The woman to whose life and environment the following pages are dedicated was called upon to play her part in one of the most difficult and perplexing periods of our history: she lived just on the edge of the modern world, when the Middle Ages, with their splendid simplicity of all-embracing ideals, had passed away, and when even the ideals of nationality and religious freedom which the Renaissance and the Reformation had brought were becoming modified by the stirring of a new spirit of liberty. The two countries which Henrietta Maria knew were throughout her lifetime making their future destiny: the France which cherished her youth and sheltered her age was becoming the greedy France of Louis XIV, with its splendid Court, its attempts at territorial growth, its downtrodden, suffering people; the England of her happy married life was growing in political self-consciousness and in a stern and repellent godliness which was to mould the character of the nation, and to educate it to become in the next century the builder-up of the greatest empire which the world has ever seen.

Henrietta's life touches both England and France: by race, by education she was a Frenchwoman; by marriage she was an Englishwoman, and it is on English history that she has left the impress of her vivid personality; but the France which she never forgot coloured her thoughts throughout, and taught her in all probability those maxims of statecraft which she attempted to apply when the troubles of her life came upon her.

She was the daughter of Henry IV, the great restorer of the French monarchy, the champion of an unified France, embracing in wide toleration Catholic and Protestant alike: her youth witnessed the beginning of Richelieu's continuance of her father's work; under the auspices of the great Cardinal she was married, and though later her regard for him turned to hatred, yet the impress which his genius had left upon her mind was not thereby destroyed.

But her marriage transported her to a very different scene. England, under the iron heel of the Tudor despotism, had been worn out by no wasting civil wars; even the Reformation had brought little disturbance, for Henry VIII, by his amazing force of character, had been able to carry through a religious revolution almost without the people being aware of it; but the long peace was teaching men to forget the horrors of war and division. By the time the crown of the great Elizabeth passed to her Scotch cousin, Englishmen had ceased to look to the monarchy as the centre of unity. There was no need of a Henry of Navarre to bind up the wounds of the country. The old factious nobility had for the most part been slain in the War of the Roses, and the peaceful generations which followed had allowed of the growth of a powerful upper and middle class, which, originally fostered by the Crown as a counterpoise to the decayed feudal nobility, was now aspiring to a large share in the ruling of the people.

Henrietta wished to see her husband great and powerful, and she could not appreciate that the day of despotism which in France was beginning, in England was ending. Charles had not in him the stuff of greatness, but it is doubtful if even a Henry IV or a Richelieu could have put back the hands of the clock and realized her ambition. The despotism which was building up on the other side of the Channel in this country was tottering to its fall by the development of the intellect and character of the people. Henrietta clung to the ideals of the past instead of stretching out to meet the ideals of the future, and so her work failed even as did that of Strafford, in spite of his greatness.

And this national development was connected with perhaps the most important aspect of the matter. The Civil War was, more fundamentally than anything else, a war of religion, another act in the great drama which had been played in France half a century earlier, and which was still being played in Germany. Henry VIII and Elizabeth seemed to have saved England from the common fate of Europe; but it was not so: they only delayed the strife and gave it a turn unknown elsewhere, adding to the disadvantages of the champion of tradition this last, that he was a renegade in the eyes of the party to which by the logic of history he belonged. To many of their enemies, perhaps to most of them in certain moods, Charles and Henrietta were not so much the hinderers of political freedom as the supporters of an alien and blasphemous system of religion. It was the peculiar fortune of England that it gained liberty by the lever of religion. But for the fear of Popery it is far from improbable that the nation would not have arisen to strike down thus violently the despotism of the Tudors. Rather, the monarchy might have been gradually transformed, and with a very different and more tardy result, by the character of the people. But Puritan England could not leave irresponsible power in the hands of a sovereign whose very Protestantism was not unimpeachable, and thus the victories which were won by sectarian enthusiasm resulted not in the advancement of a barren fanaticism, but in the sure laying of the foundations of the liberty of the people. In France, where, among many differences from England, there was this great one, that the people and the monarch were substantially agreed on religious matters, there was discontent, even rebellion, but there was no revolution, and the people was left for another century and a half to bear the accumulating load of its misery, until the burden became unbearable and was cast off with a shock from which Europe still trembles.

Henrietta Maria's life was a failure. She failed to commend either her person, her religion, or her political ideals, and she brought her husband a degree of unpopularity which without her he might have escaped. Her circumstances were hard. She could not help being a Catholic, nor the fact that under her womanly softness lay the absolutism which was in the Bourbon blood. Like Charles, she was called upon to weather a storm which she had not raised, and she had not inherited with her father's temperament and charm his unrivalled political sagacity. Moreover, she had to win her private happiness by humouring a despotic and difficult-tempered man, and she could hardly be expected to recognize that that man, in marrying her, had made, on public grounds, the greatest mistake of his life. James I, whose ideas were always too large for his circumstances, had dreamed of securing England's place in the comity of nations by marrying his son to the daughter of one of the great Catholic houses. The result was not increased honour abroad, but hatred at home, such hatred as Henrietta in her early life was unable even to suspect. Accustomed in her own land to see Catholic and Protestant dwelling at least outwardly in peace together, knowing that the Catholic faith was professed at most of the Courts and among most of the peoples of Europe, she could not appreciate the insularity of the English mind which saw in every Catholic a political assassin wearing the colours of the Pope and the King of Spain; nor was she aware of the historical facts, which if they did not justify, at least explained this point of view. And as she failed to understand England, so she failed to understand Europe. The outstanding fact of continental politics was the long duel which was going on between France and the House of Austria. France was eventually to be the victor, but it was to be a hard struggle, and few were sharp-sighted enough to see in the splendid Spain of Philip IV the signs of a decadence which had already set in. But Henrietta's blindness was more than a dimness of sight, which she shared with Cromwell and others of the great ones of her age. It hid from her that which it was essential to her to know, namely, that this struggle underlay the whole policy of her native land. Thus she failed to understand the real causes of the enmity with which Richelieu came to regard her and her husband, and thus in later days she was unable to grasp the attitude of Mazarin, or to appreciate why it was impossible that he should give her the fullness of succour for which she asked.

Had she been a Protestant and a woman of profound sagacity, she might have saved her husband. As it was, by her reckless defiance of forces whose strength she was unable to appreciate, she hurried him to his doom. She lived at a great moment, and she had no greatness to meet it. Herein alone is her condemnation. She has received more than her fair share of blame, for she has been made the scapegoat of Charles' faults. The tragedy of her fate rivals that of Mary Stuart or of Marie Antoinette, but she missed the historical felicity of a violent death, so that she has failed to touch the popular imagination. Had she done so, the most charming queen who ever sat upon the English throne, the daughter of the man whom France still adores, would have been saved from a verdict at the tribunal of posterity which, if not altogether unjust, is totally inadequate.

HENRIETTA MARIA