Page:A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (1804).djvu/439

Rh succours against the Spencers, who continually insulted her. Whilst she was innocent, she would not have dared to have risked such an action; but become culpable by the example of her husband, emboldened by her passion, and excited by the interest of a lover, Robert Mortimer, the most beautiful and accomplished knight of the age, she hazarded every thing.

It was not surely for the Spencers to be severe, nor for Edward to be jealous; and the first should have contented themselves with governing the king, without persecuting her. They undertook, however, to inform him of his wife's infidelity, and Edward renounced her society: this perhaps was what both desired, and they should have stopped there; but his favourites feared Mortimer more than Isabella. They sent him to the Tower of London; he was twice condemned to death, and twice pardoned: they wished to retain him all his life in prison, but he escaped and fled to France: and the war rekindled between France and England, was a new pretence for the Spencers to persecute Isabella. They pretended she held intelligence with the enemy, and, under this pretence, Edward despoiled her of the county of Cornwall, which she enjoyed in virtue of a custom established then in France and in England, to give particular domains to the queens for the maintenance of their households.

After having, in this manner, attacked her in her inclinations and her fortune, they had the folly to send her to France, and thus confide to her the interests of the state. Her first words were complaints of an unjust husband and his insolent ministers. Charles the Fair, her brother, seeing her lament and weep, was touched with compassion, and promised to find a remedy for her rows.