The life of Queen Henrietta Maria (17 page)

After a copy of Van Dyck's picture in the National Portrait Gallery.

Photo by Emery Walker.

WILLIAM LAUD, ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY.

doctrine is by no means invariably a corrective of personal bitterness, and the reversions to the ancient faith which were a common feature of the times can scarcely have failed to produce friction.

It may be true that reunion with Rome was the dream of the Archbishop's life ; but he had no inclination to lead the way by a personal submission. When once, if not twice, he was offered a cardinal's hat, should he take that step, he was resolute in his rejection of the proposal. " Something dwells within me," he said, u which will not suffer me to accept that till Rome be other than it is ; " and he seems to have acquiesced in the brutal punishment inflicted on one Bowyer, in consequence of his having spread reports that Laud was in the service of the Pope. Taking him all in all, his antagonism to the Queen was probably as great as that of Portland, though less undisguised.

For another and a greater man, the most interesting by far of those rilling the stage, Henrietta had no liking. In Wentworth's character there would seem to have been much to commend him to her favour. It might be true that he lacked the smaller arts useful in propitiating goodwill, that he was no courtier, nor skilled in winning the favour of women—" there are few of them," he once wrote lightly, " know how gentle a garpn I am "—but what he lacked might well have been overbalanced in the Queen's eyes by his brilliant gifts and the intangible charm of his personality, combined with his services to the King and his views upon questions of prerogative and statesmanship. In his loyalty there was an absence of self-seeking—not incompatible with the ambition he doubtless cherished—an element of personal devotion, that it is strange should not have appealed to Charles' wife. In a letter of 1632 he

makes a profession of the service he is prepared to render the King, to which his conduct never gave the lie. " Surely," he wrote, " I will never omit continually to serve him his own way, where I once understand it, and where that beam leaves me, serve him the most profitable way the dimmer lights of my own judgment shall by any means be able to lead me into. In this truth I will live and die."

In spite, moreover, of his disclaimer of popularity amongst women and of his "bent and ill-favoured brow," he had been loved by many. Not to speak of the wives to whom he was successively married, the Queen's ill-chosen friend, Lady Carlisle, was so devotedly attached to him that the transference of her services to the Parliamentarian party has been attributed to her indignation at the King's acquiescence in his fate. That Henrietta herself did not fail to recognise his serviceable qualities is clear from the narrative taken down by Madame de Motteville from her lips. He was a great man, she said, and of all the King's servants the most able and faithful. u II etait laid," adds Madame de Motteville, still quoting Henrietta's description, " mais assez agreable de sa personne ; et la Reine, me contant toutes ces choses, s'arreta pour me dire qu'il avait les plus belles mains du monde." But though doing justice both to his character and to his hands, the fact remained that Henrietta did not like him. When fault was found with certain aspects of his Irish administration, Laud warned him that it was " somewhat loudly spoken of by some on the Queen's side" ; and though Charles recognised and acknowledged his extreme value, the fact that the earldom he solicited—more as a signal mark of the King's favour which his enemies would not be able to gainsay than

by reason of the personal advancement it contained—was twice refused, may have been partly due to the influence exercised over Charles by his wife's prejudice. Holland, her chief friend at court, was heard to hint that the Lord Deputy was subject to touches of madness ; although, charged by Wentworth with having given utterance to the calumny, the Earl denied that he had attributed to him more than " hypochondria humours."

Wentworth was well aware of the feelings with which he was regarded by the Queen. Of another courtier, temporarily out of favour, he wrote that Wat Montagu was " very ill used by her Majesty, so as if it continue but a while longer in this state it is feared he may grow out of countenance on the Queen's side comme nous autres" Arduously as she laboured when the catastrophe drew near to avert his fate, in happier times she had never been his friend. His visits to court were, for the rest, only occasional, his duties, first as President of the North and then as Lord Deputy of Ireland, detaining him mostly elsewhere.

