Henrietta Maria

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Transcriber's Note

HENRIETTA MARIA FROM THE PAINTING BY VAN DYCK AT WINDSOR
BY HENRIETTA HAYNES
WITH TWELVE ILLUSTRATIONS
NEW YORK: G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS LONDON: METHUEN & CO. LTD. 1912
A bibliography of the sources from which this book has been written would extend to many pages: much information has been derived from the collections of MSS. preserved in Paris in the Bibliothèque Nationale, in the Archives Nationales, and in the Bibliothèque Mazarine; from the valuable series of Roman Transcripts in the Public Record Office, London; from the curious and interesting documents in the archives of the See of Westminster, and from the newspapers and pamphlets which form a branch of the literature of the Civil War.
I have to express my thanks to His Eminence Cardinal Bourne, who kindly permitted me to consult the archives of the See of Westminster and to print three of the documents in the Appendix; to Mr. Edward Armstrong, Provost of Queen's College, Oxford, and to the Rev. H. Thurston, S.J., who have given me much help and advice; to the nuns of the Convent of the Visitation, Harrow-on-the-Hill, who lent me the rare Vie de la Ven. Mère Louise Eugénie de la Fontaine ; and, finally, to my friend, Miss H. M. Morris, who with unwearied kindness read through nearly the entire MS. of the book, and helped me much by her criticisms and suggestions.


The woman to whose life and environment the following pages are dedicated was called upon to play her part in one of the most difficult and perplexing periods of our history: she lived just on the edge of the modern world, when the Middle Ages, with their splendid simplicity of all-embracing ideals, had passed away, and when even the ideals of nationality and religious freedom which the Renaissance and the Reformation had brought were becoming modified by the stirring of a new spirit of liberty. The two countries which Henrietta Maria knew were throughout her lifetime making their future destiny: the France which cherished her youth and sheltered her age was becoming the greedy France of Louis XIV, with its splendid Court, its attempts at territorial growth, its downtrodden, suffering people; the England of her happy married life was growing in political self-consciousness and in a stern and repellent godliness which was to mould the character of the nation, and to educate it to become in the next century the builder-up of the greatest empire which the world has ever seen.