Read The life of Queen Henrietta Maria Online

Authors: Ida A. (Ida Ashworth) Taylor

Tags: #Henrietta Maria, Queen, consort of Charles I, King of England, 1609-1669

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It was scarcely strange that trouble, separation, and sickness should have broken down the Queen's gay and courageous spirits. Parted from husband and children, the future dark and uncertain before her, with danger menacing herself and all she loved, despondency got the better of her. Writing to Charles in a mood when, if death seemed near, life was scarcely desirable enough to cause it to be feared, she gave expression to her dejection. Her extreme weakness, she told him, caused her to believe it was time to think of another world than this. God's will be done, who had already so befriended her and hers that certainly, however it might please Him to dispose of her now, it would be for her good and for the King's. There were many

BIRTH OF HENRIETTE-ANNE 301

things to say, but she dared not trust them to the chances of the road ; only she prayed him, should she die, to believe what Jermyn and Father Philip would tell him from her. It had been a consolation to say this much. Let him not be unhappy. There was reason both for hope and fear, and to prepare for the worst is to be unastonished if it comes, and to make good fortune the more welcome. " Adieu, mon cher coeur."

Henrietta's forebodings were not realised. On June 16th—a fortnight before the disastrous battle of Marston Moor—her youngest child, the Princess Henriette, was born. Shortly before this event Essex had approached her place of refuge, and was now menacing Exeter with a siege. It was manifestly desirable that, so soon as it should be possible, the Queen should leave the town. The bodily sufferings which had had their beginning at Oxford had taken an aggravated form, and she sent to demand a safe conduct from the Parliamentary general, that, weak as she was, she might return to Bath, there to carry out her original intention of trying the effect of the waters upon her malady.

Essex's answer was to make proffer of his own escort, not to Bath, but to London, where physicians were to be found, and her presence was moreover required that she might answer for the part she had taken in the war.

Henrietta, under these circumstances, decided to make her way to the sea-coast, and to take ship for France. Reasons not wholly selfish contributed to her decision. Should she remain at Exeter, she told Charles, writing from her bed twelve days after her child's birth, she knew well that he would hazard everything rather than not come to her aid ; and sooner than that he should thus imperil his affairs, she preferred to endanger what,

save for the value he placed upon it, was of small account—namely, her life. It is easy to see, reading her letter, that suffering, bodily and mental, had for the time robbed her of self-control. Otherwise it would be hard to forgive her for wringing the King's heart at a time when his anxieties and cares must have come near to being unbearable, by the description of all she had undergone and was undergoing, until, " were it not that death must not be wished for, it would be but too greatly desired by the most unhappy creature in the world."

Of the child afterwards to become so dear to her there is little mention. The French envoy, M. de Sabran, had repaired to Exeter, to visit mother and child, and had sent home word that the English Queen, though in a condition of extreme suffering, had given birth to a beautiful little princess. No time had been lost in confiding the new-born baby to the care of Lady Dalkeith, a Villiers by birth and niece to the late Duke of Buckingham. In this lady's charge the child was left when, less than a fortnight after her confinement, Henrietta started on the last of her adventurous journeys to make her way to the coast.

Not more than four days after the letter was written in which she announced her intention to the King, the battle of Marston Moor had decided the issue of the struggle in the north. On July yth it was decided that Essex's position in the west was so little secure that Charles would do well to follow him thither. It is said that the King's determination was taken rather because Henrietta was at Exeter than because the plan promised success. Affection must at least have seconded reasons of military force. But if one of his objects had been reunion with his wife, his anticipations were doomed to disappointment. Even before his resolve was taken,

Henrietta had quitted Exeter, and on July 9th she was writing from Truro to bid him farewell.

Her hazardous journey had been successfully accomplished. It was said, perhaps without foundation, that Essex had put a price upon her head. Henrietta believed it, and her precautions were taken accordingly. Accompanied by her physician, Sir John Wintour, her confessor, and one lady-in-waiting, she stole out of Exeter, narrowly escaping capture three miles from the town ; when, hidden in a hut, she heard the Parliamentary troops march by, talking as they went of the expected capture of the Queen, and their anticipations of carrying her head to London. Before Plymouth, her original destination, was reached, she was joined by the rest of her household, including Jermyn and Hudson the dwarf, and proceeded to Falmouth ; from whence, after some days spent in Pendennis Castle, she set sail for France.

She was not to be allowed to escape without a last effort on the part of her enemies to prevent it. She had had, it was afterwards boasted, " no other courtesy from England but cannon-balls to convey her to France " ; and the vessel with her on board was struck by a shell from the Parliamentary fleet in pursuit. Believing that capture was imminent, the Queen, her spirits rising in the face of danger, gave directions to the pilot to make what speed he could, ordering that rather than allow the ship to fall into the hands of the enemy it should be blown up. Amidst the shrieks of her women she remained silent and calm, conscious only of the desire to escape the shame of becoming a prisoner in the hands of the King's enemies. The sole consideration which could have made her repent of the directions she had given, so she afterwards affirmed, was

the reflection that in courting death she was guilty of an unchristian action. Thus she continued wavering between the choice of glory terrestrial and glory celestial, until the question was happily decided by the demonstration that the extreme measures she had contemplated would not be required to extricate her from the difficulties of the situation.

This was the account of the adventure she gave to Madame de Motteville. If one discerns in it a touch of self-glorification, the narrative is likely to have been substantially true. Cowardice was not amongst Henrietta's failings, and upon the emergency she described her father's spirit may have flashed out.

The account of the voyage furnished by the Capuchin, Pere Cyprian de Gamache, supplies an element of comedy to what was a serious matter. To the perils due to the Parliamentary cannon and to the step proposed by Henrietta, was added the effect upon the Queen's attendants of " the unwholesome air of the sea." To such a condition of weakness was her retinue reduced that not one of them was capable of rendering assistance to the other prostrate victims of the prevailing malady, save one monk, who, being a Knight of Malta, had been so inured to the water that he was exempted from any ill effects, and charitably gave himself up to the assistance of all the sick on board.

Under these circumstances there must have been more than one reason for relief when the coast of France was sighted. It was not a time when a convenient spot for landing could be selected with overmuch deliberation ; and Henrietta, placing herself in a boat, gained the shore, and, making her way, not without difficulty, across the rocks, succeeded in reaching a village hard by. Here she was lodged by peasants in a thatched

cottage until certain gentlemen of the neighbourhood, hearing of her arrival, " more like a miserable heroine of romance than a true queen," brought carriages to convey her elsewhere.

Thus Henrietta Maria returned to the land of her birth, quitted by her nineteen years earlier as a bride of fifteen. Not for sixteen years did she revisit England.

END OF VOL. I

Printtd by Haaell, Watson Vinty, Ld., London and Aylctbury. VOL. I. 2O

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BOOK: The life of Queen Henrietta Maria
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