Amongst the King's personal friends, as distinguished from his political advisers, Hamilton perhaps stood first. An unpopular man, he had fewer friends and more enemies, according to Clarendon, than any other, whether at court or elsewhere. The King's affection for him was, on the other hand, at least equal and thought to be superior to that he bestowed on any man. It was one of Charles' good points that he was not swayed by public opinion. When the Marquis had obtained leave to levy a body of volunteers to lead to Germany in support of Gustavus, a charge was brought against him to the effect that the object he avowed was no more than a blind, and that his real purpose was a treasonable design upon the Scottish crown. Charles listened to

HENRIETTA MARIA

the accusation against his friend, told him on his return to court of the charges preferred against him, and in proof of his incredulity made him share his own bedchamber. Such loyalty in friendship contributed to rouse an answering loyalty amongst his servants.

Turning from ministers of State and those in the King's confidence to Henrietta's own precincts, the Earl of Holland would have been the most prominent figure there. Upon Charles himself, as the intimate friend of the dead Duke, he had a strong claim; whilst, as long as he remained true, Henrietta continued faithful to her first English friend. Writing of a later date, when Holland's loyalty had been put to the proof and had been found wanting, Clarendon casts a backward glance at these earlier days when the man who had afterwards served her so ill had been " believed to be a creature of the Queen's, and exceedingly obliged and protected by her immediate single grace and favour against the Earl of Portland, the Earl of Strafford, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, in those times when they had otherwise destroyed him." Holland was not lacking in ambition, and at the time immediately following upon the Duke's death he appears to have indulged the hope of succeeding to the place left vacant, and of exercising, through the Queen, a similar power. With this object in view, with all who were not " gracious" to Henrietta, or who showed themselves adverse to her possession of authority, Holland was at war. He had, however, neither Buckingham's gifts, his brilliance nor his fascination, and his dream of pre-eminence was never realised.

Lord Carlisle was high in favour with Henrietta. He, like Holland, had had the opportunity of stealing a march upon the rest of their fellow courtiers, and

had made the most of it, obtaining for his wife a post in the Queen's household, whilst he himself had been made her Master of the Horse. In his case, as in Holland's, Henrietta remained constant in her friendship. Writing to him when abroad, Lord Goring told the Earl that " the blessed sweet Queen, my mistress, is hugely yours," and Lady Carlisle sent him word that Henrietta was constantly expressing her value of him to the King. He was much desired at home, Lord Goring told him again, not least by King and Queen ; whilst he added, evidently with the desire of effacing past strife, that Lady Carlisle was his careful friend, beyond that of ordinary in a wife, and expressed a hope that he might not hear a syllable at his return of old quarrels.

It is unlikely that Goring's aspiration was fulfilled. Lady Carlisle, one fancies, was not well calculated to keep the peace—especially, perhaps, in the case of a husband. Yet her position was such that even a husband might find it worth his while to propitiate her. Restless in her ambition, alike political and social, it was easy to deride her, especially when her charm was on the wane, for her meddlesomeness in public affairs ; but a woman who could count amongst those owning her attraction, first, the Earl of Strafford, and when he was in his grave the Puritan leader Pym, was a power no party could afford to despise. The Queen had quickly adopted her as a friend. A letter written in 1628, when Lord Carlisle was starting on a foreign mission, observes that in the opinion of the writer—one John Hope—he will not be half his journey before his wife is turned out of court, for the Duke's mother, sister, and wife hate her, not only for the Duke's intimacy with her, but also that she has the Queen's heart above them. " She has already brought

her to paint," adds Mr. Hope—clearly no friend of Lady Carlisle's—" and in time will lead her into more debaucheries." That same year it is recorded that when her friend had the smallpox they had much ado to keep Henrietta from her ; and Lady Carlisle herself, writing to her husband after her recovery, says that she did not think the heart of a queen could have been so sensible of the loss of a servant. Three years later, it is true, there had evidently been a quarrel, since a correspondent of Sir Henry Vane's informs him that Lord Holland's friendship with Lady Carlisle is perfected, adding that her friends hope his credit may restore her to the Queen's favour, whilst his apprehend that her pride may endanger him. "The court," observes the writer philosophically, " is like the earth, naturally cold, and reflects no more affection than the sunshine of their master's favour beats upon it." But, nevertheless, Lady Carlisle must have been Henrietta's chief friend amongst the women at her court. It is well known how the Queen's friendship was requited.

