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]

*****

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:—

Nevertheless, in spite of opposition, Charles went off to Scotland, and there, to the deep disgust of his Anglican friends, who had to learn that he was a very different man from his father, he was persuaded to take the Covenant, a step which they believed would not only alienate his best friends, but prejudice his chances with Providence.[388] Even the Queen was annoyed, unless, as her opponents hinted, she feigned her chagrin. But annoyance soon gave place to anxiety. First came the news of the defeat of Dunbar, then of the "crowning mercy" of Worcester; at last, after weeks of suspense, Henrietta was able to welcome her son once more, safe indeed, but worn out by almost incredible adventures and escapes, and cured for life by his sojourn among them of any liking for the Presbyterians. It was no wonder that the lad was depressed and irritable and unwilling to talk to his mother or any one else, though she had still considerable influence over him, so that it was complained that the King's secret council were his mother, "Lord Jermyn, and Watt. Montagu, for that of greatest business he consults with them only, without the knowledge of Marquis of Ormonde or Sir Ed. Hyde."[389] She was able to persuade him (the more easily, no doubt, from his Scotch experiences) to refrain from attending the Huguenot worship at Charenton, which she thought might compromise him with his relatives of France.

And, indeed, under the pressure of her many misfortunes, Henrietta was becoming more of a bigot than she had ever been before.[390] In 1647 Father Philip died.[391] The loss of this worthy old man, who was well aware of the caution necessary to a Catholic queen living among heretics, exposed her to the influence of other and less judicious counsellors, specially after the death of her Grand Almoner,[392] which deprived her of another moderating influence. When in 1650 the Anglican service, which had been held at the Louvre since the first days of the exile, was suppressed, Protestant gossip pointed out Walter Montagu as the author of this deed; but that gentleman would reply nothing, even to so weighty an interrogator as Sir Edward Hyde, except that the Queen of France was at liberty to give what orders she pleased in her own house. Henrietta may have regretted this sudden outburst of zeal on the part of her sister-in-law, but she found no answer to make when that lady came to visit her and told her, with the solemnity of a Spaniard and a dÉvote, that she thought the recent troubles of her son the King of France must have been due to his mother's weak toleration of heretical worship at the Louvre. History does not record whether she changed her mind when this act of reparation was not followed by an abatement of the rebellion; but henceforth the Anglican service was held nowhere but in the chapel of Sir Richard Browne, the father-in-law of John Evelyn, whose house was protected by his position as resident of the King of England. There John Cosin, the exiled Dean of Durham, who still kept up his impartial warfare against Rome on the one side and Geneva on the other, struck heavy blows in the cause of the Church of England, not, it was reported, without success. Religious feeling ran as high as ever it had years before in London,[393] and the good Dean's controversial acerbity was not sweetened when his only son went over to the enemy, by the instrumentality, it was said, of Walter Montagu. Nor did the alert AbbÉ's victories end there. Thomas Hobbes was still living among his learned friends in the French capital. His religion, or lack of it, made him suspect to Catholics and Protestants alike, and the Anglicans were considerably chagrined when they heard that this dangerous person, on the recommendation of Montagu, had been removed from the English Court, where the young King had shown an unfortunate liking for his company. They would fain have had the credit themselves of this judicious act, though perhaps in later days, when they saw the "father of atheists" a welcome guest at Whitehall, some of them may have been glad to be able to say that they had had nothing to do with the odious persecution which he had suffered from the bigots in Paris.

