The life of Queen Henrietta Maria (22 page)

It is probable that Henrietta believed him. At any rate, Wentworth is presently found thanking her, through her secretary, Sir John Wintour, for having been pleased so graciously to interpret his counsel—adding that he will be mindful, not only of a recommendation she has lately sent him, but of all else, whensoever he may have means of serving her. " Yet," he adds, " I know some

there are could be content her Majesty should think otherwise of me, how injurious soever to me, or untrue in itself."

Wentworth must have been anxiously occupied with matters more urgent in his eyes than the restoration of a devotion. Whatever might be the case with others, the Lord Deputy, looking across the Channel and away from his own hard-won success, was not inclined to underrate the dimensions to which discontent in Scotland had risen. The events so inadequately characterised by Charles to his Council as the work by " some wild heads," to whom, provided they went no further, he was disposed to show mercy, were regarded by Wentworth in another light. The Scottish " Protestation," in particular, he described in a letter to Northumberland as " the sauciest and most unmannerly piece my eyes ever went over, which will to posterity remain the first-fruits of their rebellion." The words were to be proved true in a wider sense than the Lord Deputy himself would have understood them at the time. For rebellion was, in fact, begun.

Important developments had taken place in affairs north of the Tweed. On February 2yth an amended form of the Covenant of 1581—entered into at the instance of James as a defence against Catholicism—was under the consideration of an assemblage of ministers gathered together in Edinburgh. Altered to suit the exigencies of the present crisis, it received on the following day the signature of the nobles and gentlemen who chanced to be at the moment in the capital, the Earl of Sutherland heading the list. The subscription of the clergy followed, and on the 29th the people in general were invited to pledge themselves in like manner to the defence of the Protestant religion. The Covenant,

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to bear such notable fruit in time to come, had had its beginning. Two months later it had been circulated throughout Scotland, and the nation had risen, almost as one man, in protest against the invasion of its religious rights.

It was clear that, until he was in a position to enforce obedience, Charles was helpless against the flood of popular resistance ; and he yielded so far as to pledge himself not to press the Canons or the Prayer-Book. But he refused to recognise the Covenant. Should that bond be abandoned, he was ready for compromise, and Hamilton was sent to conduct negotiations in Scotland. As a result of his mission he wrote to the King that he must be prepared for the invasion of Scotland, adding— for Hamilton was Scotch—that though victory would be his, he must remember that it would be gained over his own poor people. He would therefore have had Charles concede more than he was ready to do. When the King's answer came it was to the effect that preparations were being pushed forward. The shadow of coming war was already lying over the land. It lay, so they tell us, also on Charles' countenance. Whether or not he had at last obtained a glimmering perception of the extent and nature of the struggle upon which he had entered, it is said that a change was apparent both in his aspect and in his way of life. His ordinary amusements were discarded, and his face had taken a new look, as of a man acquainted with care.

Before the end of the year an event took place calculated to increase, to an appreciable extent, the King's difficulties, already sufficiently formidable. This was the arrival in England of his mother-in-law, Marie de Medicis, on a visit of indefinite duration. For the dangers resulting from the presence of the Queen-

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Mother in England neither Charles nor Henrietta was responsible.

Anxious as the latter had been to offer her an asylum, Charles had been resolute in declining to receive her, confining himself to the endeavour to induce Louis to re-admit his mother to his own dominions. His efforts had not met with success. Leicester, through whom the attempt had been made, was informed that it was " une affaire domestique," and was given no hopes of present relenting upon Louis' part ; whilst a rumour which had reached the Louvre that Marie was to be allowed to take up her residence in England called forth a warning that such a step would be regarded at Paris as an indication that Charles did not desire friendship with France. Charles had, in truth, no more inclination than his brother-in-law to afford hospitality to an intriguer of world-wide reputation ; yet before the end of 1638 circumstances had proved too strong for him. Conceiving that her petitions for permission to return to France would be more favourably received if preferred from other than Spanish territory, Marie had first betaken herself to the Hague ; and when her magnificent reception there had been followed by an intimation that a prolonged visit would not be welcome, the wanderer had determined to leave Charles no choice in the matter of receiving her. On September 3rd an envoy appeared to acquaint him with the fact that the Queen was already on her way to England. Such being the case, it came near to being impossible for him to refuse a shelter to his wife's mother, whose coming was, as Windebank expressed it, " so flat and sudden a surprisal as, without our ports should be shut against her, it is not to be avoided."

