After appointing his recalled favorite, Piers Gaveston, guardian of the realm, Edward sailed, early on Monday morning, January 22, 1308, accompanied by his mother-in-law, queen Marguerite, to meet his bride. He landed at Boulogne, where Isabella had already arrived with her royal parents. There king Edward performed homage for Guienne and Ponthieu, to king Philip.

The next day, being the festival of the conversion of St. Paul, the nuptials of Isabella and her royal bridegroom were celebrated, in the famous cathedral church of Boulogne, with peculiar magnificence.

The beauty of the royal pair excited the greatest admiration; for the bridegroom was the handsomest prince in Europe, and the precocious charms of the bride had already obtained for her the name of Isabella the Fair. Who of all the royal and gallant company, witnesses of these espousals, could have believed their fatal termination, or deemed that the epithet of She-Wolf of France could ever have been deserved by the bride?

The king and queen remained at Dover two days, where Piers Gaveston joined them. The moment the king saw him, he flew to him, fell on his neck, and called him "brother;" conduct which greatly displeased the queen and her uncles. From Dover the royal party proceeded to Eltham, where they remained till the preparations were completed for the coronation.

It is possible that if Isabella had been of an age more suitable to that of her husband, and of a less haughty temper, her beauty and talents might have created a counter-influence to that of the Gascon favorite, productive of beneficial effects; but, at the period of his marriage, Edward was in his three-and-twentieth year, and evidently considered a consort who was only entering her teens, as entitled to a very trifling degree of attention, either as a queen or a wife. Isabella was however, perfectly aware of the importance of her position in the English court; and even had she been as childish in mind as she was in age, she was too closely allied in blood to the great leaders of the disaffected peers of England, Thomas earl of Lancaster, and his brother Henry, earl of Derby, to remain quiescently in the background.

It was not, however, till the fifth year of Isabella's marriage with Edward II., that any well-grounded hope existed of her bringing an

heir to England; and the period at which this joyful prospect first became apparent was amidst the horrors of civil war.

This auspicious event took place on the 13th day of November, in the year 1312, when Isabella, then in the eighteenth year of her age, and the fifth of her marriage, brought into the world the long desired heir of England, afterwards that most renowned of our monarchs, Edward III., surnamed of Windsor, from the place of his birth.

Isabella's influence, after this happy event, was very considerable with her royal husband, and at this period her conduct was all that was prudent, amiable, and feminine. It was through her mediation that a reconciliation was at length effected between king Edward and his barons, and tranquillity restored to the perturbed realm.

It was in 1321 that the storm gathered again among the lord marchers, which led to the barons' war, and brought Isabella and Roger Mortimer into acquaintance with each other.

We now come to that eventful period when Isabella exchanged the lovely character of a peace-maker for that of a vindictive political agitator, and finally branded her once-honored name with the foul stains of adultery, treason, and murder.

While king Edward was battling the rebellious barons, the queen, for greater security, took up her abode in the Tower. In this royal fortress she gave birth to her youngest child, the lady Joanna, who from that circumstance was called Joanna de la Tour.

Some time before the birth of the princess Joanna, the two Mortimers, uncle and nephew, having been taken in arms against the king, were brought to the Tower as state prisoners, under sentence of death and confiscation of their great estates. Roger Mortimer, lord of Chirk, the uncle, died of famine, through the neglect or cruelty of his jailers in failing to supply him with the necessaries of life, it has been said, soon after his capture. Roger Mortimer, the nephew, was in the pride and vigor of manhood, and possessed of strength of constitution, and energy of mind, to struggle with any hardship to which he might be exposed. The manner in which he contrived, while under sentence of death in one of the prison lodgings of the Tower of London, to create so powerful an interest in the heart of the beautiful consort of his offended sovereign, is not related by any of the chroniclers of that reign. It

is possible, however, that Isabella's disposition for intermeddling in poli. tical matters might have emboldened this handsome and audacious rebel to obtain personal interviews with her, under the color of being willing to communicate to her the secrets of his party. He was the husband of a French lady, Jane de Joinville, the heiress of Sir Peter Joinville, and was in all probability only two well acquainted with the language that was most pleasing to the ear of the queen, and the manners and refinements of her native land, which in civilization was greatly in advance of the bellicose realm of England. Be this as it may, Mortimer was reprieved through the good offices of some powerful intercessor; and the king commuted his sentence of death into perpetual imprisonment in the Tower. This occasioned some astonishment, when it was remenbered that Mortimer was the first who had commenced the civil war by his fierce attack on the lands of Hugh Despencer, who was his sworn foe, and who at this very time had regained more than his former sway in the council of king Edward; but at that time the influence of the queen was paramount to any other, and it was probably on this account that the deadly feud commenced between her and the two Despencers, which ended so fatally to both.

