in the possession of Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, who was born in 1206, and who has been described as the “Father of English Parliaments.”  Henry belonged to the Plantagenet family, the reigning house from Henry II in 1154 to Richard III, who was killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485.  The strangest history in that family appeared to be that of Eleanor Plantagenet, the daughter of Henry II, who caused her to be married when only four years old to the great Earl of Pembroke, who was then forty, and who took her as a bride to his home when she was only fourteen years old, leaving her a widow at sixteen.  She was thrown into such an agony of grief that she took a solemn vow in the presence of the Archbishop of Canterbury never to marry again, but to become a bride of Christ.  Seven years afterwards, however, she returned to the Court of her brother, who was then Henry III, and, meeting Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, the king’s favourite, one of the most handsome and accomplished of courtiers, to whom he had given Kenilworth Castle, the widowed countess forgot her vow, and though solemnly warned by the Archbishop of the peril of breaking her oath, Montfort easily persuaded Henry to give him his sister in marriage.  The king knew that both the Church and the barons would be violently opposed to the match, and that they could only be married secretly; so on one cold January morning in 1238 they were married in the king’s private chapel at Windsor; but the secret soon became known to the priests and the peers, and almost provoked a civil war.  The Princess Eleanor was not happy, as her husband, who had lost the favour of her brother the king, was ultimately killed in the cause of freedom, along with her eldest son, at the Battle of Evesham.  He was the first to create a Parliament.

[Illustration:  ELIZABETH, QUEEN OF ENGLAND.]

In the year 1206 a festival was held at Kenilworth, attended by one hundred knights of distinction, and the same number of ladies, at which silks were worn for the first time in England, and in 1327 Edward II was there compelled to sign his abdication in favour of his son.  Kenilworth Castle probably attained the zenith of its prosperity in the time of Queen Elizabeth, who in 1563 conferred it upon her favourite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who entertained her there with great magnificence on four different occasions, 1566, 1568, 1572, and 1575.  But the former glory of Kenilworth Castle had departed, and we only saw it in the deplorable condition in which it had been left by Cromwell’s soldiers.  They had dismantled the lofty towers, drained the lake, destroyed the park, and divided the land into farms, and we looked upon the ruins of the towers, staircases, doorways, and dungeons with a feeling of sorrow and dismay.  We could distinguish the great hall, with its chimney-pieces built in the walls; but even this was without either floor or roof, and the rest appeared to us as an unintelligible mass of decaying stonework.