NAGGING WIFE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 29 June 1938, Page 4

NAGGING WIFE

KING'S UNHAPPY LIFE. Even kings have not always been secure from the persecution of a nagging wife. Henry 11, of England, for example, had a. great deal to put up with from Queen Eleanor. Admittedly Henry himself was hardly a model husband, but his domestic life was the reverse of happy, and, at length, tired of the shrewishness of his wife, he welcomed death, saying: “Let everything go as it will, I have no longer care for myself or the world.” Eleanor was a daughter of the Duke of Aquitaine. She was first married to Louis le Gros, of France, and, on her husband’s accession to the French throne, she instigated wars. She even persuaded Louis to give her the direction of a campaign in Palestine and she did it so badly that 7000 French knights were slain.

Louis might be counted lucky for he was successful in having his marriage dissolved. This did not greatly trouble Eleanor for in the same year she married Henry of Anjou, who became King of England in 1154. Their eight children quarreled fiercely, and, probably with the encouragement of their mother, defied their father, who had always treated them with the utmost generosity. Eleanor died on June 26. 1202.