In the succeeding year, 1323, we find the tameless border chief, from his dungeon in the Tower, organizing a plan for the seizure, not only of that royal fortress, but Windsor and Wallingford. Again was Mortimer condemned to suffer death for high treason, but through the agency of Adam Orleton, and Beck, bishop of Durham he obtained a respite. On the 1st of August, the same year, Gerard Alspaye, the valet of Segrave, the constable of the Tower, who was supposed to be in co-operation with him, gave the men-at-arms a soporific portion in their drink provided by the queen; and while the guards were asleep, Mortimer passed through a hole he had worked in his own prison into the kitchen of the royal residence, ascended the chimney, got on the roof of the palace, and from thence to the Thames side by a ladder of ropes. Segrave's valet then took a sculler and rowed him over to the opposite bank of the river, where they found a party of seven horsemen pertaining to Mortimer waiting to receive him. With this guard he made his way to the coast of Hampshire; from thence, pretending to sail to the Isle of Wight, the boat in reality conveyed the fugitives on board a large

ship, provided by Ralf Bottom, a London merchant, which was anchored off the Needles: this ship landed them safely in Normandy; and from thence Mortimer got to Paris.

Edward was in Lancashire when he heard of the escape of Mortimer: he roused all England with a hue and cry after him, but does not seem to have had the least idea of his destination, as he sought him chiefly in the Mortimers' hereditary demesnes, the marches of Wales.

Directly Mortimer was in safety, the queen commenced her deeplaid schemes for the ruin of his powerful enemies, the Despencers, whom she taught the people to regard as the cause of the sanguinary executions of Lancaster and his adherents.

The Despencers had succeeded in obtaining the same sort of ascendency over the mind of the king that had been once enjoyed by Gaveston; and the whole authority of his feeble despotism was com mitted to their administration. Their first act was to curtail the revenues of the queen. This imprudent step afforded Isabella a plausible excuse for declaring open hostilities against them. No one had ever offended her without paying a deadly penalty for their rashness.

She perceived that she had lost her influence with her royal husband, during his absence in the civil war in the north; and though it is evident that an illicit passion on her part had preceded the alienation of the king's regard for her, she did not complain the less loudly of her wrongs on that account.

The feuds between the royal pair proceeded to such a height, that Isabella denied her company to her lord, and he refused to come where she was. The queen passionately charged this estrangement on the Despencers, and reiterated her complaints to her brother.

King Charles testified his indignant sense of his sister's treatment, by declaring his intention of seizing all the provinces held by king Edward of the French crown, he having repeatedly summoned him. in vain to perform the accustomed homage for them. Edward was not prepared to engage in a war for their defence, and neither he nor his ministers liked the alternative of a personal visit to the court of the incensed brother of queen Isabella, after the indignities that had been offered to her.

In this dilemma, Isabella herself obligingly volunteered to act at a mediatrix between the two monarchs, provided she might be permitted to go to Paris to negotiate a pacification. Edward, who had so often been extricated from his political difficulties by the diplomatic talents of his fair consort, was only too happy to avail himself of her proposal.

A hollow reconciliation was effected between Isabella and the Despencers, who were delighted at the prospect of her departure from England; and the royal pair parted, apparently on terms of the most affectionate confidence and good will.

Isabella sailed for France in the beginning of May, attended only by the lord John Cromwell and four knights. She landed at Calais, and proceeded to Paris, where the first fruits of her mediation was a truce between her brother and the king, her husband. She then negotiated an amicable treaty, proposing the surrender of Guienne, already forfeited by the neglect of the feudal homage to the king of France, which was to be restored at her personal instances, by her brother, to the king of England, on condition of his performing the accustomed homage, and remunerating the king of France for the expenses of the war. This was to take place at a friendly interview between the two monarchs at Beauvais.

The Despencers, anticipating with alarm the great probability of the queen regaining her wonted ascendency over the mind of her royal husband, dissuaded him from crossing to the shores of France, even when his preparations for the voyage were completed. Isabella, who was well informed of these demurs, and perfectly understood the vacillating character of her husband, proposed to him that he should invest their son, the prince of Wales, with the duchy of Guienne and the earldom of Ponthieu, and send him as his substitute to perform the homage for those countries to the king, her brother, king Charles having signified his assent to such an arrangement, in compliance with her solicitations.

Edward, far from suspecting the guileful intentions of his consort, eagerly complied with this proposal; and the Despencers, not being pos sessed of sufficient penetration to understand the motives which prompt ed the queen to get the heir of England into her own power, fell into the

snare.