Henrietta Maria

by Henrietta Haynes

The last years of Henrietta Maria's life were calm and peaceful, except for her ill-health. "I have never had a day free from pain for twenty years," she said shortly before her death to her friends at Chaillot. She had little to trouble her beyond the gentle sorrow of seeing those with whom she had been associated pass, one by one, to the silence of the grave. Her brother, the Duke of Orleans, ended his restless life in the year of the Restoration, leaving his title to his nephew, Henrietta's son-in-law. Cardinal Mazarin passed away in 1661, avaricious to the last, and counting with dying fingers the treasures to which his heart still clung. Four years later Queen Anne of Austria followed him, after an illness the infinitely pathetic record of which is to be found in the pages of Madame de Motteville. She was a great loss to her sister-in-law, the more so as Henrietta's faithful friend, the Abbé Montagu, was so high in her favour that it was feared he would succeed to the influence and position of Mazarin, and thus France be under a foreigner once more. The tie between these two was of no ordinary strength. Not only had Montagu been a friend and companion of the unforgotten Buckingham, but Anne never ceased to remember the service which he had rendered to her in the past. When he returned to France, after his long imprisonment, sobered by trouble, and so far from desiring the ecclesiastical honours on which his heart had once been set that he turned from them when offered, he became in some measure her spiritual adviser, a rôle for which he was well suited, as he knew probably better than any one else the secrets of the past. From his lips, at her own request, the dying Queen received the solemn intimation of the approach of death, and almost her last conscious words were addressed to him. "M. de Montagu knows how much I have to thank God for," she said, fixing her eyes on the Abbé as he knelt weeping beside her, words which both Madame de Motteville, who was present, and Montagu himself interpreted as bearing witness to Anne's innocence in the days when she compromised her reputation by vanity and coquetting.[427]

Henrietta's health, which had never recovered from the strain of the Civil War and the terrible experiences of her last confinement, became worse and worse; so that in December, 1668, she wrote to her son Charles that her remaining days would not be many. She suffered much from sleeplessness and fainting fits, and even the waters of Bourbon, which she had long been accustomed to drink every year, afforded her little relief. The thought of death had ever been to her, as to her accomplished friend Madame de Motteville, one of terror. She did not like even to speak of it. "It is better," she was wont to say, "to give one's attention to living well, and to hope for God's mercy in the last hour." But now that death was drawing near it lost something of its terror, and she said quite openly that she was going to Chaillot to die. "I shall think no more of doctors or medicine," she added, "but only of my soul." In this spirit she went out to her house at Colombes to spend there the golden days of a French autumn, until the feast of All Saints should call her to her convent. "The Queen-Mother is extreme ill, and seems to apprehend herself extremely,"[428] wrote Ralph Montagu, the English ambassador in Paris, on September 7th, 1669.

A few days later the end came. To the Queen's sleeplessness was added an aversion from all food, and at the request of the King of France, who was much attached to his aunt, a consultation of doctors was held, among whom the principal place was taken by Vallot, a man of great experience, who was first physician to the Crown of France, but who, nevertheless, was believed by some to have been negligent in his care of Queen Anne. He, thinking that Henrietta's great weakness came from her distressing insomnia, advised that she should take a grain of some sedative at night. The Queen, who had explained her symptoms with great clearness, objected the opinion of Sir Theodore Mayerne that such remedies were dangerous to her constitution, adding, laughing, that an old gipsy woman in England had once told her that she would never die except of a grain. Vallot listened respectfully, but he was unconvinced, so that his patient, feeling her reluctance to be foolish, agreed to follow his advice. The day wore on, and after a quiet evening with her ladies, Henrietta retired to bed as usual; but she did not feel very well, and it was suggested that she should not take the opiate. However, she could not sleep, and when her physician was called to her bedside she asked with some eagerness for the drug. He administered it in an egg, after which the Queen lay down again, to fall into a sleep which became deeper and deeper, until it passed into the last sleep of death.[429]

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With daybreak all was confusion at Colombes. Messengers hurried off to Paris to acquaint the King of France with the news of his aunt's death, and to S. Cloud to break the sad tidings to the Duchess of Orleans, who would be her mother's truest mourner. By some strange oversight or malice the English ambassador was left to hear the intelligence by chance. Ralph Montagu, who had a very poor opinion of the Earl of St. Albans, whose position as Lord Chamberlain to the late Queen gave him considerable power, believed that that nobleman had purposely kept him in ignorance, so that there should not be "left a silver spoon in the house."[430] In the interests of the King of England he hurried off to the King of France, who, in spite of the protests of the Earl, caused seals to be placed upon his aunt's property until it could be properly disposed of.

