The life of Queen Henrietta Maria (2 page)

is proof sufficient of the intimate personal relationship existing between himself and the sons and daughters, whether born in wedlock or not, he had brought into the world. For Henrietta it would seem that he had a special fondness, discerning, it may be, even in her babyhood, the likeness to himself said to have been traceable in his youngest child. His time for enjoying her society was to be short. Before she was six months old he was in his grave.

The infancy of the royal children was chiefly passed at the old Chateau of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where, as later on at Fontainebleau or the Louvre, they were strangely associated with the sons and daughter of Gabrielle d'Estrees and with Madame de Verneuil's son. Of Henrietta the glimpses to be obtained are few. We are shown the baby, on the very evening of her birth, inspected by the eight-year-old Dauphin.

The first public appearance of the little Henrietta was at the tardy coronation of her mother in the May following her birth. Her second, coming all too closely upon it, was at her great father's funeral.

Shortly before the birth of her youngest child Marie had wrung from her husband a promise that her Sacre, deferred for ten long years, should at length take place. The performance of this function, carrying with it the public recognition of her position as Henri's lawful wife, and the consequent legitimacy of her children,

was the more urgently necessary owing to the claims of the Marquise de Verneuil, whose endeavours to induce the King to withhold from his wife her undeniable rights had hitherto been successful. But Marie was no less determined than her rival, and Henri had found himself at last unable to oppose a further resistance to her just demands.

Months, nevertheless, passed by, and the ceremony, in spite of the Queen's importunities, was still postponed, when the course of events furnished Marie with fresh arguments in favour of the accomplishment of her desire. War was imminent ; Henri was expected to take the field in person, and his wife was to fill the post of Regent during his absence. The appointment of a Council of State to assist and control her had been already a cause of offence, and, failing the possession of undivided authority, it was essential in her opinion that she should not occupy the anomalous position of an uncrowned Queen. The reasoning was unanswerable; yet it was not without extreme reluctance that Henri yielded, and consented to the ceremony taking place before his departure.

If his distaste was primarily due to the influence of the Marquise, other causes contributed to it. His mind was strongly possessed by the conviction that the impending solemnity would be fraught with danger to himself. It was an age of superstition ; and astrologers and soothsayers had, with such rare consonance of opinion, connected the approaching event with his own death, that incessant reiteration of prophecies of evil had taken effect upon his brain, keen and sagacious though it was.

His nervous depression deepened as the date fixed for the coronation drew near.

" Ah, my friend," he once said to Sully, u how displeasing to me is this Sacre \ I know not wherefore, but my heart tells me ill will come of it."

" They have told me," he said another time, " that I shall be slain at my first great pageant, and that I am to die in a coach."

Sully, half infected by his master's forebodings, would have had the affair deferred. Henri would have been only too willing.

" But what will my wife say ?" he asked ; " for she has a marvellous desire for this Sacre"

" Let her say what she likes," was the minister's blunt rejoinder ; adding his conviction, scarcely justified by the circumstances, that in the face of the King's presentiments of evil the Queen would not press for the performance of his promise.

Henri was possibly better acquainted with his wife's temper than his friend. At any rate, the preparations were continued and the fatal day drew near.

May 13th had been fixed for the ceremony. The court slept the previous night at Saint-Denis, and in the morning the coronation took place with all due magnificence. Surrounded by her children, Marie de Medicis vindicated her claim to be recognised as Henri's lawful wife and as Queen of France. Her three sons and her three daughters were all present, the two youngest, Gaston, Due d'Anjou, and little Henrietta, in their nurses' arms, taking their share in the show. Their father, for once playing a part subordinate to his wife's, was remarked to be unusually gay. A contemporary, nevertheless, notes that on entering the church—the sun was shining brightly outside—and finding it thronged from end to end by a crowd, all keeping a great silence, he observed that he was reminded by the scene of the

last great judgment—for which, he added, might all men prepare !

The day went by without disaster. Though passing a sleepless night, Henri's good spirits were still noticeable in the morning. Yet, walking back to the palace, after having heard mass, the subject of death crept again into his discourse.

" I shall one day die," he told his companions, perhaps half in jest; " and when you have lost me, you will know my worth."

Bassompierre, by whom the conversation is recorded, took him to task. When would the King, he asked, cease to trouble his friends by talking of his approaching death ? With God's help he would live for many happy years ; proceeding to remind his master of those possessions which should contribute to make life desirable. The King sighed.

" My friend," he said, " all that must be left behind."

It must be admitted that, to a man oppressed by a presentiment of his approaching end, and for the moment, presumably, under the influence of religious sentiment, Bassompierre's enumeration of the blessings he enjoyed, including the wife he had wronged and the women he had preferred to her, was not calculated to prove reassuring. At any rate, being very melancholy, he caused Henrietta, with her brother Gaston, scarcely more than a year older, to be brought to him, in the hope of diverting his thoughts from disquieting channels. The expedient was possibly successful, and playing with his children he may have succeeded in dismissing his forebodings ; for presently, disregarding the warnings he had received, he went out with the intention of driving to the Arsenal, where Sully lived, to pay a visit to the minister. Not an hour later

his dead body was brought back to the Louvre, stabbed to the heart by the hand of the religious maniac, Ravaillac. Henrietta had lost her father.

Panic at first prevailed, both in the palace and in Paris. It was apprehended that the crime had been the work, not of a single fanatic, but of an organised conspiracy. The ministers of the Crown, more sternly perhaps than would have been the case had Marie de Medicis' regrets carried greater conviction to their minds, forbade her to indulge in vain demonstrations of sorrow. Her children must be her first care.

