design of the upper
slab, while on the wall above it, under a graceful trefoil-headed arch,
are traces of gilding and coloring, which are supposed to be remains of
a painting of the Princess Catherine and two brothers who died in their
infancy.

Here then is the first memorial of the many "Holy Innocents" who lie in
the great Abbey--of the children who found a resting-place among

The princes and the worthies of all sorts;

and whose histories we are about to study together. But Princess
Catherine was not the only child whose early death helped to bring King
Henry's gray hairs in sorrow to the grave. Before the close of his reign
another young life was cut short by a crime so terrible as to win a
mention for Westminster from the lips of Dante himself.

In 1271, only two years after the translation of the Confessor, the
king's youthful nephew, Prince Henry, son of Richard king of Germany,
was returning from the crusade in which St. Louis had died. Charles of
Sicily granted a safe conduct to him and to his cousin Philip, son of
St. Louis, who was hurrying home to be crowned king of France. But at
Viterbo in Italy, while Henry was at mass in the Church of St.
Sylvester, he was stabbed during the Elevation of the Host by Guy and
Simon, sons of Simon de Montfort. It was a fearful revenge on Henry the
Third for the death of their father five years before at the battle of
Evesham--for their own banishment--for the seizure of their father's
lands and Earldom, which Henry bestowed on his own son Edmund. All
Europe was filled with horror at the dreadful deed, a crime almost
unheard of in its impiety. The young prince's bones were buried in the
monastery of Hayles which his father had founded; while his heart was
brought to Westminster, and placed in a golden chalice "in the hand of
a statue" near the shrine of Edward the Confessor. The old chronicler
Matthew of Westminster adds with deep satisfaction, "One of his
murderers, Simon, died this year in a certain castle near the city of
Sienna: who during the latter part of his life being, like Cain,
accursed of the Lord, was a vagabond and a fugitive on the face of the
earth."[11]

Apart, however, from all other interest, the terrible deed will be
forever memorable, as it drew from Dante "the one single notice of
Westminster Abbey in the _Divina Commedia_."[12]

In the _Inferno_, the centaur who was then guiding Dante and Virgil,
showed them a shade up to his chin in the riv