The life of Queen Henrietta Maria (30 page)

HENRIETTA remained in Holland close upon a year. Her reception was considered by her sister-in-law as, on the whole, satisfactory, taking into account the shortness of the warning she had given of her intended visit. On the other hand, in a letter of March written from the Hague by one William Newton to his brother, the Queen's entertainment was described as more royal than hearty. The authorities, Newton said, had set her a day that they would be rid of her, if so it stood with her occasions. Those declared by Parliament to be delinquents were forbidden to resort to the Hague during her visit, on pain of being sent to England; and when two of them ventured upon disobedience, they came in disguise.

The ostensible purpose of the Queen in coming to Holland had been quickly accomplished ; and by the middle of March the British ambassador, Boswell, was able to report that a week earlier the Princess Royal had been delivered over by her mother to the Prince of Orange, who, with his son, had conducted her to her

own quarters at court. It was admitted by Boswell, though out of temper at having been passed over in the marriage arrangements, that the little bride was " in good health, and certainly as safe and well as might be." Notwithstanding the present condition of English affairs, the honour of the alliance was considered great; and one of the burgesses told Lord Goring in the Prince's presence-chamber that it was feared the marriage with the King's eldest daughter "had set the Prince on such a high strain that shortly he doubted either their ruin or his own."

The Princess's separation from her mother and installation at the Prince of Orange's court had probably been no more than a temporary formality, since Henrietta stated that she retained the care of her daughter " as a child " so long as she herself remained in Holland. But it was a time when the Queen can have had little leisure to spare for domestic concerns. If the declared reason of her presence at the Hague had been to place Mary in the hands of her boy-husband, other motives for the journey had not been wanting. The money and arms urgently necessary to the King at the present juncture had to be obtained ; and it was upon crown jewels and other valuables brought by Henrietta to the Hague that it was hoped to raise the required funds. " Pour de 1'argent, je travaille," she told Charles in one of her early letters; and the words describe her chief occupation during the whole of her stay in Holland.

No less anxious than busy, the Queen's manifold cares found reflection in letter after letter to Charles—letters filled with business details, plans made only to be abandoned, fears, hopes, misgivings, leaving scarcely room at times for the expressions of love for which she perhaps guessed that the King was hungering. u je suis si estourdie d'escrire que je ne diray rien de tendre," she

HENRIETTA AT THE HAGUE 261

once says, " car je le suis plus que je ne saurois escrire." Yet, in the midst of anxieties, apprehensions, and toil, there are not wanting occasional touches of humour—as when she describes the interview with the Dutch ambassador, who, mistaking little Jeffrey Hudson for her son, had kissed the dwarfs hands.

With her sister-in-law, in spite of the absence of any real sympathy between them, she was outwardly on amicable terms. During the earlier part of her visit Boswell was able to report that the two were much together, " and very kind they are one to another." " Our Queens," he wrote again to Roe, " agree here most kindly." The confidence between them was more apparent than real. Writing on one occasion to Roe, Elizabeth informed him that William Murray had come over to the Queen. " What he brings," she added, " is kept very secret. He is very reserved to me, which he need not be, for I am not curious to ask what I see is not willingly to be told." The King, she said, did nothing save by his wife's approbation. It was a condition of affairs naturally exasperating to the King's sister, especially as the advice Henrietta was likely to give in no way commended itself to Elizabeth's judgment. " I find," she wrote, reiterating the usual complaint, " by all the Queen's and her people's discourse that they do not desire an agreement between his Majesty and his Parliament, but that all be done by force, and rail abominably at the Parliament. I hear all and say nothing."

It was easier for a woman who had only regarded the situation from the opposite side of the Channel to take a philosophical view of it than for those fresh from the scene of action ; and one fancies that Elizabeth's expressive silence may have conveyed her opinion as

eloquently as speech. Meantime, much at the Hague must have been strange and new to Henrietta. The burgomasters had small reverence for royalty, and would seat themselves and enter into conversation with her as with an equal ; or, coming into her presence without uncovering, would look at her and turn away with no salutation. These, however, were minor annoyances, if annoyances at all, for which the Queen, oppressed by her overwhelming anxieties, would have little attention to spare.

During her stay in Holland she kept up a constant and full correspondence with the King, some fifty letters belonging to this period having been preserved. Most of them were partly or wholly in cipher, and the King is warned to distrust any communication which might reach him in ordinary characters, since it would have been written for the purpose of misleading hostile readers into whose hands it might fall. Sometimes, with this intention, a pseudonym is selected for a loyal servant calculated to throw suspicion upon a popular leader, and Pym himself is bracketed with Culpepper as active in the Royalist cause.

It is pre-eminently in these letters, as well as in those of a later date, also addressed to her husband, that the true Henrietta, with all her faults and her virtues, impatient and dictatorial, loving and faithful, is found revealed. Here is to be seen the stronger will of the Queen constantly engaged in struggling, not without misgivings as to ultimate success, to impart strength and stability to the vacillating policy of the King. The correspondence throws light not only upon the period to which it belongs, but upon the past. The tone pervading it could only be used by one accustomed, if not to command, at least to counsel with authority. In these

After the picture by Miereveldt in the National Portrait Gallery.

Photo by Emery Walker.

ELIZABETH, QUEEN OF BOHEMIA.

