That gentleman's temper had not been improved by his long trials; the last memorial[361] which he drew up, which was to a great length, is extremely acrid in tone. It dwells with justice upon the services which the Queen had rendered to the Catholic Church, upon the fair hopes which had been blighted by the war. It speaks of the ill reception accorded to her friends—among whom are mentioned Richard Crashaw and Patrick Cary, the brother of Lord Falkland—at the Papal Court. Finally, it dwells with particular and not unmerited bitterness upon the conduct of Rinuccini, who, it was believed, had a secret commission to separate Ireland from England. It happened that just about the time of the presentation of this memorial the hopes of toleration for the Catholics in England disappeared as suddenly as they had arisen, for the two Houses of Parliament voted that religious liberty should not extend to the toleration of Papists;[362] but even had this untoward incident not occurred, Digby can hardly have expected much from the Pope. The answer came at last in March, 1648, and it was cold and decisive. The Holy Father would have liked to help the Queen of England, but seeing no hope of the success of the Catholics, he felt that he could not indulge his inclination.[363] Sir Kenelm shook the dust of Rome off his feet and left it more convinced than ever of what he had written a year previously, that no one could succeed at the Papal Court without money and influence, and that "piety, honour, generosity, devotion, zeal for the Catholic faith and for the service of God, with all other vertues, heroic and theological,"[364] were banished thence. Henrietta would perhaps hardly have endorsed this comprehensive indictment; but she was bitterly disappointed, and she was incapable of perceiving that from his own point of view Innocent was right in refusing money, of which such Catholics as Sir Kenelm Digby[365] and his friends would have had the spending. On larger principles also the papal policy was justified. The idea of founding a solid toleration for Catholics upon the basis of a union of the King and the Independents was chimerical, for those among the Puritans who favoured the scheme were but a small minority of advanced views, and even they, it seems, soon repented of their liberality. Even had Charles been trustworthy (and in this, as in other cases, he paid the penalty of his incurable shiftiness), the anti-Catholic feeling of the nation, which had been one of the chief causes of the war, would never have permitted the antedating by more than a century of the repeal of the penal laws, and had the guarantees been given they would assuredly have been broken. With regard to Ireland, the Queen is perhaps less to be blamed. She knew that the Confederate Catholics hoped much from her, and she could not know that Rinuccini, the envoy of the Holy Father, was using all his influence against her, or fathom the depth of the malice which led him to write that "from the Queen of England we must hope nothing except propositions hurtful to religion, since she is entirely in the hands of Jermyn, Digby, and other heretics."[366]

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"He perished for lack of knowing the truth," said Henrietta once of her husband, with a flash of insight not often given to her. That which was true of Charles was true of her also; she was her father's daughter, and she desired to know the truth, and she was accustomed to say that the chief need of princes was faithful counsellors who would declare it to them; but to such knowledge she could not reach. Her schemes, with all their ingenuity, failed one after another because she was unable to grasp the conditions in which she worked, or to read the motives and characters of the people with whom she had to deal. She lived in a world of unreality built up of the love which she bore to her husband, which made her as unable to understand that the restoration of Charles Stuart to the throne he had lost was not the main object of the diplomacy of Europe, as she was to appreciate the fact that such negotiations as those which she, the Queen of a Protestant country, carried on with the Pope and the Catholics of Europe were more fatal to him than the swords or the malice of his enemies.

CHAPTER X
THE QUEEN OF THE EXILES

It was the beginning of the year 1649. France, which four years earlier had seemed so secure a refuge, was itself torn by civil war. The day of Barricades had come and gone; Paris was in the hands of the Frondeurs, deserted by Queen Anne and by the little King who had retired for safety to S. Germain-en-Laye: Mazarin seemed to the full as unpopular as even Strafford had been.

