The life of Queen Henrietta Maria (13 page)

Whilst all went well at home, public affairs were giving grave cause for anxiety. The removal of the favourite had not resulted in any approximation between King and people. In one sense the absence of the scape-

goat upon whom the sins of the Government had been charged may have operated in a contrary direction. Charles had at once assumed the position formerly held by Buckingham, and had taken the direction of affairs into his own hands, showing an attention to business he had not hitherto displayed. It would be for the future difficult, when things went wrong, to acquit him of personal responsibility.

An additional cause of estrangement between the King and his subjects was also making itself more and more felt. To the majority of Englishmen his attitude with regard to religious matters was embittering the discontent produced by the attacks made upon constitutional liberty. The ancient church had not been thrown down in order to be replaced by a paler counterfeit, and Laud and the high church party, increasingly identified with the principles of absolute monarchy, were scarcely less objects of fear and hatred than Rome. Religion was becoming as much the watchword of the national party as liberty itself.

In the spring of 1629, after a scene of unprecedented violence, Parliament was once more dissolved. The nine members who had been most prominent in the defence of its privileges and in opposition to the Crown were thrown into prison, there to await their trial ; and the memorable attempt at personal government, to be carried on by Charles for eleven years without the help of Parliament, was inaugurated. The King and the people took their stand over against one another, each confident of ultimate victory.

Soon after the dissolution a domestic event took place, of greater importance to Henrietta than any political convulsions. This was the premature-birth of her first child. On All Saints' Day, 1627, some eighteen months earlier,

the Queen, having duly attended her devotions, had received a visit, apparently by appointment, from a lady deeply skilled in the art of fortune-telling. Dealers in divination were in fashion. It has been seen that Henri of Navarre, shrewd and sagacious as he was, had not been free from the prevailing superstition, and the tendency to put faith in soothsayers would seem to have been inherited by his daughter. Lady Eleanor Davys, the prophetess called into council, was the daughter of one Lord Castlehaven and the sister of another, of infamous notoriety. The reputation she had acquired in her special line of business stood high, nor does she appear to have entertained any doubts with regard to her own possession of phenomenal gifts.

On the present occasion, according to her account of the incident, Henrietta first inquired whether she would ever have a son. Being answered to the effect that she would have one, and shortly, the Queen proceeded to question her visitor with regard to the fate of Buckingham and the English fleet under his command, not then returned from Rochelle. Answered that the Duke would return in safety and speedily, but with little honour, the Queen recurred to matters more interesting. " I showed that she should have a son, and that for a long time she should be happy."

u But for how long ?" persisted the Queen. The answer, " For sixteen years," may have satisfied her. At seventeen, sixteen years seems a lifetime. At all events, she was not afforded further opportunity of pressing her inquiries, for at this stage of the proceedings the King entered the room ; and, probably with little liking for his wife's visitor, and less for Henrietta's object in admitting her, he changed the conversation by recalling to Lady Eleanor's remembrance a prediction she had hazarded concerning

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her first husband's death three days before it had occurred—"to.which," says the seer, "his Majesty thought fit to add that it was the next to breaking his heart." After this expression of opinion, scarcely calculated to gratify his wife's guest, Charles seems to have put a summary end to the interview. To Henrietta's ladies Lady Eleanor imparted further information. The promised son would, she said, be born, christened, and buried all in one day.

This sinister prophecy seems to have been unwisely repeated to the Queen, and was not unlikely to contribute to its own fulfilment. At any rate, Henrietta's first child, born on May I3th, 1629, scarcely survived its birth. Different causes were assigned for the catastrophe. The Queen had been frightened by finding two large dogs fighting in her gallery, one of whom had snatched at her gown ; whilst other incidents were also considered to account for the fact of her premature confinement at Greenwich. No qualified nurse was at hand, and the town midwife, sent for on the emergency, " swooned with fear" so soon as she was brought into the royal chamber, and was carried away in that condition. The Queen was in great danger ; and the King, constantly at her side, watched in deep anxiety for the issues of life or death. If God pleased, he told the doctors, he might have other children, but let them do all they could to save his wife. Their efforts were successful. Henrietta lived, but her child died. u Some little life" being still in the infant at his birth, he was baptized by the King's chaplain, though not before an altercation had taken place between Charles and the Queen's confessor. There had been but scanty time to lose in disputing. That same night the small coffin was carried in state

to Westminster Abbey, six sons of earls, supported by six sons of barons, acting as bearers, and was laid, Laud officiating, by the side of King James.