It must have been with a sinking heart that

Charles submitted to necessity. Travelling in state to Chelmsford, he met the unwelcome guest on her way from Harwich, at which port she had landed, and escorted her in person to London, where she was received with as much pomp and ceremony as if she had been a reigning sovereign. Fifty apartments had been prepared, under Henrietta's personal superintendence, at St. James' Palace for her use and that of the two hundred needy foreigners who swelled her train. In the quadrangle of the palace the Queen, expecting shortly the birth of another child, awaited the mother from whom she had been parted thirteen years. Hurrying to the carriage containing her husband and his guest, Henrietta sought with her own hands to open the door ; then, kneeling down, with her own four children at her side, she received her mother's blessing. Warm-hearted, generous, and affectionate, she was unfeignedly glad to welcome the Queen-Mother for the first time to her home.

Announcing to the Duchess of Savoy their mother's coming, she says, " I believe that none as much as yourself will enter into the joy caused to me by the arrival o: the Queen, my mother . . . She gives me a secon life, being so happy in seeing her and in being able t serve her." At the first, she added, she had foun the guest a little altered—it was no wonder, after a interval of thirteen years. But the change had bee only due to the fatigue of the journey, and the Queen-Mother had never been in better health than sine she reached London.

Henrietta was probably the single person, with th exception of the band of French refugees already findin a shelter in England, who did not view the arrival o Marie de Medicis with dismay. " You see wha a number of French daily run hither," wrote a cor

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respondent to Sir John Pennington, recording the arrival of the Due de la Valette not long before that of the royal guest, " so that if the court be not Frenchified now, 'twill never be." And he adds that the Queen-Mother is to be brought to St. James', " where she will stay till we are aweary of her." Laud was not more sanguine in his prognostications. " I pray God," he wrote, " her coming do not spend the King more than . . . would content the Swedes." His apprehensions were justified by the sequel, and Henrietta herself in later days complained of the shameless rapacity of her mother's suite.

Charles, if he performed his duty reluctantly, did it with liberality. A hundred pounds a day was the allowance granted to his mother-in-law ; and she was permitted to make of St. James' a centre for all the restless schemers banished from France. The Duchesse de Chevreuse, chief amongst them, cost him another two hundred guineas a week. In the state of the royal finances the foreign visitors must have been a serious tax upon the King's resources. But graver still was the dislike with which the establishment of a foreign court, with its contingent of French ecclesiastics, was regarded by the nation at large, at a time when the King had no popularity to squander.

A result even more dangerous was the resentment on Richelieu's part to which it would give rise. It was not possible that the Cardinal, whose position had lately been strengthened by the tardy birth of a Dauphin, would view without suspicion the establishment of his enemy in England ; and when Leicester formally acquainted Louis with his mother's arrival on British soil, the King observed that she had strange counsellors with her, " des brouillons et des meschants esprits," who, he

warned Charles, would make trouble in England, since nowhere could they live in peace or repose. The Cardinal was not a man to pardon Charles for affording to such characters harbourage and opportunity to mature their plots across the narrow seas. He had lost no time in making his own attitude plain. De Bellievre, French ambassador in London, received orders to show the exile no such courtesies as would naturally have been due to his sovereign's mother; and to minimise as much as possible any casual and unavoidable intercourse. So adroit was the envoy in carrying out his instructions, that not for some time had the Queen-Mother an opportunity of addressing her son's representative : and when, no doubt at Henrietta's instance, Holland at length succeeded in detaining the ambassador in th gallery at Whitehall until the Queen-Mother came th way, no good resulted from the interview. The envc was firm in his refusal to accept any messages for trar mission to France, assuring his own position by repeati his denial of her request in the presence of the King a; Queen. Henrietta would remember, he added, that s' had frequently commanded him to write in her narris on behalf of her mother, but that he had always en treated her not to insist upon obedience, but to respe his instructions.

