The life of Queen Henrietta Maria (16 page)

It must be confessed that the appointment of a nurse to the King's son who declined the oath of allegiance to the King was an anomalous one. In the end the child was committed to the care of Lady Dorset, who seems to have been entrusted with the general supervision of the royal nurseries, since it is to this lady that Wentworth, then Lord Deputy in Ireland, addressed a letter in the following year, containing his answer to a request that he would provide an Irish greyhound puppy for the little Prince of Wales. The zeal with which, in the midst of his anxious and arduous labours, the Lord Deputy applied himself to execute the commission, is an example of his eagerness to serve any member of the royal family.

u Madam," he writes on this occasion, " I did with all gladness receive from your ladyship the first commands it ever pleased our young master to honour me with, and before Christmas I will not fail to furnish his Highness with the finest greyhound this country affords." Till then he must crave the Prince's pardon. It were too bold and indiscreet to send a dog to England before he had had him under his own eye to see that he was safe and gentle amongst Wentworth's own children.

CHAPTER VII

1630—1634

The lull before the storm—The court—Henrietta—Charles—The Lord Treasurer, Weston—Laud—Wentworth—Hamilton—Holland—Lord and Lady Carlisle—Other courtiers—The Queen's Pastoral—Earl of Newcastle—His instructions to the Prince of Wales—Letters from the Queen and Prince—Henrietta and her sister.

r I ^HE years following the Dissolution of 1629 were JL the lull before the storm. The country, owing to a variety of causes, and especially to the peace concluded with France and Spain, was in a condition of material prosperity. For material prosperity the advisers in possession of the King's ear—more particularly the Lord Treasurer—were ready to barter most other goods, and their object had been attained. Parliaments were clearly unnecessary evils, and men laughed as they talked of the catchwords of the patriots and the liberty of the subject. If the acuter spirits amongst the ministerial party must have been aware that a time of reckoning was in store, discontent had been driven underground, and, in the absence of the usual channels of expression, could only find occasional and isolated utterance. To some men the thought of Eliot, dying in the Tower rather than make a surrender of principle, may have come at times to trouble them, like the spectre at the banquet ; but by courtiers, at least, the unwelcome reminder of a force only to be conquered

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when life itself was extinct, will have been quickly thrust aside.

Meantime, the court, presided over by a Queen in the first freshness of her youth and of a beauty to which her many portraits bear witness, was pervaded by a spirit of gaiety and pleasure. " Frivolous and meddlesome " are adjectives applied to Henrietta by one historian. Eager and interested may be epithets less offensive and not less true ; and a certain shyness which, judging by a description of her sent to Rome by the papal agent a little later, seems to have clung about her, will have added to her charm. " Her actions are full of an incredible innocence," the envoy reported, " such that she blushes like a young girl in the presence of strangers." He added that she suffered at times from melancholy, when she liked silence. These occasions, we cannot but believe, were in these days rare.

Instead of remaining aloof in the attitude she had at first adopted towards England and things English, she was setting herself in earnest, under the tuition of one Mr. Wingate, to acquire a mastery over the language ; and though it was not until some years afterwards that her first letter in that tongue was indited, her progress in it is proved by the fact that she was already capable of taking her part in the performance of an English masque.

To Charles, no less than to Henrietta, these years must have been the happiest of his life. It is true that, looking at the face made familiar to all the world by Van Dyck, it is difficult to believe that, even before he was overtaken by his calamities, he was a wholly happy man. When Henrietta sent three sketches by the great painter to Bernini, that by their help he might model the King's bust, the sculptor said that never had he looked upon a face so marked by melancholy, adding that its

owner must be doomed to misfortune. But for the present life cannot have failed to seem desirable enough.

Buckingham indeed was gone, nor was his place ever to be filled. As Charles had loved and trusted the friend of his youth he trusted and loved no other man. But, setting aside the wife he adored and the children who were growing up around him, interests, many and various, filled his days and supplied him with occupation and pleasure. His love for art of all kinds was real and genuine. " Monsieur le Prince de Galles," Rubens had written in 1625, " est le prince le plus amateur de la peinture qui soit au monde ; " and he was doing his best to encourage, not only painting, but literature and architecture. He valued the society of artists. Rubens himself, Van Dyck, and Mytens were numbered amongst his familiar friends ; and the ease and cordiality distinguishing his bearing towards the painters he attracted to his court contrasted curiously with the formality and " stiff roughness " of his manners when in a less congenial atmosphere.

His artistic sense showed itself in matters of business. He was critical and fastidious as to the style of his despatches, and Warwick records that he smilingly observed, with reference to a document that had been brought to him, that " a man might have as good ware out of a chandler's shop." Yet he recognised the fact that there were things more important than style ; and comparing his two secretaries, he once said that the dull one—Carleton—pleased him best, for he ever brought him his own sense in his own words. The other, Falkland, on the contrary, most commonly brought him his instructions in so fine a dress that he did not always own them.

Whilst his days were filled with interests practical

and artistic, Charles also possessed the power, so essential to happiness, of attaching those by whom he was surrounded. At a time when men were ranged against one another in opposite camps, the spirit of loyalty would have been in any case accentuated amongst the King's partisans; but the sequel shows that personal affection for the man mingled with passionate loyalty to the King. Nor is the attachment of his friends difficult to understand, in spite of failings and defects. "This King," says Carlyle, " is of fine delicate fibre .... there is a real selectness, if little nobleness of nature in him. His demeanour everywhere is that of a man who has at least no doubt that he is able to command." That he was justified in his confidence was to be abundantly proved in days when men went to death or to exile at his word. For the present, it was enough that he could rule in their hearts.

