Henrietta Maria Part 17

[Footnote 280: Henrietta was always fond of animals. Evelyn records how in August, 1662, he went to visit her, and she told him "many observable stories of the sagacity of some dogs she formerly had."--Evelyn: _Diary_.

Under date August 22nd, 1662.]

[Footnote 281: Green: _Letters of Henrietta Maria_, p. 167.]

[Footnote 282: Green: _Letters of Henrietta Maria_, p. 167.]

[Footnote 283: He was her great-great-grandfather.]

[Footnote 284: See _l'Angleterre Paisible_ (1644).]

[Footnote 285: A man named Dennys. See Anthony Wood's account in his Life.]

[Footnote 286: _Mercurius Aulicus_, July 14th, 1643.]

[Footnote 287: Now part of the general college buildings.]

[Footnote 288: Salvetti says the Parliamentary party regretted him "come quello che aveva sempre a.s.sicurato detto Parlamento per bocca dell'

Ambasciatore di Francia che era qui, che da quella banda haverebbe havuto ogni a.s.sistenza per mantenimento della sua liberta e privilegii: certo e che l'Ambasciatore fece la parte sua et caus in buona parte la divisione et cattiva intelligenza che pa.s.sa fra il re e il Parlamento!"--Add. MS., 27,962, K., f. 32_b._]

[Footnote 289: This doc.u.ment, which is among the Archives of the Ministere des Affaires Etrangeres Ang., t. 48, is unsigned and without date, but it is in the handwriting of Montagu, and is among the doc.u.ments of 1641; it speaks of "la rebellion presente d'Angleterre," which points to its having been drawn up after the final rupture in 1642.]

[Footnote 290: Montagu had a good many enemies in France among the Importants, who disliked him as a friend of Mazarin and as a foreigner who had great influence with the Queen-Regent.]

[Footnote 291: _Perfect Diurnall_, October, 1643.]

[Footnote 292: Green: _Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria_, p. 215.]

[Footnote 293: Kingdom's _Weekly Intelligencer_, May, 1643.]

[Footnote 294: _Ibid._]

[Footnote 295: Sieur de Marsys: _Histoire de la Persecution Presente des Catholiques en Angleterre_ (1646), from which the above account is chiefly taken. The Capuchins were sent back to France by Parliament, April, 1643.]

[Footnote 296: _Mercurius Aulicus_, July, 1643.]

[Footnote 297: "De l'entretient que j'ay eu avec le Reyne d'Angleterre j'ay bien compris qu'elle mesprise autant qu'elle peut hayr le Comte de Hollande."--Brienne to Sabran, December 21st, 1644. Add. MS., 5460.]

[Footnote 298: The opinion of Bossuet was probably derived from the Queen through Mme de Motteville: "... si la reine en eut ete crue, si au lieu de diviser les armees royales et de les amener contre son avis aux sieges infortunes de Hull et de Gloucester, on eut marche a Londres, l'affaire etait decidee, et cette campagne eut fini la guerre."--_Oraison funebra de la reine d'Angleterre._]

[Footnote 299: Du Perron: _Proces verbal de l'a.s.semblie du Clerge_, 1645.]

[Footnote 300: _The Spie_ (1643).]

[Footnote 301: Green: _Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria_, p. 243.]

[Footnote 302: _Ibid._]

[Footnote 303: "Declaratio servenissimi potentissimique principis Caroli magnae Britanniae, etc., regis Ultramarinis Protestantium Ecclesiis transmissa."--Dupuy MS., 642.]

[Footnote 304: _Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria_, p. 243.]

[Footnote 305: Now Falmouth.]

[Footnote 306: Francis Ba.s.set to his wife. Polwhele: _Traditions and Recollections_, Vol. I, p. 17.]

[Footnote 307: _Mercurius Pragmaticus_, October, 1644.]

CHAPTER IX

THE QUEEN AND THE WAR

II

The darksome statesman, hung with weights and woe Like a thick midnight fog mov'd there so slow He did not stay, nor go; Condemning thoughts--like sad eclipses--scowl Upon his soul, And clouds of crying witnesses without Pursued him with one shout.

Yet digg'd the mole, and lest his ways be found Work'd underground Where he did clutch his prey.

HENRY VAUGHAN

If, at the time of her departure from England, Queen Henrietta Maria had been able to make choice of a book for her private reading and meditation, and if in that choice she had been guided by the most enlightened self-interest, she would perhaps have chosen a little pamphlet published in London in 1642. It was ent.i.tled _A collection of Records of the great Misfortunes that hath hapned unto Kings that hath joyned themselves in a near allyance with forrein Princes with the happy successe of those that have only held correspondency at home_.

