The life of Queen Henrietta Maria (9 page)

Under these circumstances he found himself upon the horns of a dilemma. On his return from Spain Ihe had pledged his word, in response to a petition from fche Commons, that, in the event of his marrying a atholic, " no advantages to the recusants at home" should accrue from the match. On the other hand, py the secret articles appended to the marriage treaty, is binding as his own signature and his father's could nake them, he had given his promise that English [Catholics should be released from prison, and should huffer no further molestation. He had, therefore, to I hoose between the alternatives of breaking faith either vith Parliament and the nation or with France and I VOL. i. 5

Henrietta. He took the middle course of a wavering policy by which each pledge was in turn infringed ; appearing, as Mr. Gardiner points out, incapable of appreciating the position of the young Queen, who, sent to England on the distinct understanding that her coming was to bring peace and security to those professing her own faith, would feel that she, no less than they, had suffered betrayal.

Whilst the rival parties were pitted against each other over the length and breadth of the civilised world, the court itself, no less than the country, was a miniature battlefield of warring creeds. The Queen, with her French attendants, ecclesiastical and lay, were pledged to further, by all means in their power, the interests of a body regarded by the bulk of the nation with abhorrence, the popular sentiments being shared to the full by the King, his favourite, and the majority of his ministers. Each concession obtained by the Catholics was regarded, not as an individual grace freely conferred, but as a triumph wrested from the enemy. It will thus be seen that it would not have been easy for the King, however adroit in steering his course, to avoid collisions. To carry out to the full his ante-nuptial pledges would have been, taking into account the conditions of public feeling, barely possible ; whilst the attempt to evade them excited the hot indignation of the Queen's guides and counsellors, and, through ther her own. With tact and patience it is possible that a modus vivendi might have been found. But in these qualities all parties concerned were lamentably lacking ; and in the Queen, at least, there was a disposition to accentuate rather than minimise the difficulties of the situation.

The truth of the story concerning the pilgrimage

to Tyburn undertaken by Henrietta a year after her marriage has never been established. She herself denied it. Bassompierre, sent to England later on to restore peace between husband and wife, refused it credence. His account of what had actually taken place is likely to be approximately true. That Henrietta had walked in St. James' Park was, he said, probable. That she had thence passed into Hyde Park he also admitted. But that she had approached nearer to the gallows than a distance of fifty feet, or that her evening walk and that of her companions had been of the nature of a religious ceremony, he explicitly refused to allow. For the rest, " to have thought a little of God " at the sight of the gibbet seemed to the marshal a small offence. He denied, he added, that they had prayed for the malefactors hung there ; but had they done so, they would have done well, since the victims had been condemned to death but not to damnation. His reply to the Queen's accusers was, in fact, a formal denial of the act, accompanied by an offer to prove that " 1'on eust tres bien fait de la commettre."

Whether or not Bassompierre was right, Charles believed that the incident had taken place, making use of it, further, as an excuse for the expulsion from the country of the priest, de Sancy, charged with its responsibility. But, accepting the hypothesis that the accusation had been invented with a view to the discrediting of the Queen's spiritual advisers, it must be admitted that it represented little more than an exaggerated instance of the spirit displayed by those surrounding her. Trifle after trifle, insignificant in themselves, serve to indicate the fashion in which insular prejudice was wantonly and ostentatiously outraged. On one occasion it is the Queen's chaplain, who, stealing a march upon the Protestant clergyman,

succeeds in saying grace at the royal table ; whereupon the King, to mark his displeasure, takes his wife by the hand and leads her away, refusing to partake of meat thus irregularly blessed. Or again, Henrietta herself is the culprit ; as, offended by the officious zeal of the Duke's sister, Lady Denbigh, who had arranged that a preche should take place in the hall of the house where she was staying, she passes twice through the apartment, talking and laughing with her attendants, to the scandal of those present, engaged in their devotions. It is not difficult to conceive that such incidents, not likely to lose by repetition, added to the difficulties of the situation.