Coming from King and Queen to the other elements making up the court, it is worth while to pass briefly in review the principal figures there. To understand Henrietta, and to make due allowance for her faults and her mistakes, it is necessary to obtain a clear conception of the atmosphere and influences around her during these sunshiny years. Those influences were the influences of the palace, since with all that lay outside its precincts she was never brought into any practical contact ; and the court was what it was made by the men and women belonging to it. It is, therefore, not irrelevant to break the narrative of events in order to take a survey of the actors in them.

Notwithstanding the harmonious relations established between the King and Queen, the court may be roughly divided into rival camps, usually distrustful of one another if not at actual war, the members of each looking

HENRIETTA MARIA

respectively to Charles or to Henrietta for countenance and support. In the Council itself this was the case, the Queen's party actually outnumbering at the Board that of the King. In the matter of weight it was, of course, a different question, and it was impossible that Henrietta's friends should make way against the advisers favoured by Charles. Amongst these last the Lord Treasurer, Weston, afterwards Earl of Portland, was, until his death in 1635, indisputably the most important. Commonly to be found in opposition to the Queen, he was a man of little dignity and no nobility of character, self-interested, and not above the suspicion of dishonesty in the methods he took to amass a fortune. Possessing a full share of administrative ability, he had steadily adhered, partly by policy, partly by inertia, to the maintenance of that peace to which, now that Buckingham's restless spirit was removed, Charles himself inclined. England was, in Portland's eyes, " a land the people of whom it was his business to make rich, in order that they might be more easily made obedient." l

To the end thus epitomised his whole policy was directed, based on economical principles partly responsible for the frequent collisions between himself and the Queen. On some grounds Portland might have been expected to be viewed with more favour by Henrietta than others of her husband's counsellors. His family were recusant Catholics, his own attitude with regard to the old religion finding expression in a death-bed reconciliation with the Church. Yet he was constantly to be reckoned amongst the adversaries of the Queen. He had not that submission and reverence for her, says Clarendon, as might have been expected from his wisdom and breeding, and often crossed her with more

1 Gardiner's Personal Government of Charles /., vol. i. p. 5.

rudeness than was natural to him. Whilst, when the inevitable result followed, in anger upon the part of Henrietta, not inclined to take such "crossings " meekly, and there reached his ears bitter expressions she had let fall, he was " exceedingly afflicted," and would make vain and abject endeavours to regain the ground he had lost, sometimes addressing his complaints to the King, sometimes expostulating with the Queen herself, and by his demeanour and bearing rendering his case worse than before. For his attempts to control expenditure there was no doubt ample reason. Buckingham, Carlisle, and their imitators had set a bad example of a lavish extravagance, calculated to rouse emulation and lead to similar display. It was difficult for the King to allow himself to be outshone by his courtiers, nor had Henrietta shown any inclination to practise economy. Profuse expenditure existed, side by side with something approaching to actual poverty. The story told of the necessity under which the Queen found herself, to have her room darkened on the occasion of a visit made by a Frenchwoman to herself and her baby, lest the foreigner should detect the deplorable condition of the bed-coverings, does not ring true. It might indeed be considered sufficiently disproved by the entry among the state papers of a payment of ^2,000 to Lady Denbigh, as first lady of the bedchamber, for the purchase of linen in preparation for Henrietta's confinement ; but, true or false, it is illustrative of the straits considered possible at Whitehall. " She is a bad housekeeper," Charles told somebody in his wife's presence. Such being the case, and money being scarce, it is comprehensible enough that, in spite of religious sympathies in common, Henrietta and the Lord Treasurer should have frequently disagreed.

Nor was Laud, rapidly rising to pre-eminence in the King's counsels, likely to have been on terms of genuine cordiality with the Queen. Narrow, honest, dictatorial, and industrious, he had the singleness of purpose and aim which is one factor, though not the only one, in the achievement of an object. That object, in the Archbishop's case, was the settlement of the English ecclesiastical establishment on a firm basis as a branch of the Catholic Church. In furtherance of this end he attached the utmost importance to a rigid uniformity in worship and rites. Of inward diversities in dogma he took less account. Disliking controversy, he would have had men avoid, so far as was possible, meddling with matters too deep for human understanding. He was, in a sense, the apostle of the saving virtue of external observance, as opposed to the vehement and militant personal spirituality of Puritanism. As the upholder of absolutism alike in Church and State, the royal supremacy, accepted by him without difficulty, united the two. Personally he had little attraction, and none for women. "No leader of any great church party," says Gardiner, u before or since, was ever so entirely without female admirers." That it was so may be reckoned, from one point of view, to the credit of the Archbishop. From another it indicates certain disqualifications for the post of a spiritual guide. He made, says the same writer, no appeal to either imagination or devotional feeling. Hard-headed and eminently practical, he had nothing of the idealist save his blindness to actual issues.

With the hopes he indulged of ultimate reunion with Rome, it will doubtless have been his interest to keep on good terms with Henrietta. But it is equally certain that there must have constantly arisen difficulties in the way of an understanding between them. Approximation in