Henrietta Maria

by Henrietta Haynes

She herself undertook the work of preparing the house for the reception of the nuns. Hers was a busy, active nature, and she was never happier than when spending herself for those she loved. Some of the furniture she supplied herself and some was sent from the Rue S. Antoine, where the little band of women under the guidance of Mother Lhulier and Mother de la Fayette was ready to set out. The removal took place upon the 21st of June, 1651. The nuns were seen off from their old home by Vincent de Paul,[412] that strange figure of seventeenth-century Paris, whose shabby soutane was found in the salon of the noble as in the hovel of the poor, and whose advice was sought at the council table of the King as in the home of the meanest of his subjects. He was at this time director of the mother house, and though he is not known ever to have set foot within the convent of Chaillot, his memory is linked with it by the blessing which he bestowed upon its beginning.

At Chaillot Henrietta was waiting, radiant and expectant. She greeted her guests with delight, giving perhaps a specially warm welcome to two of the younger members of the little band of nine or ten—one, the only novice of the house, Eugénie Madeline Berthaud, the sister of her dear friend Madame de Motteville; the other a Scotch girl, Mary Hamilton[413] by name, whom in earlier days she had welcomed at her Court in London, but whose desire for a conventual life was such that leaving home and country she had set out for Paris, where she entered the convent in the Rue S. Antoine, without knowing a single word of the French tongue.

Henrietta led the nuns all over the house, discoursing upon its charms and conveniences, and dwelling specially upon the beauties of the situation. She had arranged that her own rooms should be in the front, overlooking the public road, while the nuns were to take the quieter apartments which faced the garden. She was surprised and disconcerted when these ladies, who were less used to palaces than she was, objected to the splendour of the lodging provided for them, and insisted upon retiring to the garrets, which they said were more suitable to their vow of poverty, and whence they were only induced to descend some days later, at the Queen's special request, and when she had carefully removed from the downstairs rooms all that savoured of worldly vanity; but neither this little difficulty nor the more serious trouble that, owing to the continued opposition of Tillières, it was necessary to defend the house with a guard of archers, could damp Henrietta's joy on such a day. She spent several hours with the nuns in happy talk and plans, and then drove back to the Palais Royal, where she was living at this time, happier perhaps than she had ever been since her husband's death.

Chaillot was honoured by letters patent from the Crown of France, which gave it the status of a royal foundation and Henrietta the title of foundress. When the enclosure was set up about a week after the arrival of the nuns, a number of distinguished persons assisted at the ceremony, though it had to be done quickly for fear of disturbance from those who had struggled so hard to keep this fair property out of the hands of the Church. Henrietta heard the first Mass which was sung in the chapel with a triumph which was all the sweeter to her bold and enterprising nature from the many difficulties which had beset the undertaking.

Congratulations were not lacking. Among the most graceful were those which Walter Montagu made public two years later in a dedication to the Queen of a volume of religious essays. "Under that notion, Madam," he wrote, "of an aspirer to a more transcendent Majestie I present your Religious Mind these entertainments: which will be the less unmannerly the greater privacie and retreat they intrude themselves upon; and truly, as your life stands now dispos'd the greater part of your time is favourable for such admissions. Since you pass the most of it in that holy retirement, whither you have carry'd up the Cross in triumph; having set That over your Head and the most tempting part (perhaps) of the whole world, as it were, under your feet.

"And, methinks, Madam, this remark may not a little indear to you the seat of your pious retirement; viz. That you, who have been dispossess'd of so many noble houses and pleasant scituations, by the worlds violence and injustice, and have had many religious receptacles (by your means consecrated) taken from you by the Prince of this world, transferring them to his profane uses: That your vertue yet should have made so eminent a reprizal upon the world's possessions in your retreat out of it. And what a comfort may it be to you to think that God has made use of you, to take from this Prince one of the chiefest holds; and convert it, as it were, into a Religious Citadel, furnish'd with such a Garrison as professing irreconcileable enmitie to him and all his partie, bears away as many conquests as it has combatants, daily singing Te Deum for their continual victories."[414]

