Mlle. de Montpensier brought her husband a revenue of 350,000 livres and immense estates, amongst which was the sovereign principality of Dombes, and Louis XIII, on the advice of Richelieu, gave Monsieur, as the price of his honour and the lives of his friends, a rich appanage. He exchanged the duchy of Anjou for those of Orléans and Chartres and the county of Blois, with a revenue of 100,000 livres and pensions amounting to more than six times that sum.[47] Little wonder, then, that he should have received the news of the unfortunate Chalais’s death with equanimity![48]
The brother was pardoned, but the wife had transgressed beyond forgiveness. The King, already violently irritated against the Queen by her coquetry with Buckingham, was exasperated beyond measure at the part which she was reported to have played in this miserable affair. His jealous and suspicious nature easily persuaded him that there was some intrigue between her and Monsieur, not perhaps to hasten his demise, but to marry whenever that event should take place; and such remained his settled conviction until the end of his life.[49] In the first transports of his wrath, he summoned his consort to appear before a special council, at which Richelieu and the Queen-Mother assisted. Instead of being accommodated with the fauteuil due to her royalty, Anne suffered the indignity of having to sit upon a folding-seat, as though she had been a criminal, the while the King upbraided her with having conspired against his life, in order to have another husband. “The Queen,” writes Madame de Motteville, “to whom innocence gave strength, incensed by the cruelty of the accusation, spoke with firmness and a generous boldness, and told him, as I have heard from her own lips, that she had too little to gain by the change to blacken her soul for so small a profit. Then, with the imperiousness of a princess of her birth, she reproached the Queen-Mother with the persecutions which she and the Cardinal de Richelieu were inflicting upon her.”
Anne’s boldness, and particularly the disdainful answer which she had given him, served only to exasperate the angry monarch still further, and he resolved to punish her by a public humiliation. Accordingly, an order was issued, signed by Louis and countersigned by the Cardinal, forbidding entry to the Queen’s apartments to all nobles and gentlemen other than those attached to her Household, unless they paid their respects to her Majesty in the King’s presence and entered and quitted her apartments in his suite. He also forbade the Queen to grant any private audience without informing the Queen-Mother or the Cardinal, and naming the person whom she proposed to receive and the object of the interview.
Madame de Chevreuse remained to be dealt with, and for a time it looked as though matters were likely to go hardly with her. Her husband, however, who was in high favour with Louis XIII, intervened and persuaded the King to be content with her banishment from the Court, promising to be answerable for her future conduct. She accordingly retired to the duke’s château of Dampierre, near Rambouillet, where she was kept under close surveillance, all communication with the Queen being strictly forbidden her. She would appear, however, to have been so imprudent as to disobey this command; anyway, six months later she received orders to leave France. Her request that she might be permitted to retire to England was refused, and she was obliged to seek an asylum at Nancy, with her husband’s kinsman, Charles IV of Lorraine.
At the end of September of that year, Bassompierre was despatched on another important diplomatic mission, this time to England, where the differences between Charles I and Henrietta Maria over the thorny question of the Queen’s French attendants had reached a crisis.
In the marriage treaty, signed on November 24, 1624, the French Government had succeeded in obtaining practically all that it had demanded, though when one reads the articles of this astonishing document, it is impossible to believe that James I, or Charles, when after his accession he confirmed them, ever intended that they should be carried out, or that they conceived it possible to do so.
The treaty stipulated that the free exercise of the Catholic religion should be permitted to Henrietta, and likewise to all the children who should be born of the marriage, who were to be brought up by their mother until they reached the age of thirteen. The Queen was to have a chapel in all the royal palaces, “and in every place of the King of Great Britain’s dominions where he or she should reside.” She was to have in her house twenty-eight priests and ecclesiastics, almoners and chaplains included, to serve in her chapel, and if there were any regular clergy amongst them, they should wear the habit of their Order. Her domestic establishment was to consist exclusively of French Catholics, chosen by the Very Christian King.
These terms, if decidedly obnoxious to British prejudice, were, with the exception of the exclusively French composition of the Queen’s Household—a most startling innovation and one which was bound to lead to trouble—only what might have been expected if the King of England chose for his wife a Catholic princess. But the treaty contained in addition private or secret articles, which, admitting as they did the right of a foreign power to meddle in domestic affairs, were unlikely to be tolerated for a moment by a self-respecting people. These secret articles stipulated:—
1. That the Catholics, as well ecclesiastical as temporal, imprisoned since the last proclamation which followed the breach with Spain, should all be set at liberty.
2. That the English Catholics should be no more searched after nor molested for their religion.