" The King is dead," she cried.

a Pardon me, Madame," the Chancellor replied, " the kings of France never die. Restrain your tears till you have ensured your own safety and that of your children."

No time was lost in placing the new Government upon a secure footing. That very afternoon the Dauphin was recognised as King and Marie made Regent. At supper little Louis, not nine years old, was served, as befitted his new dignity, by his attendants on their knees. The child, surprised, at first gave a laugh ; then, recollecting himself, he burst into tears.

"I would I were not King," he cried ; "I would it were my brother. They will kill me as they have killed the King my father."

That night the six royal children, closely guarded, were gathered together. For the most part they were fortunately too young to be aware of impending peril ; and Henrietta, at least, will have been unconscious of certain loss and possible danger.

It was soon clear that the fears entertained of concerted action on the part of the authors of the crime were groundless. Whoever might be responsible for the

THE KING'S FUNERAL n

murder, it was to prove an isolated act. On the following day the King was taken in person to meet his Parliament, and the regency of the Queen-Mother was formally confirmed. A new reign and a less fortunate era had begun for France.

One more scene closes the short chapter of Henrietta's life connected with her father. Carried in the arms of Madame de Monglat, she was taken, with her brothers and sisters, to pay the ultimate honours to the great dead King. As the solemn procession passed on its way it was observed that, whilst the little Dukes of Orleans and Anjou never ceased sobbing, the boy-King remained tearless. One after another the children of France sprinkled their father's corpse with holy water. Last of all the asperge was placed in Henrietta's hand, and she too performed her part in the prescribed ceremonial. Five days later the body of Henri-Quatre was borne in state to Saint-Denis and sepulchred amongst the kings of France.

Into the question of the forces put in motion to compass the death of the leader of Protestant Europe this is not the place to enter. Whether, as some suspected, the Queen herself had been privy to the designs upon his life—in a contemporary record it is significantly observed that she was not sufficiently surprised by the catastrophe ; whether the crime was perpetrated at the instigation of opponents political or religious ; or whether the King was the victim of pure fanaticism or madness, have been matters much debated. The answer to be given to such questions does not affect the importance of the event as regards Henrietta Maria and her future.

There is a certain interest attaching to the speculation, unprofitable though it may be, as to the difference it might have made to the destinies of Henri's youngest daughter,

and through her to those of England, had the assassin's knife missed its aim. The principles of the great opportunist, in matters of religion, were in striking opposition to the line of conduct unflinchingly pursued by Henrietta. A kingdom was well worth a mass, said the Bearnois. A mass, one imagines that Henrietta would have unhesitatingly declared, was well worth a kingdom. But Henri was dead, and his daughter, for good or for ill, was to learn her lessons of religion and state-craft from the wife he had never loved.

Marie de Medicis did not fail, during her first weeks of widowhood, to make a decent and becoming show of grief.

" Thou didst come," she told the Tuscan secretary, Cioli, sent on a mission of condolence, " to my wedding. Thou wast present at the beginning of my joys. Thou hast once more come now that they have had an end." To her cousin, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, she wrote that in her grief and affliction she needed all the consolation to be obtained from God and her friends. After which, the necessary tribute having been paid to the memory of the dead, she set herself to make the most of the good fortune fallen, unexpectedly or not, to her share.

The policy pursued during the years of her regency was what might have been expected from her character and sympathies.

insurrection; and when peace had been nominally restored, Conde, first prince of the blood, was consigned to the Bastille. There followed the young King's revolt against his mother's domination, instigated by the Due de Luynes, formerly his page and now his favourite ; the arrest and murder of Concini ; and the exile of Marie herself to Blois.

It was in the midst of these stormy scenes that Henrietta's earlier childhood was passed. Little mention of her is made in the records of the time. The youngest and for the moment the least important of the children of Henri-Quatre, she is for the most part passed over. We are told of her beauty ; of her passionate affection for her mother ; her love of music, painting, and dancing ; and of her distaste for more weighty studies. We are informed—and considering how ample were to be her opportunities for serious reflection in after life, one could find it in one's heart to be glad of it—that there was in her nature more " d'enjouement que de serieux" ; and we catch an occasional glimpse of the small royal figure as she takes part in some solemn state pageant.

Thus she is first found assisting, borne in the arms of the young Princesse de Conde, at her brother's coronation in the autumn succeeding her father's murder. Then no more is seen of her till the following year, when the first gap was made in the royal nursery by the death of her second brother, Henri d'Orleans. Always a delicate child, nothing in the circumstances warranted the suspicion of foul play ; but it was a time when poison, freely employed, was always suspected, and the anxiety and disquiet caused by his death was such that the Regent—as usual in a condition of hostility to the princes of the blood—was compelled to invite them in a body to visit the remaining children of France,

and to assure themselves, by ocular demonstration, of their safety and welfare. Two years later Henrietta played a chief part in a religious function. It was the custom of the day that the royal children, having been baptized or ondoyt at their birth, should be publicly christened at a later date, and she was four years old when the ceremony, shared by her brother Gaston, was performed. In a Discours addressed to her mother, and printed the same year, an account of the affair is given.

" Seeing the favour of nature in all points of perfection," wrote the anonymous author, " stamped upon the countenances of Monsieur the King's brother and of little Madame, and bearing witness to the excellence of their souls, your Majesty, in order to free them entirely from the power of Satan and to heap upon them the graces of God, ordered holily that on June I5th, 1614, the remaining acts and ceremonies of the Sacrament of Baptism should be administered to them at the Louvre by the illustrious Cardinal de Bonzy, your two children being dressed in white satin."