The life of Queen Henrietta Maria (32 page)

" Dear Heart, I never till now knew the good of ignorance, for I did not know the danger that thou wert in by the storm, before I had certain assurance of thy happy escape ; we having had a pleasing false report of thy safe landing at Newcastle, which thine of the 19th Jan. so confirmed us in, that we at least were not undeceived of that hope, till we knew certainly

how great a danger thou hast past, of which I shall not be out of apprehension until I may have the happiness of thy company; for indeed I think it not the least of my misfortunes, that for my sake thou hast run so much hazard ; in which thou hast expressed so much love to me that I confess it is impossible to repay by anything I can do, much less by words ; but my heart being full of affection for thee, admiration of thee, and impatient passion of gratitude to thee, I could not but say something, leaving the rest to be read by thee out of thine own noble heart."

Before embarking for the second time from Scheveling, Henrietta sent an indignant protest—less carefully worded than might have been the case had she been contemplating a more prolonged stay in Holland—to the States concerning their action in stopping a ship on its way to England. She had omitted, she wrote, to take notice of many indignities by which she had been provoked during her residence in their country, but now found herself so highly offended that she could not, with honour to the King, be silent. All things considered, and taking into account the difficulty of steering a middle course between Charles and the Parliament, it must have been with not a little relief that the authorities at the Hague bade farewell to their royal guest.

Meanwhile the King was eagerly awaiting the assurance that his wife had reached England in safety. On the same day that his letter to Henrietta had been sent, he wrote to the Earl of Newcastle, who was to meet the Queen, that " never woman with child more longed for anything than we for news from you." When intelligence reached him of Henrietta's arrival on English soil, the letter conveying it had to recount fresh

dangers escaped. After waiting off Bridlington Quay for two days, until the cavalry charged with the duty of forming an escort both for her and the supplies she brought should have arrived, she had landed on February 22nd. On the following morning, wakened by cannon-shots, she found that four Parliamentary vessels had come up and were directing their fire, not only upon the ships, still laden with munitions of war, but upon the village itself. Whether purposely, as the Queen believed, or not, the house in which she was lodged appeared to be a special point of attack, and before she had had time to rise, the balls were whistling around her, " of which you may readily believe that I loved not the music." Hastily summoned by Jermyn, she threw on what clothes she could, and going on foot to some distance from the village, sought, with her ladies, the shelter of a ditch. For two hours she and her companions lay, balls passing over their heads or striking the ground and covering them with earth. At length, the mist which had afforded him an excuse for delay clearing off, Van Tromp, who had a second time served as escort to the Queen, threatened, " un peu tard," to open fire upon the English vessels, and they desisted from their cannonade and retired.

Henrietta, for the first time under fire, had already developed her father's appreciation of the excitement of war ; and her account of the adventure is given in a tone of gay confidence, if not of bravado. One incident included in her subsequent narrative is omitted in her letter to the King—namely, her return to the lodging she had hastily quitted, upon the discovery that an ugly but much-loved dog had been left behind. Not until Mitte had been found and removed would she consent to seek a place of safety.

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The episode threw, as it was well calculated to do, considerable odium upon the Parliamentary party, described in Naworth's almanack as the " bloudy rebels who endeavoured to murthr her." If such was the deliberate intention of the firing vessels it must have been quite unauthorised. At this very time Lord Fairfax, commanding the hostile army in the north, was writing in a tone of marked conciliation, not only to congratulate the Queen upon her safe and happy arrival in England, but to offer himself and his forces as her guard. The letter is too curious an example of the tone still used towards the King and Queen by those in arms against them not to be quoted here. After expressing the joy felt by all men at her Majesty's return, together with the hopes entertained that through her influence and mediation peace might be restored to the distracted country, the Puritan general went on to make his strange proffer of service :

" Madame," he says, " the Parliament . . . hath commanded me to serve the King and (in him) your Majesty in securing the peace of these northern parts. My highest ambition and humblest suit is that your Majesty . . . would be pleased to admit me and the forces with me to guard your Majesty ; wherein I and this army shall all of us more willingly sacrifice our lives than suffer any danger to invade the trust reposed in, Madame, your Majesty's most humble servant, Fairfax."

He can hardly, one would think, have anticipated that his petition would be granted, nor can Henrietta be blamed for declining his offered protection.

The following months must have seemed to the errant Queen, looking back upon them in after years, like the adventures encountered in a troubled dream. Not till the middle of July did the meeting with the King, so ardently desired by both, take place. In the meantime,

remaining with the northern army, she ran her own risks and achieved her own successes.

By a singular chance it was at the house of the elder brother of Walter Strickland, who, as Parliamentary agent, had done his best to thwart her in Holland, that Henrietta was lodged on her first arrival in England. Sir William Strickland does not appear to have been at home when the Queen and her suite claimed his hospitality ; but in any case it would not have been easy to refuse it. Her visit had a sequel which must have made the stay of the royal guest memorable to the descendants of her host. The family plate having been produced in her honour, the Queen, in departing, took possession of it as a forced loan, leaving a portrait of herself in pledge, with apologies for what she feared might be regarded as an ungracious return for courtesies received. Another story related of this time exhibits her in a more attractive light. It is said that one of the Parliamentary officers concerned in the Bridlington bombardment, seized by the cavaliers, was tried by court-martial, convicted of having directed his fire upon the Queen's lodging, and condemned to death. Meeting him on his way to the gallows, Henrietta inquired his offence, and, learning it, refused, with easy good-nature, to allow the execution to take place. " I have forgiven him all that," she said,