Henrietta, as is hinted in the above passage, was not slow to take advantage of the retreat which she had won with so much difficulty. "Our good Queen," wrote Sir Richard Browne in August, 1651, "spends much of her time of late in a new monastery ... of which she is the titular foundress."[415] The more she saw of her new friends the more she loved them, and her affection was warmly returned. It became an understood thing that year by year she should pass at Chaillot the seasons of the great festivals of the Church, and her visits, which were usually for ten days or a fortnight, sometimes extended to several months. She came to look upon the convent as the best substitute for the home she had lost. There she passed the happiest days of her latter years, and there, had not a sudden death surprised her, she would have died.

Nor was her retirement without agreeable society from outside, for Chaillot was the resort of some who were among the ornaments of the Parisian world. There might often have been seen the Queen-Regent, whose visits at the time of the foundation were continued to the day when, on her dying journey to S. Germain-en-Laye, she was carried "to see this poor convent once more,"[416] and who in that holy retreat was able at last to forget the jealousies of bygone days, and to hold out the hand of cordial friendship to Louise de la Fayette. Sometimes an even greater honour was bestowed on the religious when the lad who was afterwards "le grand Monarque" appeared at the door, to be welcomed with all the ceremony due to the God-given hope of France. Not infrequently the bright and gifted Madame de la Fayette, who was winning a literary reputation, to be crowned later by the publication of La Princesse de Clèves, came to chat with her husband's sister, or to lay the foundation of that intimacy with Henrietta of England which fitted her to be the biographer of her short life. Most constant visitor of all, Madame de Motteville brought her wit, her accomplishments, and her long experience of Court life to enliven the dullness of the cloister. When the death of Queen Anne released her from the faithful attendance of years she spent a great part of her time at Chaillot, where she was the frequent companion of the Queen of England, who beguiled the long, quiet hours by recounting her past experiences, particularly her adventures during the Civil War, all of which her listener carefully wrote down and finally incorporated in the charming memoirs which were the principal occupation of her later days, and which contain many details of Henrietta's character and career lost but for her in the silence of time.

But perhaps the most romantic visitor who ever appeared at Chaillot was a runaway Princess, who found there an asylum after her conversion from the Protestant to the Catholic religion. Louise of the Palatine was a connection of the Queen of England, for she was the daughter of Elizabeth of Bohemia, the Winter Queen, whose beauty had turned so many men's heads and hearts. Louise lived with her unfortunate family at The Hague, and she solaced the weary days of an exiled Princess by the study of accomplishments, especially of painting, for which she had real talent. The attractions of the Church of Rome were represented to her by a priest, who gained her ear and her confidence as an instructor in her favourite art. She determined to abandon the religion of her family; and, as she knew that her position in her mother's house would be intolerable, she sought refuge in flight, and threw herself upon the protection of her aunt by marriage, whose devotion to the Church of Rome was a matter of common knowledge. Louise was not disappointed. Henrietta, to whom the conversion of any Protestant was a matter of real interest, and who must have felt a certain satisfaction in the secession to the enemy's camp of one of the children of the Queen of Bohemia, whose Protestantism had often in the past been unfavourably compared with her Catholicism, received the girl with motherly kindness, and bestowed her at Chaillot under the care of Mother de la Fayette. Louise soon expressed a desire to enter the religious life, and it was thought that she would take the veil in the convent which sheltered her; but Mother de la Fayette, with the good sense which distinguished her, objected to the profession of a Princess, whose birth would necessitate her election to a high office, to which perhaps her personal qualities would not entitle her. So the royal lady went on to the Cistercians, who had no such scruples, and who made her Abbess of Maubuisson, near Pontoise, where she lived in much repute to a green old age, and famed perhaps as well as her younger sister Sophia, whose steadfast Protestantism was rewarded by the reversion of the crown of the Three Kingdoms, and whose descendants sit to this day upon the throne which she missed by a few weeks.