eto by envy
conceived against his mother, than by any fault of the young prince, for
that she knew and dreaded the high spirit of the Lady Constance.

Shakspeare has rendered this with equal spirit and fidelity.

QUEEN ELINOR.

What now, my son! have I not ever said,
How that ambitious Constance would not cease,
Till she had kindled France and all the world
Upon the right and party of her son?
This might have been prevented and made whole
With very easy arguments of love;
Which now the manage of two kingdoms must
With fearful bloody issue arbitrate.

KING JOHN.

Our strong possession and our right for us!

QUEEN ELINOR.

Your strong possession much more than your right;
Or else it must go wrong with you and me.
So much my conscience whispers in your ear--
Which none but Heaven, and you, and I shall hear.

Queen Elinor preserved to the end of her life her influence over her
children, and appears to have merited their respect. While intrusted
with the government, during the absence of Richard I., she ruled with a
steady hand, and made herself exceedingly popular; and as long as she
lived to direct the counsels of her son John, his affairs prospered. For
that intemperate jealousy which converted her into a domestic firebrand,
there was at least much cause, though little excuse. Elinor had hated
and wronged the husband of her youth,[89] and she had afterwards to
endure the negligence and innumerable infidelities of the husband whom
she passionately loved:[90]--"and so the whirligig of time brought in
his revenges." Elinor died in 1203, a few months after Constance, and
before the murder of Arthur--a crime which, had she lived, would
probably never have been consummated; for the nature of Elinor, though
violent, had no tincture of the baseness and cruelty of her son.

BLANCHE.

Blanche of Castile was the daughter of Alphonso IX. of Castile, and the
grand-daughter of Elinor. At the time that she is introduced into the
drama, she was about fifteen, and her marriage with Louis VIII., then
Dauphin, took place in the abrupt manner here represented. It is not
often that political marriages have the same happy result. We are told
by the historians of that time, that from the moment Louis and Blanche
met, they were inspired by a mutual passion, and that during a union of
more than twenty-six ye