On the 24th of January, 1308, about six months after his accession, Edward II. was married at Boulogne to Isabella, daughter of the French king, Philip IV. (surnamed le Bel, or the Fair); five kings in all, and four queens, including the bride and bridegroom, being present at the ceremony. Edward was in his twenty-fourth year; the French princess was only in her thirteenth, but was already famous as the greatest beauty in Europe. "One of the fairest ladies of the world," Froissart calls her. In tradition and history, however, she lives as little less than a beautiful demon. Never has beauty, never has a marriage been more fatal than hers was to herself, to her husband, to both their native lands. The radiant girl who now gave Edward her hand was in the end to deprive him of his crown and of his life; a long imprisonment of eight and twenty years was to be the dower of her own widowhood; and from their union was to spring a quarrel between their two countries, which it was to take nearly a century of bloodshed and desolation to fight out:-- "Mark the year, and mark the night, When Severn shall re-echo with affright The shrieks of death through Berkeley's roofs that ring; Shrieks of an agonizing king! She-wolf of France, with unrelenting fangs, That tear'st the bowels of thy mangled mate, From thee be born who o'er thy country hangs The scourge of heaven! He who was thus to prove "the scourge of heaven," to his mother's land and race was her eldest son Edward, born at Windsor Castle on Monday the 13th of December, 1312. Young Edward appears to have been known till near the end of his father's reign as Earl of Chester; he was summoned to parliament by that title in 1320, and in each of the four following years. In May, 1325, Isabella proceeded to France on the pretence of negotiating a treaty of peace between her husband and her brother Charles IV., the new king of that country; and in September following she was joined there by her son Edward, who with his father's consent set sail, splendidly attended, to be invested by the French king with the dutchy of Guienne and the earldom of Ponthieu, which his father had consented to resign to him. He did homage for the two fiefs, and received investiture; but, although he had promised his father to hasten his return, he remained abroad till the 24th of September of the next year, when he landed at Orwell in Suffolk with his mother, come, with her paramour Mortimer, to make open war upon her husband. The last instrument issued in the name of Edward II. was on the 20th of January, 1327; on the next day he is understood to have formally resigned his crown in the castle of Kenilworth to commissioners sent to him by the parliament; his son was proclaimed as Edward the Third on Saturday the 24th. His reign, however, for some reason which is not known, was reckoned as having commenced on the 25th. His father is supposed to have