THE PRINCE AND THE PAGE

by Charlotte M. Yonge




PREFACE



In these days of exactness even a child's historical romance must
point to what the French term its pieces justficatives. We own that
ours do not lie very deep. The picture of Simon de Montfort drawn by
his wife's own household books, as quoted by Mrs. Everett Green in
her Lives of the Princesses, and that of Edward I. in Carte's
History, and more recently in the Greatest of the Plantagenets,
furnished the two chief influences of the story. The household
accounts show that Earl Simon and Eleanor of England had five sons.
Henry fell with his father at Evesham. Simon and Guy deeply injured
his cause by their violence, and after holding out Kenilworth against
the Prince, retired to the Continent, where they sacrilegiously
murdered Henry, son of the King of the Romans--a crime so much
abhorred in Italy that Dante represents himself as meeting them in
torments in the Inferno, not however before Guy had become the
founder of the family of the Counts of Monforte in the Maremma.
Richard, the fourth son, appears in the household books as possessing
dogs, and having garments bought for him; but his history has not
been traced after his mother left England. The youngest son, Amaury,
obtained the hereditary French possessions of the family, and