Page:A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (1804).djvu/442

428 The death of Edward was resolved, and that it might be without bodily marks, was executed in a manner too horrible to mention. The people could suffer it no longer, and her son shuddered to consider himself as an instrument to all these abominations. He made Mortimer be arrested in the anti-chamber of the queen, who, bathed in tears, and her voice stifled with sobs, cried, "My son! my dear son! spare the gentle Mortimer." But Edward was inexorable. Isabella was shut up in a castle. Some authors have said, that her days were shortened. The constant opinion is that she lived twenty-eight years in that prison. Froissard, a contemporary writer, says, "that she was well treated, that she had servants to attend, ladies to keep her company, gentlemen of honour to guard her, revenue sufficient to maintain her rank, and that the king, her son, came to see her two or three times a year." The last crime of Isabella and Mortimer was the beheading of the earl of Kent. Gaillard.

one of the greatest beauties of the age. Charles VI. king of France, on seeing her, became deeply enamoured, and married her at the age of fourteen, 1385; and Isabella, with the crown on her head, was conducted in a covered waggon to the cathedral of Amiens, where they received the nuptial benediction. Afterwards, when she made her public entry into Paris, the presents made, on the occasion, by the citizens, were carried to her apartment by two men, one of whom