The disappointment was no doubt a severe one. In the words of Sir Theodore Mayerne, the Queen's physician, God had shown them a Prince of Wales, but the flower had been cut down the same instant that it saw the light. Sir Theodore was, however, able to assure his correspondent, Lord Dorchester, that the mother was doing well and was full of strength and courage.

If the Queen had to mourn the loss of her child, a constant source of trouble to her had come to an end shortly before her confinement. The war with France had been concluded. Charles had tacitly renounced the right he had assumed to dictate to the French King the measures to be adopted in dealing with his Huguenot subjects, whilst Louis had waived the question of the fulfilment of Charles' pledge that the English Catholics should remain unmolested. Further, when Henrietta declared herself satisfied with the arrangement of her household, it was manifestly impossible for her brother to continue his interference on her behalf. On April I4th a treaty was accordingly concluded, and less than a month later it was publicly proclaimed.

At peace with her own country, and secure in the affection of her husband, Henrietta, in spite of the little grave in Westminster Abbey, had become a happy woman. The prophetess's prediction was in course of fulfilment. The good years had begun. An account of things at court sent by Lord Cottington to Went-worth some three months after her child's birth proves that all was going well. " The Queen," he says, " went to the waters of Tunbridge, with an intention to have

drunk them long, but she could not bear the King's absence ; so she is come suddenly from thence, and by great journeys meets with the King this night at Oatlands, whither he also returns to pay her in the same money."

More conclusive still is a letter written in 1630 by Charles, when, before the birth of the child who was to become Charles II., he gives his mother-in-law a description of the relations existing between himself and his wife, offering a signal contrast to the complaints intended for Marie de Medicis' eyes in earlier days. After making due acknowledgments for the gift of a chair sent over from France for Henrietta's use, he adds that she is so careful of herself that the only authority he needs to exert is that of love, " the sole dispute now between us being which shall vanquish the other by affection, each deeming the victory is gained when the wishes of the other are discovered and followed." Nor is there any reason for believing that the condition of harmony thus established was ever seriously interrupted. If Charles had shown himself too anxious at the first to vindicate his authority as husband, he had exchanged the part for that of a lover, and such he remained to the end of his life.

There can be no doubt that Henrietta showed herself worthy of his love. The age was one of licence, and the path of the courtier remained, as Raleigh had described it in his dying speech, a way of wickedness and vice. Charles had refined his surroundings ; it was not in his power to conform them to his own standard of morality. Pleasure, says Mr. Forster, was, in the court of Charles II., a vulgar satyr. In his father's it was a god Pan, and the muses piped amongst his nymphs. Yet something had been done. With a King,

no HENRIETTA MARIA

to quote an authority as unprejudiced in Charles' favour as Mrs. Hutchinson, temperate, chaste, and serious, the face of the court had changed, and those of the nobility and courtiers who did not abandon their former ways of life had yet the reverence to the King to retire into corners to practise them.

It has been asserted that Henrietta had no natural abhorrence for vice, and tolerated those about her person known to indulge in it. Admitting the charge to be to a certain extent true, it is no more than fair to take her origin, her early training and associations, into account. She had been brought up at a court where intrigues were of daily occurrence. The blood of Henri of Navarre ran in her veins, partly responsible, it may be, for the sins laid to the charge of Charles II. The age, also, was one when immorality was in a measure taken for granted. 1 But though the atmosphere around her may have affected Henrietta's moral standard, she herself had escaped the taint. Unpopular as she was, alike as Catholic and as Frenchwoman, and later on as Queen, and in spite of the abuse showered upon her, curiously few serious attempts were made to reduce to specific charges the vague generalities of condemnation. Both before and after her husband's death her name was coupled with that of Jermyn, but the foundations upon which the accusation rests are, in the King's lifetime, scarcely worth taking into account ; after his death, wholly inconclusive. With this exception, the breath of calumny was I powerless against the blamelessness of her private life. Her confessor's conviction, transmitted to Rome by the agent of the Vatican, was that she had

