Richard Head in his Life and Death of Mother Shipton (1684) says, "the body was of indifferent height, her head was long, with sharp fiery eyes, her nose of an incredible and unproportionate length, having many crooks and turnings, adorned with many strange pimples of divers colours, as red, blue and dirt, which like vapours of brimstone gave such a lustre to her affrighted spectators in the dead time of the night, that one of them confessed several times in my hearing that her nurse needed no other light to assist her in her duties" Allowing for the absurdity of this account, it certainly seems (if any reliance is to be placed on the so-called authorities) that the child was phenomenally plain and deformed.
So, from the first, France was faced with another war against an affrighted and infuriated Europe, a war in which the big battalions would be on the side of the Seventh Coalition; and to oppose their vast armies, Napoleon only had in March the 150,000 men he had taken over from Louis XVIII when the Bourbon hurriedly quitted the throne.
For Owen's brilliant but brief career and ruthless treatment of English settlers and Anglophil Welshmen, his countrymen had not unnaturally to pay a heavy penalty in the severe statutes which the affrighted parliaments of Henry IV.
