Heroism was contagious in those days as for all time, and the example of Eustace de Saint-Pierre was speedily followed by five of his fellow townsmen. Let us now pass to the heroine of the story, Queen Philippa. When the six burgesses, in their humble state, were led to the feet of the haughty and relentless Edward, all pleas were vain to save them, the king turning away in wrath even from the faithful Walter de Manny and commanding that the hangman be summoned. "Then the Queen, being great with child, kneeled down, and sore weeping said: 'Ah, gentle sir, sith I passed the sea in great peril I have desired nothing of you; therefore now I humbly require you in the honour of the son of the Virgin Mary and for the love of me that ye will take mercy of these six burgesses.' The King beheld the Queen and stood still in a study a space, and then said: 'Ah, dame, I would ye had been as now in some other place; ye make such request to me that I cannot deny you. Wherefore I give them to you, to do your pleasure with them.' Then the Queen caused them to be brought into her chamber, and made the halters to be taken from their necks, and caused them to be new clothed, and gave them their dinner at their leisure; and then she gave each of them six nobles, and made them to be brought out of the host in safeguard and set at their liberty." A noble picture is this of the clemency of a woman where the prayers of men availed not; and we join Jean Froissart in honoring his royal patroness and mistress, "the most gentle Queen, most liberal and most courteous that ever was Queen in her days, the which was the fair lady Philippa of Hainault, Queen of England and Ireland." But it was not for her mercifulness alone or even in chief that Froissart admired her; he chiefly praises her because she was a woman warrior almost as determined and successful as Jeanne de Montfort, and had come to Calais fresh from her victories over the Scots, of which Froissart gives a careful and glowing account. CHAPTER X AT THE COURT OF THE MAD KING THAT France which had known queens good and bad, from Constance in the tenth to Blanche of Castille in the thirteenth century, was delivered over, toward the close of the fourteenth, to the hands of one of the worst women in her history. The woes of France under the rule of the mad King Charles VI. would have been enough to bear; but the Court of France was led in a veritable saturnalia by the licentious Queen Isabeau de Bavière. Once more, in Isabeau, we find a woman whose life-story cannot be told without at the same time telling much of the history of France; but it is not because the queen does anything good that we must tell of the government of the kingdom during her ascendancy; she does nothing but indulge her vulgar tastes for pleasure and debauchery, to satisfy which she would pawn France itself.