pally resided till the subsequent July, when she was conveyed to Dover, and thence, in the charge of Sir Thomas Percy, afterwards the Earl of Worcester, who distinguished himself in the Percy rebellion, across the Channel, to Calais. On tbe twenty-sixth of July, the English and French embassy met at Leulinghen, a small town between Calais and Boulogne, and Percy, with weeping eyes, delivered Isabella over to Count St. Pol, and, in return, took a receipt, worded like an ordinary receipt for merchandize, acknowledging her safe delivery into the hands of the French. Thus plundered and penniless, and dressed in deep mourning, the youthful Queen was consigned to the charge of her French relations and friends. The English embassy, with a brazen falsehood, declared they returned her just as she had been received; and Percy, to give strength to the he, challenged to mortal combat any one who should dare assert to the contrary. Put the assertion and the challenge were both disregarded by the French, who, overjoyed at the presence of Isabella, conveyed her with royal pomp to the presence of her parents at Paris. The kind-hearted Queen, but yet a virgin in her fifteenth year, had so completely won the affections of her English attendants, that the parting was painful in the extreme. With many ìond farewells, Isabella distributed the little jewellery she possessed amongst the ladies who had come with her from England ; and although " weeping herself all the time, she comforted them with kind, cheering discourses, and warmly thanked them for their unceasing attention to her on the journey." Although Isabella w7as returned stripped of her marriage-portion and jewels, and without dower or revenue as Queen-Dowager of England, she was received back with paternal tenderness by her parents, and with marked honour by the court and the people of France. The Duke of Orleans, desiring to marry her to his heir, sent the English King a challenge, as the plunderer of the ill-used Queen, and the murderer of her lord, Richard the Second, and offering to fight him in single combat, or with a hundred knights on each side. Henry replied that it was beneath the dignity of a king to fight with a subject, he that subject ever so high-born. However, he concluded, we shall doubtless shortly meet in the battle-field, when, rely on it, whatever else happens, the Duke of Orleans will receive that punishment which his lying insolence so amply merits. This answer produced a letter of defiance from Isabella's uncle, denouncing King Henry as a traitor, an usurper, the murderer of his King, and the man who plundered the Queen of her wedding-portion, her jewels, and her dower, and sent her back to her parents a penniless, disconsolate widow, weeping for the loss of her assassinated husband ! Exasperated beyond measure by these defiances, Henry, in a vindictive missive, replied, that henad neither ordered nor consented to the death of his dear cousin, Richard, on whose soul he prayed God to have mercy ; and if the Duke, or any one else, said otherwise, they spoke a foul lie, for God only knew by whom the death was done—an admission, to say the least of it, that Richard died by violence. In 1406, the council of France, after a lengthened debate, consented to the union of Isabella with Charles of Angoulême, heir of the French King's brother, Louis, Duke of Orleans, and, as the young Charles had completely won the heart of the virgin widow, the marriage was one of love as well as state policy. The royal lovers were betrothed in 1406, and, in the subsequent year, united in holy wedlock, in the presence of Isabella's mother, and most of the male and female nobility of France. At the altar, the bride shed an abundance of tears. The loss of the crown of Kngland, says the chronicler, and the murder of the husband of her first love, Richard the Second, preyed upon her heart and sorely afflicted her. Perhaps, however, the tears were only the result of that commingled feeling of joy and sadness mostly experienced by the more sensitive H 2