Within the city, in the palace of the Louvre, the Queen of England yet lingered; she would gladly have escaped to her relatives at S. Germain, but when she attempted to do so she was stopped at the end of the Tuileries Gardens. However, she had little fear; she knew that she was popular with the people, who preferred her sprightly ways to those of the dévote Spanish Queen, who thought of nothing but convents and monks, and she was content to wait upon events. It is true she was exceedingly uncomfortable; little by little the seemly establishment she had kept up in the early days of the exile had dwindled as she strained every nerve to send supplies to her husband, but she had never known need until now, when for six months her allowance from the King of France had not been paid. However, one day, when in the bitter cold of January she could not even afford a fire, she received a visit from the Coadjutor Bishop, who was a man of great importance among the Frondeurs. Little Princess Henrietta, who had been smuggled over to France in 1646 and who was now about four years old, was lying in bed. "You see," said the Queen, indicating the little girl and speaking with her usual cheerfulness, "the poor child cannot get up, as I have no means of keeping her warm." De Retz, in spite of his leanings to liberalism, was so shocked that a daughter of England and still more a granddaughter of Henry the Great should be in such a plight, that he prevailed upon the Parliament to send a considerable sum of money to the Queen of England.

It was never the physical accidents of life that weighed upon Henrietta—these she could bear so lightly as to shame her attendants into a like courage; but there was worse than cold or privation, worse even than the fear lest her native land might be rushing to the same fate as had overwhelmed the land of her adoption.[367] The real misery was the anxiety which was gnawing at her heart for her children, and above all for her husband. During the day she was able in some degree to divert her mind from it, but in the silent watches of the night it overwhelmed her.

She had begged and entreated the French Government to intervene between Charles and the foes in whose hands he was; but after her long experience of Mazarin she was not surprised at the ineffectual character of such intervention as the French ambassador gave. In Paris people were too much taken up with their own troubles "to take much notice" or to "care much of what may happen to the King of England."[368] Lower and lower sank the Queen's hopes, until at last all that she desired was to be at her husband's side to uphold him in his trouble. Laying aside in her great love the pride which prompted her to ask nothing from her enemies, she wrote to both Houses of Parliament asking for a safe conduct to England. Even this sorry comfort was denied her: her letters, the purport of which was known, were left unopened, to be found in that condition more than thirty years later among the State Papers.

In Paris the days dragged on. The city was so blockaded it was almost impossible for letters to enter it. There was great uncertainty as to the fate of the King of England, but sinister rumours, which probably came by way of Holland, began to be rife. One day Lord Jermyn presented himself before Henrietta and told her that her husband had been condemned to death and taken out to execution, but that the people had risen and saved him. Thus did the faithful servant attempt to prepare the Queen; and even over this shadow of the merciless truth she wept in recounting it to her friends.

But at last concealment was impossible. Father Cyprien was at this time in attendance on the Queen, and one evening as he was leaving her dining-room at the supper hour he was stopped at the door and asked to remain, as she would have need of his consolation and support. His wondering looks were answered by a brief statement of the fate of the King of England, at which the old man shuddered all over as the messenger passed on. Henrietta was talking cheerfully with such friends as the state of Paris permitted to gather round her, but she was awaiting anxiously the return of a gentleman whom she had sent to S. Germain-en-Laye. Jermyn (for it was he who had taken upon himself the task of breaking the hard news) said a few words intended to prepare her; she, with her usual quickness of perception, soon saw that something was wrong, and preferring certainty to suspense begged him to tell her plainly what had happened. With many circumlocutions he replied, until at last the fatal news was told.

"Curae leves loquuntur, graves stupent," is the comment of Father Cyprien, the spectator of this scene. Henrietta was utterly crushed by so awful a blow, which deprived her, by no ordinary visitation, but in so unheard-of and terrible manner, of him who had been at once "a husband, a friend, and a king"; she sank down in what was not so much a faint as a paralysis of all power and of all sensation except that of grief; she neither moved nor spoke nor wept, and so long did this unnatural state continue that her attendants became alarmed, and, in their fear, sent for the Duchess of Vendôme,[369] a sweet and charitable lady whose whole life was devoted to doing good and of whom the Queen was particularly fond; she, by her tears and her gentle sympathy, was able to bring Henrietta to a more normal condition in which tears relieved her overcharged heart. All the next day she remained invisible, weeping over the horror which to her at least was unexpected, for she had never believed until the last that the English people would permit such an outrage, and recalling, with bursts of uncontrollable grief, the happy days she had spent with the husband who had been her lover to the end. "I wonder I did not die of grief," she said afterwards, and indeed, at first, death seemed the only thing left to be desired, but

