The life of Queen Henrietta Maria (14 page)

Difficulties of the kind were more easily met when both King and Queen were anxious to keep the peace; but prudence and tact were not amongst the gifts of Henrietta's spiritual advisers, and a ceremony at which, in the presence of two thousand spectators, she laid the corner-stone of the Capuchin church at Somerset House, increased to an alarming extent the dislike felt for the Catholic Queen. The strict watch kept by the public upon the royal household is evidenced by a letter written when Henrietta's second confinement was expected, in which it was mentioned, as the best news of the week, that nurse, rocker, and all attendants of the future nursery, were to belong to the Protestant religion.

VOL. i. 8

Another letter—this time addressed by Lord Dorchester to de Vic, charge d'affaires at Paris—gives an account of the period immediately preceding the looked-for event. The Queen, he said, was expecting her confinement at St. James', all being convenient there— the King having his recreations near, and the Queen her entertainments and devotions. The newly arrived Capuchins were lodged commodiously, beyond the austerity of their rule, so as the French ambassador himself professed he could not conceive how it was possible for things in all respects to be so well accommodated. The general satisfaction at court had been disturbed by one incident alone—namely, the arrival, against Charles' expressed pleasure, of a doctor from France, intended to fill the post of domestic physician to the Queen. Lord Dorchester added that, having the present condition of the latter in view, the King had contented himself with letting the French ambassador know that the doctor might return as he came, replying to the envoy's requests that the man of medicine might kiss her Majesty's hand and wait to carry the good news of the birth to France, with a civil refusal. This reply was to be understood by M. de Fontenoy as made to him in his private capacity. Should he advance the demand as ambassador, Charles would be forced to say what would displease him.

Such being the state of feeling at court and outside it, it was perhaps fortunate that the sage femme, Madame Peronne, who had, under the singular escort of little Geoffrey Hudson, the Queen's dwarf, been despatched from France to preside over the birth, should have fallen into the hands of pirates, by whom she was detained until the occasion for her services was at an end.

On May 29th, 1630, the Queen's eldest surviving son, afterwards Charles II., was born at St. James' Palace. That same morning the King went in state to return thanks at St. Paul's Cathedral for the birth of his heir, a star, said to have appeared at noonday whilst the procession was taking place, promising well in the sight of the people for the future of the new-born Prince. Charles had likewise taken immediate measures to ensure that no march should be stolen upon him by Henrietta's resident priest. " As soon as he was in the world," writes Father Cyprian de Gamache of the child, " the King his father sent to tell the Capuchins not to trouble themselves about the baptism of his son, as he would attend to it himself"— a polite fashion of intimating that the ministrations of the monks would not be acceptable in the present instance.

Whilst thus making his own attitude clear, Charles had come near to being betrayed, out of consideration for his wife, into a step by which the popular imagination would have been dangerously inflamed. It was only by the expostulations of his ministers that he was induced to cancel the appointment, announced on the day the child was born, of Lady Roxburgh, a Catholic, to the charge of the heir to the throne—a post ultimately conferred upon Lady Dorset.

That Charles should for a moment have contemplated running counter to British prejudice in such a matter is one proof amongst others of his lack of comprehension of the conditions by which he was surrounded. At this very time, so strong was the jealousy entertained with regard to the French Queen and her religion that the birth of the child had been looked upon by many of his subjects rather in the light of a misfortune than as matter of rejoicing. Henrietta's son was, it was

considered, an ill substitute for the heirs to the throne ready provided in the children of the King's sister, the Queen of Bohemia; who, educated and nurtured in the exercise of the Protestant faith, would have been gladly welcomed as his successors by the bulk of the nation. Two of Henrietta's sons were, however, for good or for ill, to reign over the English people. On June 2yth the baptism of their future King took place, the ceremony being performed by Laud, now Bishop of London, and the office of sponsors filled by the incongruous trio, King Louis XIII., Marie de Medicis, and the zealous Protestant Palgrave, all three alike viewing with suspicion or dislike the special tenets in which their godson was to be educated.