It was plain that there was, for the present, no chana of Marie's readmission to her son's dominions ; sh( had made good her footing on English soil, and woulc not be easily dislodged. For the next three years she remained in London, a constant source of exasperation tc the people, by whom she was disliked for her own sak< as well as for her daughter's. " Wheresoever she ha been there could be no peace nor tranquillity, yet shi] money must be had to keep her and all her chaggraggs,'

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omplained a political squib of the year 1639 ; whilst >esides the material burdens incidental to her presence, it ppears that a superstitious dread was felt of the ill luck .ogging her footsteps, " so that she was held as some

meteor of ill signification."

But it is difficult for a host to dismiss a guest; it is lard for a son-in-law to cast his wife's mother homeless

upon the world ; and no alternative remained but to ccept the situation with what equanimity was possible.

CHAPTER X 1639—1640

Wentworth's letter—Preparations for war—Need of money—Choice of officers—Wentworth and the Queen—Charles in the north—A treaty signed with the Scotch—Marie de Medicis and her son—Wentworth's growing influence—Becomes Earl of Strafford—Secretaryship conferred on Vane—Henrietta in opposition to Strafford—Rossetti papal agent in England—Departure of Duchesse de Chevreuse—The Short Parliament—Growing disaffection—Henrietta appeals to Rome— Failure of northern campaign.

THE latter part of the year 1638 had been marked by tempests symbolising well the storms imminent upon the political horizon. In Yorkshire the son of the Vice-President of the North had been killed by the fall of chimneys, and Wentworth wrote to Laud from Dublin, that nowhere were there so many rotten chimneys or ones so dangerously high as at the castle ; and that the women and children there, already frighted by the late high winds, were so terrified, since news had come of young Osborne's death, that when next Boreas swelled his cheeks he did not think it would be possible to keep them in their beds. " God bless the youn whelps," he adds, " and for the old dog there is lesi matter."

News from abroad was bad. The young Princ Palatine had been defeated in an abortive attempt t vindicate his rights, and Rupert was a prisoner, reportei at first to be dead of his wounds, "having fought very

bravely and (as the Gazette says) like a lion," writes Nicholas to Pennington. The rumour must soon have been contradicted ; but Charles, in the midst of his own trials, will not have been insensible to the misfortunes of his nephews.

Wentworth was, as usual, ill and suffering. A realisation of his constant ill-health is necessary in order to appreciate to the full the indomitable courage and intellectual vigour of the man who thus subordinated flesh to spirit. In the midst of his more important labours he was finding time to devise means of gratification for Henrietta. Writing to Charles in December—having caused himself to be taken out of bed and set up in a chair for the purpose—he reminded his master of a certain day at Windsor when the King had directed him to carry himself with all duty and respect to her Majesty, " as I ever have done, and as good reason there is I both should and ought to do." Hitherto he had " never had the happiness to light upon any fit occasion to express it, in this silent corner of the world." One had now offered itself. For building purposes of Henrietta's, materials were to be fetched from Ireland ; and the Lord Deputy wrote to tell the King that he had made discovery of a royal unclaimed right, which, being vindicated, would bring in some four or five thousand pounds. He suggested that this sum should, with Charles' approval, be made over to the Queen, and should defray the cost of the Irish building materials, the grace of the gift, of course, remaining with the King. It was a dexterous device for affording pleasure alike to King and Queen, and doubtless it found appreciation with both. There must have been need at court of any distractions, however slight, that would afford a respite from the anxiety caused by the political outlook.