Women being, for the most part, rash and sudden in the execution of their resolves, the lady keeper that evening gave Isabella poison in a conserve which she pressed her to take, under the pretence that it was good for the sinking and oppression of the heart which she complained of.  A short while after Isabella had swallowed it her throat and tongue began to swell, her lips turned black, her voice became hoarse, her eyes fixed and glassy, and her breathing laboured and stertorous:  in short, she exhibited all the symptoms of having been poisoned.  The queen’s ladies hastened to inform her majesty, assuring her that the lady keeper had been the author of the nefarious deed.

The queen had no great difficulty in coming to the same conclusion, and went at once to see Isabella, who seemed to be almost at the last gasp.  Sending with all speed for her physicians, she, meanwhile, ordered that the sufferer should be given a quantity of powdered unicorn’s horn and several other antidotes, with which great princes are usually provided against such casualties.  The physicians arrived and begged the queen to make the lady keeper declare what kind of poison she had used (for no one doubted that she was the poisoner).  This information having been obtained from the criminal, the physician applied the proper remedies with such good effect that, with God’s help, Isabella’s life was saved, or at least there was a hope that it would be so.

The queen ordered that the lady keeper should be arrested and confined in a chamber of the palace, intending to punish her as her crime deserved; whilst the guilty woman thought to excuse herself by saying that in killing Isabella she offered an acceptable sacrifice to heaven by ridding the world of a Catholic, and removing with her the cause of affliction to her son.  Finally, Isabella did not die; but she escaped only with the loss of her hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes, her face swollen, her bloom gone, her skin blotched and blistered, and her eyes red and humid.  In a word, she was now become an object as loathsome to look at as she had before been surpassingly beautiful.  The change was so frightful that those who knew her thought it would have been better had the poison killed her.  But notwithstanding all this, Richard supplicated the queen to let him take her home with him, for the great love he bore her comprehended not only her body but her soul, and if Isabella had lost her beauty, she could not have lost her infinite virtues.  “Be it so,” said the queen.  “Take her, Richard, and reckon that you take in her a most precious jewel, in a rough wooden casket.  God knows how gladly I would give her to you as I received her; but since that is impossible, perhaps the punishment I will inflict on the perpetrator of the crime will be some satisfaction to your feelings.”