Three years after the suppression of the Anglican service at the Louvre, other events occurred which did not tend to Henrietta's popularity with some of her son's best friends. Henry, Duke of Gloucester, the youngest son of Charles I, is now chiefly remembered as an actor in that most pathetic of all farewell scenes, when he and his sister Elizabeth took leave of their dying father. The little girl never recovered the shock of her father's death, and died without seeing again the mother who longed for her. Henry was too young to suffer thus, and at one time a rumour was about which reached the ears of Sir Edward Nicholas that Cromwell intended to make the child king; but in 1653 the authorities in England, touched by compassion for his youth, or perhaps finding him more trouble than he was worth, sent him over to his sister in Holland, whence, much against that lady's will, he was fetched to Paris to his mother's side. Henrietta was charmed with the little fellow, whom she had not seen since he was quite a child. Though small and thin he was "beautiful as a little angel" and, while resembling his aunt Christine in face, possessed the fascinating manners of his father's family and was remarkably forward in book-learning. The boy was made much of, not only by his mother, but by the whole French Court. "You know they always like anything new,"[394] wrote the Queen of England to her sister, and she goes on to relate with some amusement the innumerable visits she received on account of this petit chevalier. She was, no doubt, glad that he had made so good an impression upon his French relatives, for she had schemes for his advancement which depended largely on their favour.

The only one of her children whom Henrietta had been able to bring up in her own faith was the dearest of all, the youngest little daughter, whom she was wont to call her child of benediction. It is probable that during her husband's lifetime she felt a scruple in trying to turn his children from the religion which their father professed, particularly as he showed a generous confidence in her in the matter; but now that he was gone she felt her obligation to be over, and she gave much time and attention to influencing the minds of her two elder sons, of whom she had good hopes. She even, unmindful of the lessons of the past, entered anew into negotiations with the Pope and, by means of the Duchess of Aiguillon, a niece of Richelieu, held out, in the name of her son, hopes of untold benefits to the Catholics of the British Isles if the Holy Father would only assist the young and importunate monarch, who would certainly repay his paternal kindness with interest.[395] But, nevertheless, the Queen knew well enough the grave difficulties in the way of Charles' profession of the Catholic faith, and she turned with relief to the little Henry in whose youth she saw an easy prey. She had other arguments than those of religion to bring forward. All sensible people, she told the boy, were now agreed that the King, his brother, would not regain his throne. He knew the extreme poverty to which the revolution had reduced his family; how as a Protestant did he propose to live in a manner suitable to his rank as a Prince of England? Whereas, if he would become a Catholic and take orders, his aunt, the Queen of France, would make everything easy by procuring for him a cardinal's hat, and by bestowing upon him such rich benefices as would afford him a fitting provision.

Henry was a boy, little more than a child, but the circumstances of his life had been such as early to teach him the necessity of self-interest. His father's last counsels, given at a supreme moment, may have weighed with him, for his well-known answer, "I will be torn to pieces ere they make me a king while my brothers live," prove him to have been, at that time, an unusually precocious child. Be this as it may, he showed an unexpected reluctance to follow his mother's advice and an unaccountable dislike of the AbbÉ Montagu, whom she appointed to be his governor. Perhaps he remembered his father's distrust of that fascinating person; certainly he knew that by following his teaching he would offend irrevocably the brother on whom, in case of a restoration to their native land, his future must depend. Henrietta herself was not blind to this aspect of the case, and she tried to propitiate her eldest son, to whom she had given a promise that she would not tamper with his brother's religion. "Henry has too many acquaintances among the idle little boys of Paris," she wrote to Charles, who was away from the city, "so I am sending him to Pontoise with the AbbÉ Montagu, where he will have more quiet to mind his book."

To Pontoise accordingly Henry went, where Montagu attempted in vain to win his confidence. After a while the boy was allowed to return to Paris, but he showed himself so obstinately indocile that at night-time he and his page (a lad who had been in the service of the Earl of Manchester, and who doubtless enjoyed thwarting the renegade AbbÉ), "like Penelope's web ... unspun" (as well as they two little young things, some few years above thirty between them) whatever had passed in public.[396] The poor little Prince owned, indeed, that he was called upon to deal with matters above his years. His relatives at the French Court assured him that his first duty was to his mother now that his father was dead. His Anglican friends told him that a sovereign came before a mother, and that his obedience was due to his eldest brother. That brother, moreover, took this view strongly and wrote to him, saying in brief and pithy terms that, should he become a Catholic, he would never see him again. It is not surprising that between all these conflicting opinions Henry's young head was a little confused. He was further perplexed when to other arguments in his mother's favour was added the curious one that his conversion would make amends to her for the breach of her marriage contract, by which she should have had control of her children up to the age of twelve.