The baby was satisfactory in all respects save beauty. He was fat, healthy, and ill-favoured. He also had a gravity of demeanour according little with his characteristic gaiety in later life.

"He is so ugly that I am ashamed of him," Henrietta wrote to her friend, Madame de Saint-George, to whom, in spite of her reconciliation with her husband, she always continued to display cordial affection. " I wish you could see the cavalier, for he has no ordinary mien. He is so serious in all that he does that I cannot help deeming him far wiser than myself." "If my son only knew how to talk," she says in another letter, " I think he would send you his compliments. He is so fat and so big that he is taken for a year old, and he is only four months. ... I will send you his portrait as soon as he is a little fairer ; for at present he is so dark \_noir~\ that I am ashamed of him."

These and others addressed to " ma mie Saint-George" are sunshiny letters, giving little indication of any apprehension of gathering clouds. It is difficult

to believe that they can have been wholly absent. Yet it is pleasant to imagine that, for a time at least, the woman to whom life was presently to resolve itself into a sombre tragedy was troubled with no serious forebodings.

CHAPTER VI

1630—1633

Exile of Marie de Medicis—Henrietta's growing influence—Charles still independent of it—His foreign policy—The Queen's hostility to Spain—Charles' refusal to receive her mother—The Chevalier de Jars—Letters of Henrietta's and Lord Holland's opened—Quarrels at court—Jermyn's misconduct—Birth of the Princess Royal—Charles crowned in Edinburgh—Birth of James II.—Letter from Wentworth.

HENRIETTA'S domestic felicity, great as it was, cannot have been without alloy. Before her baby was many months old news was brought from France which, to a daughter so devotedly attached, must have occasioned no little grief, rendered the greater by her inability to render to Marie de Medicis the assistance she demanded.

In these early days the King, in spite of his attachment to his wife, was jealous of allowing it to be imagined that he was ruled by her influence, and it may be that her power over him at this date has been overestimated. The very endeavours made by intriguing politicians to make use of her—endeavours of which the King cannot have been altogether ignorant—may have contributed to put him on his guard. It has been seen that Chateauneuf had striven to turn her power to account, and a letter written at a later date to the Vatican by Panzani, papal agent at her court, affords evidence that he was engaged in a similar attempt. " She thinks little of the future," he wrote, " trusting

entirely in the King. She must endeavour more to gain the ministers of State, of whom if she wishes she may be the mistress."

The last sentence is significant of the pressure constantly brought to bear upon Henrietta with the object of inducing her to throw herself into political and party interests. It is easy to measure the importance, in the eyes of foreign statesmen, of increasing the influence of a Queen upon whom they believed themselves able to count for the furtherance of their designs. Ignorant for the most part, whether as foreigners or as Catholics, of the trend of political and public feeling in England, they could not foresee the fatal results, not only of the Queen's genuine power over her husband, but of the reflected distrust of him likely to be produced by the suspicion that he acted at the dictation of his wife.

There can be little doubt that it was at this time that the foundations were being laid for that influence destined to prove, in the eyes of most of those making a study of this period, alike strong and disastrous. Mr. Disraeli, it is true, has been at pains to demonstrate that Henrietta's power has been strangely and inexplicably overrated. He asserts that it is comparatively seldom that she appears in connection with matters of state importance, quoting a letter from the Earl of Northumberland to the Earl of Leicester in support of the view that solely or chiefly in reference to court arrangements did Charles defer to her wishes. " Celia [the Queen] will be able to serve you in matters of favour rather than in what must be disputed and sifted for reason and justice, because Arviragus [Charles] is too subtle. . . . Our master loves not to hear other people give what is only fit for him." Mr. Disraeli also contends that the public declaration

made at a later date by Charles at York, that the Queen had advised him to call a Parliament, was a mere expedient adopted to promote her popularity. The assertion can be neither proved nor disproved. His main argument will strike many readers as singularly inconclusive. It is the Queen's unfitness to be the King's counsellor in matters of State. But not the wisest advisers are most secure of a hearing, and men are less often swayed through their reason than by means of their affections.