Rising rapidly in her liking during this period were " the young tampering favourites," as Warwick terms them, Henry Jermyn, of whom mention has already been made and who was to play so conspicuous a part in her after-life, and Henry Percy, brother to Lady Carlisle and the Earl of Northumberland. Percy's influence was strong with the Queen, since in 1635 when a Garter was to be given away, Henrietta by his request spoke to the King to give it to his brother, making it "her act solely, that the thanks might be only hers." Like his sister, Percy was amongst those who in days to come was not always held to have well repaid the favour shown him in these halcyon times. On the whole, however, he was a sharer in the Queen's fortunes to the end.

If a woman is to be judged by her friends Henrietta is not well calculated to stand the test. But it must be remembered that she was young and a foreigner, and almost necessarily influenced by the attraction exercised by external advantages, by grace and wit and adroitness in the art of achieving success at court. It is, nevertheless, not astonishing that her choice of men such as Holland, Jermyn, and Percy as her favourite companions and associates should have redounded to her discredit, and their influence may well have availed to prejudice her against those who might have proved wiser counsellors and friends.

In the meantime, though she was not without her enemies at court, it would have been a bold man who would have sought to harm her, her relations with the King being what they had now become. Every touch in the domestic story of those days tells of love and happiness. Smallpox was a terror at the time, especially to women ; but Henrietta seems to have been singularly fearless. If it had been difficult to bar her access to Lady Carlisle when attacked by the disease ; when it was contracted by the King it was found impossible. " The Queen, as I heard a Frenchman of the court assert," writes a contemporary,

Upon the King's recovery followed the performance of VOL. i. 10

the Queen's Pastoral, rousing serious disapproval in the minds of her Puritan subjects, and contributing, amongst other consequences, to cost Prynne his ears. It was to be acted at Whitehall, in a temporary building erected for the purpose, lest the pictures in the banqueting-hall should be injured by the lights ; and " my Lord Chamberlain saith that no chambermaid shall enter, unless she sit cross-legged on the top of a bulk. No great lady shall be kept out, though she have but mean apparel, and no inferior lady or woman shall be let in, but such as have extreme brave apparel, and better faces." Birth, beauty, or fine clothes were to be the passports of admission.

There had been trouble about the Pastoral. To Inigo Jones, high in the King's favour, and who, ha< Charles been able to carry out his plans, was to have rendered Whitehall worthy to compete with any palace in Europe, the decorative arrangements of the masque were to have been entrusted, Ben Jonson furnishing the words. But the two artists had fallen out, and since neither would give way it was clear that one must withdraw. It was the poet's services that were dispensed with, and Ben Jonson's verses were not written. One man's misfortune is another's opportunity. Young Walter Montagu, my Lord Privy Seal's son, destined to end his days as a Catholic priest, and, as Henrietta's spiritual adviser, held responsible for certain acts on her part specially offensive to Protestant sentiment, was selected to replace the veteran verse-writer. Not yet having mastered the difficult art of brevity, he produced a libretto of which the performance took some eight hours ; but though the Queen is said to have complained bitterly of the length of her part, the author had given satisfaction, since, meeting the Lord Privy Seal, the King " did highly

congratulate and extol unto his lordship the rare parts of Mr. Walter Montagu, his son, in poetry and otherwise ; so that he is a favourite with both their Majesties."

For months the Queen and her ladies are said to have thought of little besides the coming performance. On January loth, 1633, it took place, and the very next day the invective of Mr. Prynne of Lincoln's Inn was published, including, amongst other objects of vituperation, stage-plays and such-like entertainments. The production was so plainly directed against the Queen that the author could scarcely have expected to escape prosecution, and it is not to be wondered at that proceedings were taken against him—Henrietta, it is said, interceding, though in vain, to obtain a mitigation of his punishment. It was that they might publicly dissociate themselves from this attack that other gentlemen of Lincoln's Inn entertained the court, the year after, at another magnificent ballet and masque, given in the banqueting-hall at their own expense ; on which occasion the crowd was so great that the King and Queen found a difficulty in reaching their places. The masque was followed by a ball, when Henrietta expressed her approval of the partners she selected, pronouncing them as good dancers as ever she saw.