On the following day, however, she was sufficiently recovered to receive Madame de Motteville, who was setting out for S. Germain-en-Laye. The Queen asked her friend to come and kneel beside the bed on which she was lying, and then taking her hand she begged of her to carry a message to the Queen-Regent. "Tell my sister," said Henrietta, "to beware of irritating her people, unless" (with a flash of the Bourbon spirit) "she has the means of crushing them utterly." Then she turned her face to the wall and gave way once more to her uncontrollable sorrow. Only one thing could have increased her grief, and that was the knowledge, mercifully hidden from her, of the part which she had played in bringing her husband to his terrible doom.

It was but a few days later that she roused herself to go for a short visit to her friends, the Carmelite nuns in the Faubourg S. Jacques;[371] but there fresh agitation awaited her, for thither was brought the last tender letter which her husband had written for her consolation when he knew that he must die. As she read it grief once more overcame her and she sank fainting into the arms of two of the nuns who stood near; but she was stronger now than when she had met the first shock. Flinging herself on her knees before the crucifix which hung on the wall and raising her eyes and hands to heaven, she cried, "Lord, I will not complain, for it is Thou who hast permitted it." A similar courage upheld her in receiving indifferent acquaintance and uncongenial relatives who came to pay visits of condolence. Mademoiselle de Montpensier, indeed, considered that her aunt was less affected by her husband's death than she should have been, though she had the grace to add that it was probably self-respect and pride which forbade the widow to show the depth of her sorrow; this was undoubtedly the case. Henrietta might open her heart to dear friends such as Madame de Motteville or the Duchess of Vendôme, but she could not expose the sacredness of grief to the curious eyes of her niece, who not only had shown herself very indifferent to the charms of the Prince of Wales, on which, perhaps, Henrietta had descanted rather too frequently, but was inclined to regard the Queen of England's tales of the happiness and prosperity of her married life as somewhat highly coloured.

The execution of Charles I caused an unparalleled sensation throughout Europe, and indeed the world. Kings shivered on their thrones and despotic governments trembled. Sovereigns had indeed been murdered with a frequency which made such tragedies almost commonplace, but it was without precedent that a king should be put to death after a judicial trial by the hands of his own subjects. Even in far-away India a king who heard the news from the crew of an English ship replied that "if any man mentioned such a thing he should be put to death, or if he could not be found out, they should all dy for it."[372] In France the horror was specially felt, both on account of the close ties which bound together the two royal houses and because, owing to the unforgotten murder of Henry IV, regicide was a crime particularly odious to all good Frenchmen, who abhorred the views held on this subject by an advanced school of Catholicism. Moreover, the state of the country was such as to cause apprehension of a civil war similar to that which had caused the tragedy. "It is a blow which should make all kings tremble," said Queen Anne. Even the rebellious Frondeurs were shocked at the news. Many a gallant Frenchman would gladly have unsheathed the sword to avenge the murder of Charles Stuart, and many did take up the pen to exhort Christian princes to lay aside their differences and to turn their arms against the English murderers, which, of course, those potentates were not prepared to do, though they had a just appreciation of the offence offered to all kingship in this audacious act. Even the name of the much-loved Pucelle d'Orléans[373] was invoked in the cause, while a living lady, Dame Isabeau Bernard de Laynes, was so overcome by her feelings that she broke into verse, beginning—

Zealous Catholics shook their heads and said that now the real tendencies of the impious Reformation were appearing, which theme Bossuet developed with great effect when he came to preach Henrietta's funeral sermon;[375] others, more liberal-minded, contended that the two great religions of Rome and Geneva could live together very well, as was proved in France, but that the King of England had allowed all kinds of sects and sectaries, a course which clearly could only lead to disaster; the Sieur de Marsys, the French tutor of the young Princes of England, translated the story of the trial into French that all Frenchmen might read and ponder the monstrous document.[376] It was even said that the little Louis XIV, who was not yet eleven years old, took to heart in a way hardly to be expected the murder of his uncle, as if the child saw through the mists of the future another royal scaffold and the horrors of 1793.

