She feels, in comparison, like a dreary, elderly dowager.
This nearly ruined Geneva, which, too, in 1477 had to pay a large indemnity to the Swiss army that, after the defeat of Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy, advanced to take vengeance on the dominions of his ally, Yolande, dowager duchess of Savoy and sister of Louis XI., as well as on the bishop of Geneva, her brother-in-law.
The next day the empress dowager ordered that all foreigners be killed.
The queen dowager and her daughter were carefully watched at Linlithgow, but on the 23rd of July 1543 they escaped, with the help of Cardinal Beton, to the safer walls of Stirling castle.
Moreover, just at the end of the year a loss which greatly shocked and grieved the queen was experienced in the sudden death, at Windsor Castle, of the Dowager Lady Churchill, one of her oldest and most intimate friends.