1 In the letters of Mary, Princess of Orange, to her brother Charles some twenty years later, there is more than one playful allusion to his " wife," Lucy Walters, the mother of Monmouth.

no temptation to moral transgression. She possessed, at all events, the safeguard of the love, tender and true and enduring, she bore her husband—a love even more passionately returned.

In the summer of 1629, Chateauneuf, the French ambassador, was observing and registering his impressions of affairs at court. Sent to London for the purpose of securing, if possible, Charles' co-operation against Spain, he placed high amongst the circumstances favourable to his mission the influence exerted by Henrietta. Though ignorant of politics, and as yet taking little interest in such questions, she could be counted upon as the natural advocate of France ; and each proof of the King's devotion to her, however trivial in itself, represented an additional chance of effecting the desired alliance. And proofs were many.

" You do not see that in Turin ?" said Charles lightly to the ambassador, as he kissed his wife again and again. " Nor at Paris either," he added, in a lower tone and a little indiscreetly, in allusion to Louis and the unloved Queen.

Complaints were heard that speech could not be had with the King, so constantly was he in his wife's apartments. His only regret was that he could not take her with him to the council-chamber. " 1 wish," he once said, " that we could always be together, and that you could accompany me to the Council. But what would these people say if a woman were to busy herself with matters of government ? "

Chateauneuf was forced to confess that the nineteen-year-old Queen had little desire to find occupation in state affairs. It was, nevertheless, important to strengthen and maintain the French hold upon her sympathies; and viewed in this connection, the fact that, since

HENRIETTA MARIA

the ejectment of her retinue, an English Oratorian had filled the post of her confessor, caused some disquietude in France. The ambassador accordingly set himself to place the ecclesiastical arrangement of her household on a new footing. The coming of the Capuchins who, as a result of Bassompierre's mission, were to have been sent from France, had been delayed by reason of the war. It was now proposed that, together with a bishop, eight French monks of the order should take up their residence at court, thereby superseding in their functions the Queen's present confessor, Father Philip, and his colleague, a second Oratorian. Against the coming of the Capuchins the King had no objections to urge. As belonging to a less political order than the Oratorians, their presence at court might indeed be the more desirable of the two. With Henrietta's personal religion he had shown no disposition to interfere, and was reported to have chidden her for remaining so late in bed that mass could not be said before noon. The eight Capuchins he was, therefore, ready and willing to receive. But to a resident bishop he entertained strong objections. Retaining a lively recollection of the young ecclesiastic who had accompanied his bride to England, and of the part he had played in the domestic dissensions of their first year of marriage, he may be pardoned for entertaining a dread of a similar influence.

" Your mother is sending you a governor," he told Henrietta, adding an injunction not to permit the newcomer to establish himself on the same footing as that

O

obtained in former days by the Bishop of Mendes ; but to permit him to approach her at dinner or in church alone.

The proposed arrangement ultimately fell through. Unless he were to be replaced by a bishop, Henrietta

refused to relinquish her English confessor ; and Charles in the end declined to receive a bishop at all. Although the difficulty was afterwards surmounted, it seems to have been considered impracticable to combine the ministrations of Oratorians and Capuchins ; and retaining the services of Father Philip, the Queen dispensed for a time with those of the monks. In the spring of the following year, however, the long-deferred arrangement was carried into effect, and the band of Capuchins were at last established in London. Their arrival was the signal for fresh demonstrations on the part of the English Catholics, and threatened to endanger the hardly won domestic peace of Whitehall. Auguring favourably for the future from the presence of the monks, crowds hastened to avail themselves of their ministrations, till it became necessary to issue orders that no English subject should be admitted to the Queen's chapel—a prohibition that Lord Dorset, now chamberlain and " highly approving this gracious message," could be trusted to enforce.