Those difficulties were seriously enhanced by the position at court of the Duke of Buckingham. Madame de Motteville goes so far as to assert, upon Henrietta's own authority, that not only had he fomented the dissensions between husband and wife, but that he had openly avowed to the Queen that such was his deliberate intention. Whether or no he is to be credited with so perilous a candour, it can scarcely be doubted that his attitude was that of an opponent. Nor were the events of the autumn such as to diminish his hostility.

The brief spell of popularity he had shared with Charles on the collapse of the marriage negotiations with Spain had been quickly overpast ; and in the October following upon the dissolution he made an attempt to regain public favour by organising a descent upon Cadiz, to be accompanied by an alliance with Holland. The Spanish expedition, so far from answering his purpose in planning it, only contributed by its failure to embitter the sentiments of the country towards him ; whilst still more personal cause of disappointment was supplied by Richelieu's refusal to accept him as ambassador at the

French court. The sentiments entertained towards the Duke in Paris may be inferred from a letter from Lord Holland, who, in the winter of 1625-6, filled, in conjunction with Sir Dudley Carleton, the post coveted by Buckingham.

" My dearest Lord," wrote the envoy, " all the joy I have hath such a flatness set upon it in your absence from hence as I protest before God I cannot relish it as I ought." Proceeding to treat of Buckingham's own affairs, and making use of somewhat transparent hieroglyphics in case the letter should fall into hands other than the Duke's, he informs his patron that the King—a crown being substituted for the word—continues suspicious, often discourses of the matter, and is willing to be told that the Heart—another hieroglyphic—" hath infinite affections, you imagine which way." The Duke is the " most happy unhappy man alive, for the Heart is beyond imagination right, and would do things to destroy her fortune, rather than want satisfaction in her mind. . . . Do what you will, I dare not advise you. To come is dangerous, not to come is unfortunate."

The Duke was not mad enough to disregard Richelieu's prohibition ; but, disappointed in his hopes of re-visiting Paris, it may well be believed that he was not thereby the more inclined to act as peace-maker between Charles and the sister of the French King ; and the account given by Henrietta to Madame de Motteville of his line of conduct is corroborated, not only by de Tillieres' narrative, but by a further letter of Lord Holland's, where he quotes the Queen-Mother—never able to speak of her daughter without tears—as declaring that, having made the marriage, the Duke was now resolved to destroy his own work.

Buckingham's bearing towards Henrietta appears to

have been, with brief intervals, one almost of menace. With the ostensible object of warning her as to the danger of the course she was pursuing, he arrogated to himself the office of her mentor, taking her again and again to task, now in the character of the King's friend and representative, now in his own person. At times his tone was sufficiently threatening to have intimidated a less wilful and fearless spirit than Henrietta's. The King, he told her, would not long endure his present manner of life; if she did not change it, means would be taken to make her do so ; and she would render herself the most unhappy woman alive. She lived, he complained on another occasion, " en petite demoiselle et non pas en reine."

This last charge may have been in allusion to pleasures, innocent enough in themselves, but to which Charles had taken exception—to water-parties and promenades ^ or perhaps to amusements of the nature of a stolen visit, incognito, recorded a little later, to the Royal Exchange, where she had gone to make her own purchases in bourgeoise fashion—" a French trick," says an ill-natured contemporary letter, " like the washing in the Thames last summer," when the Duchesse de Chevreuse had performed the feat of swimming across the river, to the scandal of English beholders, unused to the sight of outdoor bathing.

The fact was that matters had reached a pass when every incident that took place was liable to misconstruction. If Henrietta was cold in her manners to her husband, he took umbrage at it. If she made an attempt to improve their relations, he suspected the change to be due to the instructions and influence of those about her.

" As for news," he wrote to Buckingham some time in the autumn of this year, " my wife begins to mend her

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manners. I know not how long it will continue, for they say it is by advice. But the best of all is, they say the Monsieurs desire to return home. I will not say this for certain, for you know nothing they say can be so."

