediency of