Page:The Queens of England.djvu/219

KATHERINE OF VALOIS. .185 from her, and conveyed to the keeping of a sister of the Earl of Suffolk ; her daughter had lived only a few days ; and Owen Tudor, her husband, was thrown into Newgate. This cruel persecution appears to have broken Katherine's heart; she became very ill, and in her weakness and dejection grievously laid to heart her perverseness in having disobeyd the injunction of her royal husband Henry the Fifth, and given birth to Henry the Sixth at Windsor. Those misfor- tunes, which Henry had prophesied, were rapidly fulfilling. The English had evacuated Paris, and were fast losing town after town in France. Katherine's mother, Queen Isabeau, had recently died neglected and despised, scarcely any one being found to bury her. From that which had thus come to pass, Katherine, in her feebleness and sorrow, might naturally look forward to calamity falling on her son, as the necessary sequence of belief in the truth of the prognostication. But a few days before her death she dictated a will, addressed to the king her son, full of melancholy, but not even then men- tioning Owen Tudor as her wedded husband. She died Feb- ruary, 1437, but a few months after her entrance to the Abbey of Bermondsey; and was buried in Our Lady's Chapel, West- minster Abbey, in a stately tomb, bearing a Latin epitaph, which, as it represented her as widow of Henry the Fifth, is supposed to have been purposely destroyed by Henry the Seventh, as directly denying the legitimacy cf his father. The fate of Kathc ine after death was strange in the extreme. Her remains we exhumed when Henry the Seventh was interred, and continued unburied till the commencement of the pres- ent century. In three hundred years her body was shown as a curiosity to any persons visiting Westminster Abbey. It remained in a wonderful state of preservation. Pepys boasts of having kissed it; and it was not till late in the reign of George the Third that it was consigned to one of the vaults. After Katherine's death, her husband was vigorously per- secuted. He escaped from Newgate, and retired into Wales ; but his indefatigable enemy, Gloucester, again secured him by treachery, and, in spite of a safe conduct, threw him into a dungeon of Wallingford Castle, and then brought him back to Newgate. Once more Tudor broke loose from Newgate, and, reaching his native mountains, was not retaken. On Henry the Sixth arriving at power, though he never acknowl- edged Owen Tudor as his step- father, he appointed him keeper