It may have been at the time of this armistice that Sir George Goring, afterwards attached to Henrietta's household as vice-chamberlain, wrote that the Queen began to find that it was a gentle way and not frowns that could prevail with a great King and a prudent husband ; adding that the " small disgusts" at court were so well repaired as it were a sin to commemorate them. The period of peace can have been but brief. Nor must it be denied that if Charles displayed a total inaptitude, during these early days, for dealing with the wilful child he had married, he was not without more serious causes of displeasure than were furnished by water-parties and shopping expeditions. Even the Bishop of Mendes, in no ways inclined to over-conciliation, was forced to admit that it would be a propos should the Queen show a greater degree of courtesy to the King and to his dignitaries of State, adding that to none, of what rank soever, did she so much as pay a compliment. At a moment when all eyes were jealously fixed upon the court, her chapel had been made a rallying-point for English Catholics, and it had become necessary to place pursuivants at the doors in order to exclude and take them into custody ; whilst members of her household had acquired houses in the neighbourhood of London, where it was intended to send boys and girls as a preliminary to despatching them to receive their education in foreign seminaries.

It was, perhaps, at this period—no date is given—that Henrietta's desire to effect a return to her native country

gave rise to a temporary cessation of hostilities between herself and the favourite. Aware of the Duke's longing to see her sister-in-law once more, she communicated to him her own wish to revisit France, the compact being that, in return for his good offices with the King, Henrietta should gain permission from her mother to bring Buckingham with her to Paris. Her request being met with a refusal, the Duke's interest in the matter was at an end, and the plan came to nothing.

In a memorial of Charles' own, sent in the summer of 1626 to Marie de Medicis in order that it might serve as justification for the apparent harshness of his measures, his causes of complaint are recapitulated, and a graphic description is furnished of the condition of the royal interieure during the first year of marriage. Plainly intended for the eyes of the Queen-Mother and her son, it is ostensibly addressed to some representative of his own, probably Sir Dudley Carleton, sent to Paris " to satisfy the King and Queen " as to Charles' conduct with regard to Henrietta and her French suite. Though it does not seem to have answered the purpose it was meant to serve, Carleton being very ill received at court, an impartial reader will be driven to confess that Henrietta's husband was not without legitimate grounds for discontent.

It was not unknown to the King and his mother, Charles wrote, what unkindness and distastes had fallen out between his wife and himself. Hitherto he had borne all with patience, as all the world knew, knowing her to be but young and hoping for amendment. Recurring to the initial cause of dispute in the exclusion of Madame de Saint-George from the royal carriage, he attributes to that incident Henrietta's subsequent attitude towards himself. For " from that very hour to this,"

says the unfortunate King, writing on July I2th, 1626, " no man can say that ever she used me two days together with so much respect as I deserved of her." On the contrary, such numerous disrespects had been shown him that it would be impossible to recount them all. He proceeds, however, to give samples of his wife's behaviour.

Soon after their marriage the court had adjourned to Hampton Court, and on their arrival there the King seems to have sent to her a deputation of his council, bringing with them the regulations that had been in use at court in his mother's time, and desiring that Henrietta's chamberlain would see that the same were now observed. To require conformity to the arrangements of a dead mother-in-law was, perhaps, an unwise test to apply to the obedience of a new made queen. Henrietta's reply was not conciliatory. It was to the effect that she hoped " the King would give her leave to order her house as she listed herself." That this discourteous reply should have been publicly returned to his communication was, in Charles' eyes, an aggravation of the offence. Had she answered that she would speak with him privately, he would have found no fault with her, so he stated, imputing what she might then have said to ignorance of business matters. " But I could not imagine," he added, " that she should affront me so as to refuse me in such a thing publicly." As it was, he took an opportunity, " when 1 thought we had leisure to dispute it out by ourselves," to tell her calmly of her fault, and further, set himself to convince her of her mistake with regard to the business in hand. Whereupon Henrietta, in lieu of a humble acknowledgment of error, gave him so ill an answer that he omitted to repeat it—especially as he had much more of the same