Henrietta landed in France in the spring of 1644, and from that time until her husband's death her life was a continuation of that which she had led in Holland, namely, a perpetual struggle to gather together men and money--particularly the latter--to help on the cause of the King of England. For this she intrigued now with one foreign Prince, now with another, with the King of Denmark, with the Prince of Orange, with the Duke of Lorraine, the admirer of Madame de Chevreuse, the old enemy of Richelieu, with the Pope himself. The result was the undying hatred of a large section of the English people towards both her and her husband, and a growing distrust which had much to do with the King's final overthrow.

It is idle to blame her overmuch. It cannot be denied that hers were the mind and the will which impelled her husband along this fatal road; but he fell in gladly with her suggestions, and he was almost as eager as she for help from any quarter. She believed, moreover, that the Scotch rebels had set the example by intriguing with Richelieu, and she knew that the English Puritans had made it possible for an army of Scots, who at that time were looked upon almost as foreigners, to enter into England and to remain upon its soil. It would have required the brain of an Elizabeth to perceive that a king, by following such precedents, was courting disaster. Henrietta's brain, acute, lively, but never profound, was incapable of perceiving this.

Besides, she was a Bourbon, and her simple political creed was identical with that of her husband: a King should be no tyrant, he should rule his people with justice and mercy; but it was his to command and theirs to obey, without asking questions as to matters with which they had no concern.

The exiled Queen spent some weeks at

"ces admirables Fontaines Ou par douzaines et centaines Pluzieurs gens vont pour etre sain Et qu'on nomme Bourbon-les-Bains."[308]

Their healing influence, together with the care of some of the most distinguished physicians of France,[309] restored her to such a small measure of health as enabled her to turn her steps towards Paris. The kindness she had received since her arrival in her native land was a preparation for the magnificent reception which awaited her at the capital.

Her brother, the Duke of Orleans, came out as far as Bourg la Reine to meet her, and was quickly followed by his daughter, Mademoiselle de Montpensier, the richly dowered girl of whom Henrietta was already beginning to think as a possible bride for her eldest son. At Montrouge, on the southern outskirts of the city, the Queen of England received an even more distinguished attention, for there the Queen of France, accompanied by her two little sons, met her. Anne's kind heart was touched when she saw the sister-in-law from whom she had parted nearly twenty years earlier as a bride returning sad, sick almost to death, and bereft by ill-health and sorrow of the brilliant beauty which had then been hers. Forgetting the girlish unkindness which Henrietta had shown her in the past, remembering nothing but their common friends and enemies--Richelieu, Madame de Chevreuse, Jars, Montagu--the Queen of France took the Queen of England into her arms, and the two women clung together weeping and embracing. Then they climbed up into the royal coach, and Henrietta made the acquaintance of the little King, whose unexpected appearance in the world six years earlier had caused so much excitement, and of the still younger Duke of Anjou, "the real Monsieur" (as he was called in contradistinction to his uncle), who was one day to be her son-in-law. In such company there can have been no tedium in the long drive through the Rue S. Jacques, over the Pont Neuf, and through the Rue S. Honore to the Louvre, where the kindness of Queen Anne had caused apartments to be prepared for the royal guest.

That afternoon deputations from the city of Paris and from the various sovereign bodies waited upon Henrietta, and the ceremonies of reception were concluded a few days later by a State visit to Notre-Dame, where the Queen of England gave thanks to Heaven for her safe return to France through the ministry of the young Coadjutor Bishop of Paris, the witty and dissolute churchman who afterwards became famous as Cardinal de Retz, and who always retained a kindness for the exiled royal family of England.

Nothing could exceed the kindness and sympathy which were shown to the Queen, kindness all the more welcome because she was aware of the annoyance it would cause to her enemies. "I am so well treated everywhere that if my lords of London saw it, I think it would make them uneasy,"[310] she had written to her husband shortly after her landing in France. She was a.s.signed a pension of 10,000 crowns a month, which enabled her to keep up a fitting establishment, and in addition to her lodgings at the Louvre she was given the Chateau of S. Germain-en-Laye, where she had played as a child, and where, half a century later, her son was to wear out a more desolate exile. Her own affairs prospered. Her health improved surely if slowly. She had the comfort of the presence of faithful servants--Jermyn, who acted as her secretary, Henry Percy and Lady Denbigh, who herself had tasted the full bitterness of civil strife in the death of her husband, who fell fighting for the King, and in the defection of her eldest son to the rebels, which sorrows bound her all the more closely to the Queen, who had shown the tenderest sympathy with her bereavement. Moreover, in Paris Henrietta found many friends. Familiar faces, indeed, were missed. The Bishop of Mende had not been given time to learn wisdom by experience, but had "made an angelical end" at the siege of Roch.e.l.le, dying in the same year as his enemy Buckingham. Madame S. Georges, who had found an honourable position as governess to the heiress of Montpensier, had pa.s.sed away in 1643, and Louis XIII was gone, so that all his sister could do for him was to journey to S. Denys and to sprinkle his tomb with holy water.

