The same year Lady Morton, who had been left at Exeter with the infant Henrietta Anne, made her escape, disguised as a beggar, and, with the child in her arms, travelled on until she placed her in her mother's lap. The queen's heart was gladdened at the sight of her little one, whom she covered with kisses, and called "child of benediction."
She had made up her mind that this little princess should become a Catholic, and for that reason appointed Père Gamache to instruct her.
Now, so long as the royal family of France were rich, Queen Henrietta shared their prosperity, and was treated with the utmost respect and consideration, but when their own civil wars reduced them to a state of destitution she had poverty added to her other troubles.
She behaved nobly when her sister-in-law, Anne of Austria, was in danger from the fury of her own subjects, and left her quiet retreat at St. Germains to share her danger in Paris during the battles of the Fronde and the Barricades. It was she who acted as peacemaker between the queen-regent and her people, and she had become such a favorite in France that after much trouble and many privations she finally succeeded in restoring order.
A.D. 1648. But the Christmas of 1648, before this was accomplished, Cardinal de Retz, who was one of the principal leaders of the Fronde, but a good friend to Queen Henrietta, found her shut up in an apartment of the Louvre with little Henrietta, without any fire, although it was a cold, snowy day. The sorrowing mother had kept the four-year old princess in bed lest she should suffer from the cold, but both were without food. The cardinal supplied the necessary comforts forthwith, and on the same day represented to the parliament of Paris the distress in which he had discovered the daughter of their former king. His eloquence was the outpouring of a kind heart, and met with an immediate response, for a subsidy of twenty thousand livres was instantly voted for the destitute queen.
Then she wrote to Lord Fairfax in England, asking his assistance, that she might see her husband once more. This letter was delivered to the house of commons, and contemptuously thrown aside, with the remark "that the writer had been voted guilty of high treason in 1643."
Thus ended all hope of being reunited to the husband whose afflictions she shared and for whose sake she would willingly have died. Added to this was the suspense the queen endured while the civil strife in Paris and its neighborhood rendered the passage of couriers impossible.
King Charles might well have escaped from England and joined his wife, but nothing could induce him to enter France as a supplicant sovereign. He preferred to suffer and struggle alone, through four long years of insult and abuse,—most shocking to us of the present day to read about.
The Roundheads grew so powerful that, with Oliver Cromwell for their leader, they became a body of ruffians, who either thrust into a dungeon or expelled any of their band who evinced the least mark of favor towards the king.
Through treachery Charles I. had fallen a prisoner in their hands. They showed him no mercy; they granted him no justice. A handful of self-appointed judges went through the mockery of a trial, and condemned their unfortunate sovereign to the block.