Henrietta was, indeed, steeling her heart to greater sternness than she had ever used to any of her children, to whom she had always shown herself an indulgent mother. It may be that, as men said, she was under the influence of Montagu, who, however, was not wont to be very severe, and who did his best to win over his pupil by kindness and by pointing out to him the worldly advantages which a change of faith would bring—a lesson which the luxuries of Pontoise, contrasting as they did with the poverty in which many of Henry's Anglican friends were obliged to live, illustrated in a practical manner. It may be that the Queen thought that a boy of her son's age could not resist severity, and that she was determined to hold out until she conquered the child for what she believed to be his good in this world and the next; but she was to be defeated. While reports were being industriously circulated through the city that Henry was on the point of coming to a better mind, while in some churches thanksgivings were even being offered for his conversion, his continued obstinacy was in reality wearing out his mother's patience. She sent for her son, and after receiving him with her usual affection she said that she required him to hear the AbbÉ Montagu once again, and that then he must give her his final answer. Montagu pleaded for an hour, expending upon this lad of fourteen all those powers of persuasion and eloquence which enabled him to excel as a popular preacher. But Henry's mind was made up, he was determined to cast in his lot with his brother and England rather than with his mother and France. He communicated his decision to the Queen, and at the fatal words she turned away, saying that she wished to see his face no more. She left the room without any sign of relenting, and her son discovered a little later that her anger even cast his horses out of her stable. He was sobered by the depth of her displeasure, but he reserved his chief wrath for Montagu, to whom he attributed a harshness very far indeed from his mother's natural character. Turning on his late tutor, he upbraided him angrily: "Such as it is I may thank you for it, sir; and 'tis but reason what my mother sayes to me I say to you: I pray be sure I see you no more."[397] Then, turning on his heel, he showed his independence by marching on to the English chapel at Sir Richard Browne's house (for it was a Sunday morning), where he was received with such rejoicings as befitted so signal a triumph over the rival religion. He could not, of course, return to the Palais Royal, and he asked the hospitality of Lord Hatton, who, both as Royalist and Anglican, was delighted to welcome his "little great guest." His satisfaction was the greater because of the piquant circumstance that he was himself a relative by marriage of the discomfited AbbÉ. Henry, who was considered to have "most heroically runne through this great worke beyond his yeres,"[398] made further proof of his unflinching Protestantism by receiving a distinguished minister of Charenton, to whom he gravely discoursed of his father's religious views. But he did not remain long in Paris. Lord Ormonde arrived with letters and messages from the King of England and bore the lad off to Cologne, where his eldest brother was at that time keeping his Court.

*****

The years of the exile wore on not too cheerfully. Little by little Henrietta lost the influence she had had over her eldest son, who came to distrust Jermyn, perhaps because he saw the favourite rich and prosperous, while others of his faithful servants were almost in need. Probably the Queen was annoyed at the ill success of Charles in her own country, for it is remarkable that the young man who possessed the French temperament, and who was, in many respects, like his grandfather Henry IV, was never popular in Paris, while James was greatly liked and admired. It is true that the latter was a singularly gallant youth, and that he spoke the French language much better than his brother, which accomplishment was in itself enough to win Parisian hearts. "There is nothing, in my opinion, that disfigures a person so much as not being able to speak," said that true Frenchwoman Mademoiselle de Montpensier. As for Princess Henrietta, she was looked upon quite as a French girl, and she was admired, not only for her beauty, but for her exquisite dancing, a talent which she inherited from her mother. It was on account of this beloved child that the widowed Queen of England, in the last years of the exile, came out again a little into the world and held receptions at the Palais Royal, which proved so fascinating as to be serious rivals to those of the grave Spanish Queen of France. At them she was always pleased to welcome Englishmen, for she loved the land of her happy married life in spite of the treatment she had received there. "The English were led away by fanatics," she was wont to say; "the real genius of the nation is very different." So jealous was she of the good name of her son's subjects in critical Paris that once when an English gentleman came to her Court in a smart dress, tied up with red and yellow ribbons, she begged the friend who had introduced him to advise him "to mend his fancy," lest he should be ridiculed by the French.

