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Updated: May 19, 2025
Maurice, Henry's own handiwork perhaps, soaring lightly out of the tangled little town at our feet. Beyond, broken with copse and hedgerow and cleft by the white road to Loudun, rise the slopes of Pavilly leading the eye round, as it may have led the dying eye of the king, to the dim blue reaches of the west where Fontevraud awaited him.
The soldiers, however, in their grief and rage for the king, did put him to death in a cruel manner. Richard desired to be burned at the feet of his father, in Fontevraud Abbey, where he once bewailed his undutiful conduct, and now wished his body forever to lie in penitence.
On the breast of her doublet was Lord Marmion's badge, a falcon crest, which she vainly attempted to conceal. At the command of the Prioress, the silken band that fastened the young girl's long, fair hair was undone, and down over her slender form fell the rich golden ringlets. Before them stood Constance de Beverley, a professed nun of Fontevraud.
She had retired, after the siege of Mirabeau, to the convent of Fontevraud, where she assumed the veil, and now shared the same fate as her husband, King Henry like him, dying broken-hearted for the crimes of their son. She was buried beside him and her beloved Coeur de Lion. The Bretons mourned and raged at the loss of their young duke.
The story was, that, when Richard entered the Abbey of Fontevraud, in which his father's body lay, the corpse bled profusely, which was held to indicate that the new king was his father's murderer. Richard was very penitent, as his elder brother Henry had been, on his death-bed.
The daughter came, and afterward became a nun at Fontevraud; but no dowry was sent with her: and Foulques returned to the cause he had deserted, gave her sister Sybil to William Clito, and held with him till his early death. On the death of his countess, Foulques vowed to go on a crusade.
The Abbess of Fontevraud would fain have had the princess among her own nuns, but Mary resisted, and remained in the branch establishment, probably by exerting her influence over her father, who seems seldom to have refused anything to his children.
Henry Plantagenet lay quiet in the abbey church of Fontevraud, in the fifty-seventh year of his age never to be completed after governing England well, for nearly thirty-five years. In the year of our Lord one thousand one hundred and eighty-nine, Richard of the Lion Heart succeeded to the throne of King Henry the Second, whose paternal heart he had done so much to break.
No scene harmonizes more thoroughly than Fontevraud with the thoughts which its name suggests. A shallow valley which strikes away southward through a break in the long cliff-wall along the Loire narrows as it advances into a sterner gorge, rough with forest greenery.
She became a nun of Fontevraud at the priory Ambresbury, in accordance with the exhortations of the clergy to her parents; but there was not much vocation to the cloister in her disposition, and she was as often present at court pageants as her secular sisters.
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