is
rebellious subjects in check. Not till he died, cursing Richard and
John, who had again been in revolt against him, was the queen released.

Hardly had Richard been crowned before he departed for the Crusade,
leaving Eleanor as regent. Even against her own son the old queen
intrigued; yet it was partly her indignant intervention which later
helped to release Richard from the German prison where the emperor,
instigated by Philip Augustus, would have kept him. The son whom she
loved best, John, loved and trusted her no more than did Richard. In the
struggle between Philip Augustus, championing Arthur of Brittany, and
John, Eleanor seems to have kept faith with her son, and to have given
him shrewd if cruel counsel. We hear of her but once or twice more in
active affairs. In 1200 she was sent by John into Spain to bring back
his niece, Blanche de Castille, who was betrothed to Prince Louis of
France by one of the terms of a treaty just concluded between John and
Philip Augustus. On her return, when passing through Bordeaux, a mob set
upon and killed one of her party, the detested Mercader, captain of
Richard's Brabancon mercenaries. Eleanor, old, and sick with fatigue and
fright at this scene of horror, could proceed no further, and stayed in
the abbey of Fontevrault, sending Blanche on with the Archbishop of
Bordeaux. She rallied from this illness, however, and two years later
had a narrow escape from being captured by her grandson, Arthur. She was
besieged, and very hard pressed, in the Chateau de Mirebeau, when Arthur
and his followers were surprised and captured by John. This episode of a
grand-mother besieged by her own grandson is quite in line with the
traditions of the family. "It is the fate of our family that none should
love the other," said Geoffrey Plantagenet.

In the midst of the triumph of Philip Augustus over her miserable son
John, old Queen Eleanor died, in the convent of Beaulieu, in 1204. The
miseries of her declining years make us more charitable toward her; but
it is impossible to respect a character such as that of England's
troubadour queen. One sometimes finds her praised for a splendid virtue,
that of impulsive generosity; but there was no generosity in her nature;
she was merely lavish in spending for her own pleasure. In keeping with
what a great historian has said of her son Richard Coeur de Lion, one
may say that she was a bad wife,--to two husbands,--a bad mother, and a
bad queen. There