Page:The Queens of England.djvu/152

 128 THE QUEENS OF ENGLAND. thought it a fair opportunity to make an inroad. Young Ed- ward marched boldly against them, leaving Isabella and Morti- mer to enjoy the power at home. That power was employed to perpetrate one of the blackest deeds in history. The poor captive king continued to implore the queen, in most moving letters, that he might be permitted to see her and his son ; but no feeling of compassion could now touch that savage heart. Learning that the Earl .of Lancaster had become softened by the situation of his late monarch, and inclined to treat him with kindness, she removed him from Kenilworth, and gave him into the hands of Sir John Mal- travers. Sir John, a hardened tool, put him under the control of two humbler, if not baser tools. These fellows, Gurney and Ogle, conducted him, by night journeys, in thin clothing. and suffering intensely from the cold, to Corfe Castle, thence to Bristol, and thence, again, for fear of the public, to Berkeley Castle. These monsters employed the most refined cruelties to torture their unhappy, deposed sovereign. They deprived him of sleep, crowned him with hay in derision and shaved him in an open field with muddy water from a ditch. One dark night, towards the end of September, they completed their devilish work, by scorching his intestines with a hot iron. His piercing shrieks and screams of anguish startled numbers in the neigh- boring town from their sleep ; "and," says Holinshed, "they prayed heartily to God to receive his soul, for they understood by those cries what the matter meant." This fiend-like act completely rent away the hearts of the people from Isabella. They now contemplated with disgust and indignation the conduct of herself and her parmour, Mortimer ; and, as if resolved to defy public opinion to the utmost, while the murdered king was interred, without any ceremony, in the Cathedral of Gloucester, the queen hastened to celebrate, with great festivities, the marriage of her son and his Hainault bride. She concluded, also, a treaty with Scotland, selling, for twenty thousand pounds (which Mortimer pocketed), those claims over that kingdom for which the two last kings had shed so much blood. She, moreover, contracted her daughter, the Princess Joanna, a child of five years of age, to the heir of the Scottish throne, then about ten years old; and herself and Mortimer journeyed to Berwick with the infant princess, to attend the nuptial ceremony. The queen and her paramour had now become so accustomed to the taste of blood, that it seemed difficult to satisfv their