Henrietta received plenty of sympathetic words and visits of condolence, but she received little else. It was believed that the condition to which Mazarin was reduced by the Frondeurs had emboldened the rebels in England to commit their last desperate act, but the instructions which the Cardinal penned to the French ambassador in London, before the fatal January 30th, show that his fear of the Spanish was a good deal stronger than his desire to help the King of England, and after the tragedy he only expressed polite regrets that France had not been able to follow the good example of Holland, which had protested against the regicide, and made a great favour of recalling the ambassador and refusing to recognize the republican agents in Paris. It was reserved for an old servant of Henrietta to show sympathy in a more practical manner. Du Perron, who at the request of the Queen of England had been translated to the See of Evreux, found himself detained by the Frondeurs, sorely against his will, in his own cathedral city. Ill, and wounded in his tenderest feelings by a compulsory semblance of disloyalty, he so took to heart the news of the terrible death of King Charles, to whom he was greatly attached, that he became rapidly worse and died in a few days.

The story of the heroic manner in which Charles met his terrible death wrung tears from many an eye in Paris. Henrietta, who had lived with him for twenty years, must have known that he would not fail in personal courage. After all, misfortune was no novelty to the House of Stuart. Charles' own grandmother had mounted the scaffold of Elizabeth, and of his remoter ancestors who sat upon the throne of Scotland few had escaped a violent death; when the moment came he was ready to fulfil the tragic destiny of his race. To his widow his royal courage was so much a matter of course that it brought her little consolation; but some real comfort she might have known could she have foreseen that such ready acceptance of his fate would not only blot out in the mind of his people the memory of his many failings, but would throw a glory over his name and career which has not completely faded even to the present day.

No one felt more than Henrietta that the King of England's fate was a warning to those in authority. She watched with painful interest the course of rebellion in France, and when at last she was able to see the Queen-Regent,[377] she gave that obstinate lady some excellent advice, dwelling particularly on the goodwill of the Parisians to their little King, and the general dislike which was felt for Cardinal Mazarin. In 1649 the rebellion was repressed, but only that it might break out anew two years later. During the second war of the Fronde, Henrietta, who thought that English history was repeating itself in France,[378] sought Queen Anne at S. Germain-en-Laye. There in an assembly, composed of both Frenchmen and Englishmen, she pressed upon her sister-in-law counsels of wisdom and moderation which it had been well had she herself followed in the past. "My sister," said the haughty Spanish lady, who was weary of advice, specially perhaps from one who had known so little how to manage her own concerns, "do you wish to be Queen of France as well as of England?"

Henrietta's reply came promptly, but with a world of sadness in it, "I am nothing, do you be something!"[379]

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Queen Henrietta Maria's position was considerably altered by her husband's death; on the one hand she became a person of greater importance as the adviser of her young son, who was hardly of an age to manage his own affairs; on the other, she was deprived of Charles' powerful support, and laid more open to the attacks of her opponents, whose fear it was to see her two sons, Charles and James, who arrived in Paris shortly after their father's death, fall under her influence.

