They were all astonishing—­men and women—­and filled the world, for two hundred years, with their extraordinary energy and genius; but the greatest of all was old Queen Eleanor, who survived her son Coeur-de-Lion, as well as her two husbands,—­Louis-le-Jeune and Henry ii Plantagenet,—­and was left in 1200 still struggling to repair the evils and fend off the dangers they caused.  “Queen by the wrath of God,” she called herself, and she knew what just claim she had to the rank.  Of her two husbands and ten children, little remained except her son John, who, by the unanimous voice of his family, his friends, his enemies, and even his admirers, achieved a reputation for excelling in every form of twelfth-century crime.  He was a liar and a traitor, as was not uncommon, but he was thought to be also a coward, which, in that family, was singular.  Some redeeming quality he must have had, but none is recorded.  His mother saw him running, in his masculine, twelfth-century recklessness, to destruction, and she made a last and a characteristic effort to save him and Guienne by a treaty of amity with the French king, to be secured by the marriage of the heir of France, Louis, to Eleanor’s granddaughter, John’s niece, Blanche of Castile, then twelve or thirteen years old.  Eleanor herself was eighty, and yet she made the journey to Spain, brought back the child to Bordeaux, affianced her to Louis VIII as she had herself been affianced in 1137 to Louis VII, and in May, 1200, saw her married.  The French had then given up their conventional trick of attributing Eleanor’s acts to her want of morals; and France gave her—­as to most women after sixty years old—­the benefit of the convention which made women respectable after they had lost the opportunity to be vicious.  In French eyes, Eleanor played out the drama according to the rules.  She could not save John, but she died in 1202, before his ruin, and you can still see her lying with her husband and her son Richard at Fontevrault in her twelfth-century tomb.

In 1223, Blanche became Queen of France.  She was thirty-six years old.  Her husband, Louis VIII, was ambitious to rival his father, Philip Augustus, who had seized Normandy in 1203.  Louis undertook to seize Toulouse and Avignon.  In 1225, he set out with a large army in which, among the chief vassals, his cousin Thibaut of Champagne led a contingent.  Thibaut was five-and-twenty years old, and, like Pierre de Dreux, then Duke of Brittany, was one of the most brilliant and versatile men of his time, and one of the greatest rulers.  As royal vassal Thibaut owed forty days’ service in the field; but his interests were at variance with the King’s, and at the end of the term he marched home with his men, leaving the King to fall ill and die in Auvergne, November 8, 1226, and a child of ten years old to carry on the government as Louis IX.