A formidable array of witnesses testify to the influence exercised by Henrietta. St. John, the popular leader, classed her with Buckingham and Laud as obtaining Charles' ear u to his utter undoing" ; Clarendon is prejudiced against her, but when he speaks of her " absolute power" over her husband, if some blunders are thereby transferred from the master he loved to the Queen he disliked, the King is convicted of a degree of weakness scarcely less than criminal ; Sir Philip Warwick's reference to her " too, too powerful influence " takes its existence for granted ; and, in view of the facts of history and of the documentary evidence afforded by her own letters and the King's, it is difficult not to believe, in spite of arguments to the contrary, that the opinion of contemporaries, endorsed by most historians, is justified.

At the present time Henrietta's power was in its infancy ; nor is proof wanting that Charles was capable of holding his own against it. In his foreign policy this was especially the case. A glance at it, however cursory, will show that it was not adopted in deference to his wife. So far as it could be called a policy at all, it displayed strength in family affection, but in nothing else. His central aim, to the exclusion of all wider and larger conceptions, was the restoration of the Palatinate to his

sister's husband. To this end, negotiations were carried on, in turn or simultaneously, with every power from whom assistance might be expected. Envoys visited Madrid, Vienna, France, Turin, and the camp of the great Protestant champion, Gustavus. Should the restitution of the Palatinate be made a condition of the alliance, Charles would have been ready to throw the weight of his influence into the scales in favour of any power thus pledged. He failed to perceive that, in order to obtain a result of no great moment to any one but himself, he must be prepared to make adequate payment, either in hard cash or in military assistance. Charles never made it worth while—perhaps, under present circumstances, it would have been impossible for him to make it worth while—for any of the powers at war to accede to his condition. But if his hopes of achieving by diplomacy what he was not prepared to purchase at its just value were doomed to disappointment, the course he pursued was, none the less, proof sufficient that Henrietta had not the direction of his conduct. So far as she endeavoured to sway him, it would certainly have been in favour of her own country and against the interests of Spain. In December, 1628, a correspondent, informing the Earl of Carlisle that suspicions were entertained that he inclined towards an accommodation with that country, added reassuringly that the Queen refused to believe it; and when Lord Cottington, despatched in the following November, in spite of her opposition and that of the French ambassador, to conduct negotiations in Spain, in taking leave of her asked, " what service she would be pleased to command him to her sister," she replied uncompromisingly that " she would have nothing to do with Spain or any person there." Upon the arrival

of a Spanish envoy, Don Carlos de Coloma, in December of the same year, she made so little attempt to disguise her feelings that she omitted to pay the guest the customary compliments.

Incident after incident betrays the strength of her French partisanship. It is related that one morning the King sent her in jest a grey hair discovered on his brown head. " Don Carlos," she told him sardonically, seizing the opportunity of pointing a moral—" Don Carlos will give you many more before the Emperor restores the Palatinate." She was right. Yet, against her judgment and against her wishes, Coloma remained in London, and ten months later Charles had concluded a treaty with Coloma's master and his own old enemy. Nor did Henrietta even then show any disposition to bow to the inevitable. When the formal declaration of the alliance was publicly celebrated, and bonfires were lighted by order in the streets, Charles proved unable to command corresponding tokens of rejoicing within the precincts of Whitehall, the Queen marking her displeasure by a refusal to array herself as for a festival at the banquet given in the ambassador's honour.

It is thus proved that, from first to last, Charles had shown himself, where Spain was in question, fully capable of carrying out a line of action directly opposed to his wife's wishes. In a matter touching her more personally he gave yet more signal evidence of independence of judgment and conduct. In November, 1630, a year before the final conclusion of the treaty with Spain, an attempt had been made in France to overthrow the domination of the all-powerful Richelieu. In this attempt, not only the two Queens, Louis' wife and mother, had been concerned, but the King's brother, Gaston, Due d'Orleans. It had ended in failure ; and the Queen-Mother, fore-