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queen eleanok's tall. |
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founded with her most unpopular mother-in-law, Eleanor of Provence, the wife of Henry the Third, whose luxurious habits, and quarrels with the city of London, might afford some shadow of a basis for the impossible slanders of the ballad-singer. Queenhithe was a quay, the tolls of which formed part of the revenue of the Queen, and Eleanor of Provence rendered herself extremely odious by compelling vessels, for the sake of her fees, to unlade there. Charing-cross was one of thirteen monuments raised by Edward the First at the stages, where his queen's body rested, on its progress from the place of her decease to Westminster. In the connection of both these places with the name of a Queen Eleanor may be found (as Miss Strickland suggests in her Lives of the Queens) the germ of the marvellous story of the disappearance at Charing-cross and the resurrection at ■Queenhithe.
That portion of the story which relates to the cruelty exercised by the queen towards the Lord Mayor's wife is borrowed from the Gesta Romanorum. See Madden's Old English Versions, &c. p. 226, Olim-pus the Emperour. Peele's Chronicle History of Edward the First exhibits the same misrepresentations of Eleanor of Castile. See what is said of this play-in connection with the ballad of Queen Eleanor's Confession, vol. vi. p. 209. The whole title of the ballad is:—
A Warning Piece to England against Pride and Wickedness:
Being the Fall of Queen Eleanor, Wife to Edward the First, King of England; who, for her pride, by God's Judgments, sunk into the Ground at Charing-cross and rose at Queenhithe. |
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