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 124 THE QUEENS OF ENGLAND. unforeseen results. The queen not only lost the favor of the barons, but the Despensers, encouraged by the disgrace of these their powerful enemies, immediately re-appeared on the ? scene. The king, flushed with his success at Leeds Castle, and urged on by the spirit of vengeance in the Despensers, pursued the barons, defeated them in a battle at Boroughbridge, took Lancaster, with ninety-five of his followers, and beheaded him at Pontefract. The queen, during this warfare, took refuge in the Tower of London ; and here the crowning circumstance of her fate curiously took place. Roger Mortimer, a daring chief of the Welsh border, was a prisoner in the Tower, under sentence of death, for his attack on the estates of the Despensers before their banishment. Probably the queen's hatred of the Des- pensers was the first cause which gave the handsome and unprincipled Mortimer access to the presence of the queen, who, so fortunately for him, had thus taken up her abode in the Tower. But his own attractions in the eyes of Isabella, no doubt, speedily completed that blind passion in his favor which, from this moment, reigned in the heart of the queen. By her means he received at Christmas a reprieve ; and, though he was convicted in the following year, 1323, of a treasonable plan of seizing not only the Tower, but Windsor and Wallingford, he yet, once more, was respited from death through the means of the queen's staunch adherents, Adam Orleton, and Beck, Bishop of Durham, and contrived to make his escape from prison, no doubt by aid out of the same quarter. He succeeded in reaching France ; and, once safe, the besotted queen went to work with redoubled zeal for the destruction of his enemies, and the accomplishment of the scheme which they had unques- tionably planned together. She made a direct and open attack upon the Despensers, her own enemies and Mortimer's. She declared the Earl of Lan- caster, who had fallen the victim of her own vengeance, to be a saint and martyr, sacrificed to the hatred of the Despensers. The Despensers, with a hearty return of ill-will, induced the king to deprive Isabella of her revenues. She complained to her brother, Charles le Bel, King of France ; Charles threat- ened to seize on all the British provinces in France, and then Isabella artfully proposed to go out as a mediatrix between her husband and brother. The ruse was successful. She escaped thus to France, where she soon induced the weak kinsr to allow