But old servants, such as the Bishop of Angouleme, were there to welcome her; and in the brilliant Paris of the day she came across not only friends of the past--M. de Chateauneuf, the Chevalier de Jars, and others--but new acquaintances, who soon became friends, of whom perhaps the most interesting was the accomplished Madame de Motteville, herself one of the band of exiles whom the death of Richelieu had brought back in triumph to the Court of France.

Nor did she fail to attract the exiles of England to her own Court, where she gathered round her some of the men of wit and learning whom the evil times had forced to quit their native land. Thither came "Master Richard Crashaw, Master of Arts of Peterhouse, Cambridge, well known for his excellent poems,"[311] who was introduced to the Queen's notice by a brother poet, Abraham Cowley, at this time Jermyn's secretary. It can hardly be supposed that Henrietta understood the highly difficult poems of the Cambridge mystic, but perhaps she talked with him of S. Teresa,[312]

whose praise inspired some of his choicest work, and whom she herself had learned to love as a child among the Carmelites in Paris. Moreover, Crashaw was interesting as a recent convert to Catholicism. "Being a meer scholar and very shiftless,"[313] he was quite dest.i.tute in the French capital when he was found by Cowley, and he was delighted to accept Henrietta's hospitality. He dwelt nearly a year at her Court, making many friends by his talents and virtues, of whom the chief was Lady Denbigh. Her he exhorted, not without success, to follow his religious example, and to her he dedicated his book of poems, _Carmen Deo Nostro_, which was published after he had pa.s.sed on to the Court of Rome, bearing a letter of introduction written to Innocent X by the Queen's own hand.[314] To the exiled Court of England came also another poet, Sir William D'Avenant, whose welcome was the warmer because he had been concerned in the army plot. At the Louvre he wrote the dreary verses of _Gondibert_, and dedicated them to Thomas Hobbes, that daring philosopher who had likewise found a refuge in Paris, where, apart from the turmoils of England, he was able to reflect upon those principles of government wherewith he startled the world a few years later on the publication of _The Leviathan_. To these literary refugees must be added English Catholic n.o.bles, such as Lord Montagu, and ladies of the same persuasion, among whom was prominent the Dowager Countess of Banbury, a lady who, after a not irreproachable career in England, had settled down in Paris to enjoy the reputation of a rich _devote_.

But no social pleasures and attentions could satisfy Henrietta, whose heart was with her struggling husband. "There is nothing so certain as that I do take all pains I can imaginable to procure you a.s.sistance, and am as incapable of taking any delight or being pleased with my being here, though I have all kinds of contentments, but as I hope it may enable me to send you help."[315] These words, written to the King on November 18th, 1644, were no idle sentiment; they are the truest epitome of her life in Paris.

The royal cause was balancing between hope and fear. The defeat of Marston Moor, on July 2nd, 1644, had been indeed a terrible blow, but new hope was infused into the party by the surrender of Ess.e.x in Cornwall, a victory peculiarly grateful to the Queen, who could not forget the Earl's ungallant conduct to her. The great need was men and money, and to procure these was the end of Henrietta's unremitting efforts. For this she carried on negotiations with the Prince of Orange, by means of an English Catholic named Stephen Goffe, for the marriage of Prince Charles with his daughter; for this she attempted to mortgage the tin mines of Cornwall; for this, above all, she carried on personally and through Jermyn long and weary negotiations with the Court of France.

France had not been unmindful of the difficulties of the King of England, or of the troubles which threatened the Queen; but great caution was used, and Gressy, who had shown too openly his partiality for the royal cause, was replaced by Sabran, who knew better how to trim between the two parties. It is probable that at the beginning of the struggle Mazarin desired the victory of the King, and it is said that up to 1644 the French Government gave as much as 300,000 crowns in money and munitions to aid him.[316] A letter of Goring,[317] Henrietta's agent in France, dated at the beginning of that year, which unfortunately fell into the hands of her enemies, spoke of the dispatch of a considerable quant.i.ty of arms, and gave a cheerful account of the kind words of the Queen-Regent and of Mazarin.