On the arrival of Montrose, despatched by the Earl of Newcastle with a body of two thousand cavaliers to act as her escort, the Queen quitted Boynton Hall, and, carrying with her the Strickland family plate, proceeded to York, gathering fresh reinforcements as she went. Riding with the troops, and indulging in no delicatesses de femme, she lived with the soldiers, discarding the

forms and ceremonies of royalty and taking her meals with them under the open sky. " Treating them as brothers, they all loved her," and the novelty of the situation must have lent it charm. Garrisons had been left behind at Moulton and at Stamford Bridge, and before the end of March Henrietta was able to report to the King the favourable response of Sir Hugh Cholmley, Governor of Scarborough, to her invitation to visit her, and his subsequent determination to hold the town for the King. For more than three months she remained at York, awaiting the time when it would be deemed advisable to send her, with troops to serve both as her escort and as reinforcements to the King's army, to join him at Oxford. In the meantime she was conveniently placed for communication with the north, and, in a letter to Ormond, Sir Robert Poyntz states that she had received visits from some of the Scotch nobles, including Montrose, who " were persuaded the safest way was by the Queen, whose course by many is judged very constant and fixed, whereas other courses are too moveable." Hamilton, however, had also repaired to York, and by his interest with her most trusted servants had " defeated the others and made her give little countenance to Montrose," himself hazarding the rash promise that he would keep the Scots at home.

During this period of waiting occasions were not wanting when, as before, the Queen regarded Charles and his proceedings with displeasure and did not fail to give forcible expression to her sentiments. Haunted by the old fear that peace would be concluded upon disadvantageous terms, she is found, after her former fashion, telling him that, in such a case, it will not be expedient that she should remain in England, and that she will take refuge in France. After which she turns to more personal

grievances, of what precise nature it does not appear : u Have more care of me than you have hitherto shown," she adds with wholly unmerited reproach, u or at the least appear to do so, to the end that the lack of it may not be noticed." To Newcastle, in the same fit of ill temper, she wrote that it was not he alone who had been scolded ; she had likewise had her share, which did not greatly surprise her, reason being on her side.

According to Clarendon, the Queen was largely responsible for the collapse of some secret negotiations carried on during this year at Oxford, when it was proposed that the King should re-admit the Earl of Northumberland to his favour and bestow upon him his former post of Lord High Admiral. Hyde himself, now coming into prominence as Chancellor, with others of Charles' Council, were anxious that this should be done; but the King was firm in his refusal—a refusal attributed by the Chancellor to a pledge given to the Queen at her departure to Holland, by which Charles had bound himself to admit none who had done him disservice to favour or trust without her consent, and, further, to make no peace save by her mediation. Upon this engagement Clarendon charges, not only Charles' refusal to condone Northumberland's offences, but the miscarriage of the peace negotiations. The King's affection, says the Chancellor, for his wife being of a very extraordinary alloy, compounded of conscience, love, generosity, and gratitude, and all those noble affections which raise the passion to the greatest height, he saw with her eyes and determined by her judgment— desiring, moreover, that all men should know that he was swayed by her.

Few people will differ with the writer when he expresses his belief that the condition of things thus

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described was good for neither King nor Queen. Yet Charles was demonstrating at this very time that he was capable of adopting a line certain to meet with Henrietta's disapproval. If her influence was, as Clarendon believed, wrecking the chances of a better understanding between the King and his subjects, she was, for her part, not without causes of complaint more reasonable than any imaginary neglect shown her by Charles. Amongst the sops he had thrown to his opponents was the offer of a bill directed against Catholics, and including in its provisions the compulsory education of their children in the Protestant religion. When it is remembered that the body at which this measure was aimed had been foremost in espousing the Royalist cause, it will be admitted that the services they had rendered were ill requited. Nor can it have answered its purpose in propitiating public opinion, since any result it might otherwise have produced must have been neutralised by a letter intercepted about this time, containing a message from the King to the effect that aid was shortly to be expected from Ireland. In the face of the knowledge that Charles was ready to employ Irish Catholics to advance his cause, the abandonment of their co-religionists in England will not have contributed to rehabilitate him in the eyes of his rebel subjects.

What Henrietta thought of the proposed concession is not known. By April she was repenting of her ill humour. Care for the King, and affection, she protested, had alone made her angry, and she grieved for his grief. If, as he believed, she had been in fault, she would make confession and hope for absolution. " I own," she wrote somewhat later," that I was carried away in the end by passion ; but you know that I am open to reason."-

That the Chancellor was not alone in attaching a

very high degree of importance to the Queen's influence is proved by a message received by her about this time from certain of the Parliamentary party, intended to elicit her views as to a pacification, and assuring her that the reasons to be given her for gaining the King's consent to the conditions which had been submitted to him would be such as she could not fail to find convincing. Her reply appears to have been a meaningless profession of her desire for peace, and, as might have been expected, nothing came of the attempt at conciliation. Before the end of May, so far were the Parliamentary leaders from entertaining any hopes of the Queen's assistance, that the gulf separating the opposed parties was widened by an attack on her own person. On a motion brought forward in the Commons for declaring all Papists in arms traitors, a member called Darley rose. " For my part," he said, " I desire to speak plain English. I think that the principal Papist now in arms against us is the Queen." Her impeachment was carried after scanty opposition, and was laid by Pym before the Lords. The step was little more than an act of bravado, for Henrietta was in no danger at the time of falling into the hands of her enemies.

She was doing her best to further the royal cause in the north, and was actually exerting herself to impress the necessity of patience upon Newcastle, who was not without grievances of his own. She gave him no counsels, she said, upon which she herself had not acted. It would seem that she had in truth been making an effort to control her own irritation :