As there is little, in all I have been able to collect respecting MARIE,
which has any thing to do with the Poem, I have chosen to place such
information at the end of the book, in form of an Appendix, rather than
here; where the only things necessary to state are, that she was an
Anglo-Norman Minstrel of the thirteenth century; and as she lived at the
time of our losing Normandy, I have connected her history with that
event: that the young king who sees her in his progress through his
foreign possessions is our Henry III.; and the Earl William who steps
forward to speak in her favour is William Longsword, brother to Richard
Coeur de Lion. Perhaps there is no record of minstrels being called upon
to sing at a feast in celebration of a victory which involves their own
greatest possible misfortune; but such an incident is not of improbable
occurrence. It is likely, also, that a woman, said to be more learned,
accomplished, and pleasing, than was usually the case with those of her
profession, might have a father, who, with the ardour, the disobedience,
the remorse of his heroic master, had been, like him, a crusader and a
captive; and in the after solitude of self-inflicted penitence, full of
romantic and mournful recollections, fostered in the mind of his
daughter, by nature embued with a portion of his own impassioned
feelings, every tendency to that wild and poetical turn of thought which
qualified her for a minstrel; and, after his death, induced her to
become one.
* * * * *
The union of European and Eastern beauty, in the person of Marie, I have
attempted to describe as lovely as possible. The consciousness of noble
birth, of injurious depression, and the result of that education which
absorbed the whole glowing mind of a highly gifted parent, a mind rich
with adventures, with enthusiasm and tenderness, ought to be pourtrayed
in her deportment; while the elegance and delicacy which more
particularly distinguish the gentlewoman, would naturally be imbibed
from a constant early association with a model of what the chivalrous
spirit of the age could form, with all its perfections and its faults;
in a situation, too, calculated still more to refine such a character;
especially with one who was the centre of his affections and regrets,
and whom he was so soon to leave unprotected. That, possessing all these
advantages, notwithstanding her low station, she should be beloved by,
and, on the discovery of her birth, married to a young nobleman, whose
high favour with his sovereign would lead him to hope such an offence
against the then royal prerogative of directing choice would be deemed a
venial one, is, I should think, an admissible supposition.
* * * * *
That a woman would not be able to sing under such afflicting
circumstances might be objected; but history shews us, scarcely any
exertion of fortitude or despair is too great to be looked for in that
total deprivation of all worldly interest consequent to such
misfortunes. Whether that train of melancholy ideas which her own fate
suggests is sufficiently removed from narration to be natural, or not
near it enough to be clear, the judgment of others must determine. No
wish or determination to have it one way or another, in sentiment,
stile, or story, influenced its composition; though, occasionally, lines
previously written are interwoven; and, in one instance, a few that have
been published.
* * * * *
Her Twelve Lays are added in a second Appendix, as curious in
themselves, and illustrative of the manners and morals of an age when
they formed the amusement of the better orders.