Party feeling ran high at the exiled Court, which, with the suppression of the first rebellion of the Fronde, took shape again. Henrietta was respected by all—"our good Queen," she was affectionately called—but her religion and her politics were disliked by the Church of England constitutional party, which was strongly represented in Paris. Sir Edward Hyde, Sir Edward Nicholas, and their friends, considered with some justice that her counsels had been fatal to the master whose death had placed him on a pinnacle, where assuredly he had never been in his lifetime. They particularly disliked Jermyn, whose great influence with the Queen exposed him to jealousy, and Lord Culpepper[380] and Henry Percy, his intimate friends, were little less obnoxious to them. "I may tell you freely," wrote Ormonde, the late Viceroy of Ireland, who arrived in Paris at the end of 1651, "I believe all these lords go upon as ill principles as may be; for I doubt there is few of them that would not do anything almost, or advise the King to do anything, that may probably recover his or their estates."[381]

Shortly after the King's death the Queen's party (or that of the Louvre, as its enemies called it) was strengthened by the arrival of a recruit of great importance, Henrietta's old friend Walter Montagu, whom she had never seen since they parted in Holland in 1643. This gentleman, since his apprehension at Rochester, had been in the hands of the Roundheads; he had spent most of his time in the Tower of London, where he varied the monotony of prison life by a spirited controversy with a fellow-prisoner, Dr. John Bastwick, of pillory fame, who expressed himself greatly pleased with his nimble-witted adversary. He also became very devout, and in proof thereof wrote a volume of spiritual essays, which he published in 1647 with a charming dedication to the Queen of England, wherein piety and flattery were delicately blended. In spite of the dislike with which he was regarded,[382] he was treated with consideration, partly no doubt through the influence of his brother, the Earl of Manchester, with whom he was always on good terms and who even supplied him with money, but partly also, probably, because it was felt that the Queen of France, who pleaded over and over again for his enlargement, must not be irritated beyond measure. He was permitted to go to Tunbridge Wells on account of his health, which suffered from his long confinement, and he was finally released on the ground that he had never borne arms against the Parliament, which was true enough, as he had been in prison almost since the beginning of the war. Nevertheless, together with his friend Sir Kenelm Digby, who had reappeared in England, he was banished the country under pain of death.[383] He quickly repaired to Spa to drink the waters there, and thence passed to Paris, where he was warmly welcomed by the Queens, both of England and France.

The appearance of Walter Montagu—a frail worldling, as he calls himself—in the rôle of a spiritual writer probably caused much the same sort of amusement in Parisian circles as was caused in later days in those of London by the publication of Richard Steel's Christian Hero. But it was soon found that the long years of prison and danger had wrought a real change in the whilom courtier, who now became a dévot of the fashionable Parisian type. He lost no time in putting into execution his former project of embracing the ecclesiastical state. "Your old friend, Wat Montagu," wrote Lord Hatton in February, 1650-1, "hath already taken upon him the robe longue and received the first orders and intends before Easter (as I am credibly assured) to take the order of Priesthood."[384] He sang his first Mass at Pontoise in the following April, and in the autumn of the same year received by the favour of Queen Anne the Abbey of Nanteuil, which gave him the title of Abbé and a sufficient income. A few years later the same royal patroness bestowed upon him the richer and more important Abbey of S. Martin at Pontoise,[385] whose ample revenues he expended with such liberality and tact as to win the gratitude of his less fortunate compatriots, Catholics and Protestants alike.

One of the earliest questions which the Queen had to settle after her husband's execution was that of her eldest son's plans. At first a journey to Ireland was contemplated, but finally it was decided that the young King should go to Scotland and try his fortune among those who had betrayed his father. Henrietta herself was inclined to the Presbyterian alliance, in which opinion she was encouraged by the Louvre party. English and French Catholics alike believed that the silly Anglican compromise had met with the fate it deserved, and that henceforward the spoils would be divided between themselves and the Presbyterians. The remnant of Anglicans who showed a gallant faith in their position which later events justified distrusted these latter so deeply that they would almost have preferred the King to remain an exile for ever to seeing him restored by their means, who had sold the Blessed Martyr. As for the Presbyterian alliance with the Catholics, that they considered the most natural thing in the world;[386] for in their opinion both schools of thought aimed at an undue subordination of the civil to the religious power, or as a Royalist rhymester put it:—