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 ISABELLA OF FRANCE. 129 appetite for it. The Earl of Lancaster, her own uncle, and the two brothers of the late king, Thomas of Brotherton and the Earl of Kent, who had deserted the council chamber, and withdrawn in grief and indignation from all intercourse with the queen and Mortimer since the king's death were soon marked out for destruction. The Earl of Kent was seized and executed at Winchester, where the terror of thus shedding inno- cent and royal blood was so great the executioner stole away from his office, and the unhappy duke was left standing on the scaffold from noon till five in the afternoon, before any one could be found to perform the odious deed. It was at length done by a condemned felon, on receiving his pardon for the act. Before, however, the other victims could be reached, the terrible career of this wicked woman was arrested. Her para- mour Mortimer had assumed such princely state, and bore him- self with such insolence, that even his own son called him "the King of Folly." He had been created Earl of March, and kept a retinue like a monarch. The nobility became incensed beyond endurance at his arrogance, and at the infamous crimes in which he was daily indulging with the abandoned queen. They opened the eyes of the gallant young king to the dishonor which his mother was bringing on him. A parliament was summoned to meet at Nottingham, when Edward, entering b> a subterranean passage, the castle in which Isabella' and Morti- mer were lodged, seized Mortimer, and had him conveyed to the Tower in London, whence, a few hours after his arrival, he was conducted to Tyburn, and hanged, being the first criminal that suffered on that notorious gallows. Edward confined his sanguinary and vicious mother in Castle Rising, in Norfolk, where he sometimes visited her. She was in her six-and-thirtieth year when she entered her prison, and she continued there till she was sixty-three, suffering a cap- tivity of twenty-seven years. Such was in her "the ruling passion strong in death," that she chose to be buried in Grey Friars' Church, Newgate, London, by the side of Mortimer, and such her disgusting dissimulation, that she ordered the heart of her murdered husband to be laid on her breast. Thus ended the strange, and for the greater part of her life, the revolting career of this "She- Wolf of France." Besides Edward the Third, Isabella had three other children by Edward the Second, John of Eltham, and the Princesses Eleanor and Joanna.