There was great mourning for Henrietta in France, not only because she was personally beloved, but because the King and the people saw in her not so much the widow of the King of England as the last surviving child of the much-loved Henry the Great. High and low vied with each other in their desire to do her honour, and Louis XIV expressed his wish that she should lie by her father in the royal Abbey of S. Denys, where he ordered that a splendid funeral service, following the precedent of that of his mother, should be celebrated at his expense. He immediately dispatched a lettre de cachet[431] to the Prior and monks of the house, ordering them to receive with all honour the body of the Queen of England.

Meanwhile at Colombes on a bed of state lay the corpse.[432] But that same evening, following the custom of the times, the heart was taken out, enclosed in a silver casket, and carried to its last resting-place at Chaillot. A sorrowful company escorted the precious relic, which was met at the door of the convent by the religious, each of whom held in her hand a lighted taper. Then in a set little speech the Abbé Montagu, as Grand Almoner to the late Queen, delivered it over to the Superior, commending it to the pious care of the community.

Two days after this mournful little ceremony the body was carried through the Porte S. Denys, along the road which Henrietta had traversed as a bride, to the royal abbey, where it was to rest. There, watched by faithful guardians, it lay in a chapel behind the choir for more than a month, until the 20th of November, when the funeral service was celebrated. The obsequies were a magnificent affair, comparable with the splendours of the long-ago wedding. In the great church hung with black, on a magnificent mausoleum supported by eight marble pillars and blazing with a quantity of lighted tapers, Henrietta, who, living, had known what it was to lack the necessaries of life, lay as a King's daughter in her death, and that the contrast might be the more complete, her body, which had long laid aside the trappings of royalty, was covered by a gorgeous pall "of gold brocade covered by silver brocade and edged with ermine." By the will of the King representatives of the sovereign bodies were present, while the mourners included princes and princesses and even one of higher rank, for Casimir, the ex-King of Poland, who had exchanged his crown for a monk's frock, had journeyed to do honour to the Queen of England from the great Abbey of S. Germain des Prés, where he was spending a peaceful old age, and where his tomb may be seen to this day. The attendance of clergy indeed was not large, but that was only because orders had been issued that the sovereign bodies should be saluted before the prelates, an insult which the pride of the Church could not stomach.

After a new and delightful rendering by the choir of the Dies Iræ, the Bishop of Amiens ascended the pulpit. Francis Faure was probably selected for this office partly because he had been a servant of the dead Queen in her early married life, and partly because she had taken pleasure in hearing him deliver the panegyric of S. Francis de Sales in the chapel of the convent of Chaillot on the occasion of the saint's canonization. It seems, however, that this "cordelier mitré", as Gui Patin calls him, was not very popular with Parisian audiences, for the discourse which he delivered at the funeral of Queen Anne was severely criticized, and his sermon on the Queen of England had no better reception. Nevertheless, it reads as the work of an honest and affectionate man earnestly striving, not always indeed with success, to avoid that flattery of the great of which the times were so tolerant, but which is peculiarly vain in connection with death, the great leveller. His text was, "Watch and pray"; and he dwelt with some sternness upon the awful suddenness of the Queen's end, of which the Chaillot nuns said sweetly that it was the mercy of God to save her from the apprehension of the death which she feared so much. The discourse[433] was long, and it was nearly four o'clock in the afternoon before the body of Henrietta Maria was lowered into the royal vault, to lie beside that of her father.

But the pious care of Louis did not end at S. Denys. Nearly a week later (November 25th) another service was celebrated in Paris itself, at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, as an additional mark of the King's respect for his aunt. The Duke and Duchess of Orleans were again the chief mourners, while this time the preacher was Father Senault, Superior of that Congregation of the Oratory from which the Queen, ever since her marriage, had chosen her confessors.[434] He was a preacher of repute, as well as a writer of distinction, and his discourse on this occasion met with the "marvellous success which attends all his actions."[435]