Library / Literature & Fiction
The Prince and the Page: A Story of the Last Crusade
- Pages
- about 240
- Category
- Literature & Fiction
- Language
- English
- Reading time
- 4.4 h at 250 wpm
From the opening
IN these days of exactness even a child’s historical romance must point
to what the French term its pièces justficatives. We own that ours do
not lie very deep. The picture of Simon de Montfort drawn by his wife’s
own household books, as quoted by Mrs. Everett Green in her Lives of the
Princesses, and that of Edward I. in Carte’s History, and more recently
in the Greatest of the Plantagenets, furnished the two chief influences
of the story. The household accounts show that Earl Simon and Eleanor of
England had five sons. Henry fell with his father at Evesham. Simon and
Guy deeply injured his cause by their violence, and after holding out
Kenilworth against the Prince, retired to the Continent, where they
sacrilegiously murdered Henry, son of the King of the Romans—a crime so
much abhorred in Italy that Dante represents himself as meeting them in
torments in the Inferno, not however before Guy had become the founder
of the family of the Counts of Monforte in the Maremma. Richard, the
fourth son, appears in the household books as possessing dogs, and having
garments bought for him; but his history has not been traced after his
mother left England. The youngest son, Amaury, obtained the hereditary
French possessions of the family, and continued the line of Montfort as a
French subject. Eleanor, the only daughter, called the Demoiselle de
Montfort, married, as is well known, the last native prince of Wales, and
died after a few years.
The adventure of Edward with the outlaw of Alton Wood is one of the stock
anecdotes of history, and many years ago the romance of the encounter led
the author to begin a tale upon it, in which the outlaw became the
protector of one of the proscribed family of Montfort. The commencement
was placed in one of the manuscript magazines which are so often the
amusement of a circle of friends.
A short sample. Read the whole book
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