[To face p. 16*.

letters, often written in haste, in weariness and lassitude and strain, there was no leisure to play a part or to cast about for phrases. Each reflects the mood by which it was dictated. At one moment the absent Queen is found rebuking almost with scorn, complaining, going so far as to use threats should her injunctions not be obeyed ; the next she is full of tender and passionate affection, apologies, protestations ; and always, whether in anger or love, she is seen working, contriving, labouring, ready to sacrifice all—ease, comfort, safety—if by so doing the royal cause might be forwarded. Throughout weariness, disappointment, and fear, the courage belonging by right to the daughter of Henri of Navarre rarely fails. It may be true that she estimated aright neither the situation nor the times. She was wrong-headed, violent, self-willed. It may be the fact that her counsels contributed in no small degree to Charles' ruin ; but in the vehemence of her protests against a pacification to be bought, as she understood it, by abandonment not only of rights but of justice, she spoke as the daughter of a royal race, to whom honour was dearer than life. It would be well if those who accuse her alike of urging Charles to a hopeless resistance and of responsibility for the surrender of StrafFord, were to read the indignant remonstrances breaking from her at the mere rumour of an accommodation with Parliament from which Charles' too zealous supporters should be excluded :

" You must think well of what you will grant," she wrote to the King, u for you are lost for ever if you abandon your servants, and if you do not avow them in all they have done in your service. ... If you abandon your servants, it will be worse than your crown : for, so long as you have friends, there is still hope of recovering that; but forsaking them, you will find no others, as I

feel sure, nor yet any crown." And again : " If you take not care for those who suffer for you, you are lost. . . . You see that it will be necessary that you should pardon all who have actually opposed you, and those who have been on your side would be forgotten—a thing so base that I well know it could never come from you."

It will scarcely be denied that, in her energetic protest against what might wear the appearance of delivering up his followers to the enemy, Henrietta was within her rights. On other occasions the means she employed to force the King to adhere to the policy she was pressing upon him were less justifiable.

" There is a report here," she wrote soon after her arrival at the Hague, " that you are returning to London or its neighbourhood. I believe nothing of it, and hope that you are more constant to your determinations. You have already learnt to your cost that lack of perseverance in your plans has been your ruin. Assuredly you will change them no more. If it should prove otherwise, farewell for ever, and I must think upon my resolution to place myself in a convent; for never could I trust myself to the persons who would be your counsellors, nor to you, who would have failed in your promises to me."

Before the letter containing this menace—one she continued to repeat on important occasions—was despatched, news had arrived showing that her fears had been groundless, and that, so far from returning to London, the King was on his way north, and had arrived at Newmarket. A little later she is again in terror lest he should yield to the pressure put upon him, and relinquish, at least temporarily, the control of the militia.

" Perhaps," she writes with a touch of contempt, " this has already been done, and you are again beginning your old game of yielding all. Nevertheless, I will hope, for my consolation, until I learn it for certain, that it is not so ; for I confess that if you do it you ruin me in ruining yourself." Worse still, she will have been rendered ridiculous, should it turn out that he has broken all the resolutions they had arrived at together, except, indeed, in going north—to do nothing when he arrived there. In the argument she proceeds to advance there is no little reason. Had his concessions in the matter of the militia been made whilst she herself remained in England, Parliament would have been satisfied. But she now fears he has acted as before in the case of the bishops—has, that is, refused the demands made upon him at first, and given way afterwards. Whereas, had he adhered to his attitude of resistance, it would have been believed that his former concessions had been merely the result of his fears for the Queen and of his affection for her, and not of any Jack of determination. After which she reiterates her former threat, " I see that I shall be constrained by my misfortunes to withdraw into a place in which to pray God for you."

Henrietta's fears had again been unfounded. It was doubtless true that her absence had left the hands of the man who loved her more free than when he had been constantly haunted by the apprehension of her danger. The answer returned by him to the deputation demanding that the control of the militia should be transferred for a time to Parliament was marked by unusual determination and by something like passion. " By God," he replied, " not for an hour. You have asked that of me in this was never asked of a king,

and with which I will not trust my wife and children." The reply must have gladdened Henrietta's heart. In a postscript to the letter last quoted, when news had reached Holland of the occurrences at Hull and of the refusal of the Parliamentary governor to admit the King, it is evident that the certainty of approaching conflict had only strengthened in Henri-Quatre's daughter her father's fighting spirit. She wished herself in James' place—the little Duke of York had been sent to Hull the day before his father reached it—that she might have dealt in person with Hotham, the governor. " Courage ! " she added. u For my part I have never had so much. It is a good omen."

It was in another mood that she wrote, two or three weeks later, to the friend of her childhood, Madame de Saint-George.

" Pray God for me," she says, after recounting her misfortunes, " for believe that there is not in the world a more miserable creature than I, separated from the King my Lord, from my children, absent from my country, with no hope of returning thither without danger, and forsaken by all the world."

Through this long summer and autumn Henrietta was never idle. Negotiations with moneylenders, and with possible purchasers of the crown jewels and of her own, filled her days; and her letters to Charles are largely concerned with the consignments to England of the money, arms, and ammunition thus obtained. Yet she found space for bursts of passionate affection ; and some of her graceful, hurried letters remind one of those addressed by her father, not seldom in the stress of imminent battle, to the women he loved. " My only joy," she tells the King, " is to assure you that I am with you in thought and affection, and am more yours than you

yourself." When a hope of a meeting, to prove for the moment illusory, had been held out, she writes in a veritable transport of anticipation : " I cannot refrain from telling you the joy I shall have in going, hoping to see you in a month. ... I fear to become mad with it, for I do nothing in the world but think of this, the only pleasure which remains to me in this world, for without you I would desire to remain in it not for an hour. . . . Adieu, my dear heart."