XXXIII.—Notices of the Last Days of Isabella, Queen of Edward the Second, drawn from an Account of the Expenses of her Household. By Edw. A. Bond, Esq. Egerton Librarian in the Department of MSS. British Museum

Extract

The narrative of the deposition and murder of King Edward the Second, as delivered by both early chroniclers and recent historians, so far fails to realise the full interest of its subject, that it leaves in obscurity the subsequent history of the chief mover of those fearful events. The ambitious Mortimer expiates his crimes on the scaffold. Isabella, the instigator of sedition against her king, the betrayer of her husband, survives her accomplice; but, from the moment that her career of guilt is arrested, she is no more spoken of. The name which had before been so prominent, and had moved in us such deep and changing interest, disappears at once and entirely from the narrative. It is briefly intimated that the fallen Queen passed the remainder of her days in seclusion, and we can only speculate in what spirit she bore her humiliation and met the reproaches of her conscience in her long retirement; how far her withdrawal from public life was compulsory; and whether, or to what extent, she recovered her influence over the son she had so inhumanly set against his father. After mentioning the execution of Mortimer, Froissart proceeds to tell us that “the King soon after, by the advice of his Council, ordered his mother to be confined in a goodly castle, and gave her plenty of ladies to wait and attend on her, as well as knights and esquires of honour. He made her a handsome allowance to keep and maintain the state she had been used to, but forbade that she should ever go out or shew herself abroad, except at certain times, when any shows were exhibited in the court of the castle. The Queen thus passed her time there meekly, and the King, her son, visited her twice or thrice a year.” All that was added to this account by later historians was, that Castle Rising was the place of her confinement; that after the first two years the strictness of her seclusion was relaxed; that she surrendered her dowry into the King's hands, and received from him, in lieu of it, manors and rents of the yearly value of, at first, 3,000l. and, subsequently, 4,000l.; that she died at Castle Rising, on the 22nd of August, in the year 1358, and was buried in the church of the Grey Friars, within Newgate, in the city of London.