OF THE QUEENS OF ENGLAND, FROM THE COMMENCEMENT OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY. BY HANNAH LAWRANCE. LONDON: EDWARD MOXON, DOVER STREET. MDCCCXXXVIII. PREFACE. In a day distinguished by the publication of so many historical works, and amid the increasing abundance and variety of materials illustrating our national antiquities, the queens of England still remain almost unknown. Women, whose influence extended over a wide and important sphere, and whose maternal counsels so frequently impressed a character of good, or ill, on the reign of the succeeding monarch, have been passed over with scarcely the slightest notice. The land of their birth, the date of their marriage, the day of their death, is often all that the historian records of the wives and mothers of our Plantagenets. Anxious to rescue the memory of these illustrious women from oblivion, the author of the present work determined to seek, from contemporary sources, that information which hitherto she had sought in a |