But ere this another blow had fallen upon Henrietta, and this time she was wounded, indeed, in the house of her friends. As early as 1652 France recognized the Government of the Commonwealth, but in 1657 the Queen learned that her nephew, acting under the advice of Cardinal Mazarin, who was impelled by his usual dread of Spain, had even made a treaty with Cromwell, "ce scÉlÉrat," as she was accustomed to call him. By the terms of this treaty her three sons were banished from France, and she herself was only permitted to remain with her young daughter because public opinion would not have tolerated the expulsion of a daughter of Henry IV. The Princes went off to Bruges, where Charles fixed his Court, and to mark their displeasure they took service under the Spaniard. Henrietta had to bear the insults as best she could. She had nowhere to go; for when a year earlier she had thought of a journey to Spain, it had been intimated to her that his Catholic Majesty would prefer her to remain on the French side of the Pyrenees.

The only satisfactory aspect of the matter was that now the Queen felt it possible to press for the payment of her dowry. Her relatives of France, particularly Queen Anne, were liberal, but Henrietta was made to feel now and then

and, besides, hers was too proud a nature to relish dependence. She knew that any scheme likely to spare the coffers of France would be grateful to Mazarin, whose immense riches, splendid palace, and magnificent collection of pictures and curios, the fruit of an unbounded avarice, were the talk of Paris. The request was proffered. The reply came, and Mazarin carried it himself to the Queen. Speaking with the Italian accent, which his long years of residence in France had not been able to eradicate, he explained to her that the Protector refused to give her that for which she asked, because, as he alleged, she had never been recognized as Queen of England. The refusal was bad enough, but the gross insult with which it was accompanied could not fail to cut Henrietta to the heart, but she did not love Mazarin and she had too much spirit to betray her chagrin. "This outrage does not reflect on me," she said proudly, "but on the King, my nephew, who ought not to permit a daughter of France to be treated de concubine. I was abundantly satisfied with the late King, my lord, and with all England; these affronts are more shameful to France than to me."

This episode did not decrease Henrietta's hatred for Cromwell. It was even said by one of her women, who played the part of spy, that she was overheard plotting his murder with Lord Jermyn. But she had not long to endure his usurpation of the seat of her husband, whose regal title she believed him to have refused solely from fear of the army. On September 3rd, 1658, the anniversary of Dunbar and Worcester, Oliver Cromwell died amid a tumult of storm, sympathetic with the passing of that mighty spirit. "It is the Devil come to carry old Noll off to Hell" was the comment of the Royalists, who kept high revel in Paris and elsewhere at the news of his death, though the Queen, whom long sorrow was at last making slow to hope, did not join in the jubilation. "Whether it be because my heart is so wrapped up in melancholy as to be incapable of receiving any [joy]," she wrote to Madame de Motteville, "or that I do not as yet perceive any good advantages likely to accrue to us from it, I will confess to you that I have not felt myself any very great rejoicing, my greatest being to witness that of my friends."[400]

It was not, indeed, until the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659 that there seemed to be solid hope for the King of England. Then Charles left his Court at Bruges, and traversing all France, had an interview with Don Louis de Haro, the powerful minister of Spain, who received him with all ceremony as a sovereign prince. Mazarin still obstinately refused to receive him, but he had an interview with his uncle, the Duke of Orleans, at Blois, and afterwards passed a few days with his mother at Colombes, on the outskirts of Paris, where she had a small country house. Both mother and son may have been to some extent hopeful, but neither knew how near the day was when the prophecy of a French rhymester after Worcester would be fulfilled, and