OLD SOMERSET HOUSE
FROM AN ENGRAVING AFTER AN ANCIENT PAINTING IN DULWICH COLLEGE
But the society of friends of her own sex was only one among the many joys which were Henrietta's during the happy years which elapsed between the troubles of her youth and the storm of the Civil War. For a few months after the departure of the French her husband seems to have kept her short of money,[75] but in 1627 she enjoyed the income of £18,000, which was guaranteed to her by the terms of her marriage contract. Moreover, large grants of manors and lands were made to her. Thus came into her possession the park of East Greenwich, whither she was wont to retire when she wished for country air and quiet, and yet could not be far from town; thus she acquired Oatlands in Surrey, the pleasant country-house of which nothing now remains, where she spent many happy days with her friends and children; thus she was able to call her own Somerset or Denmark House, her much-loved and beautiful London home which stood with other noblemen's houses facing the Strand, while behind lovely pleasure gardens sloped down to the still silver Thames. None of her other houses, probably, was as dear to her as this, where she kept an establishment befitting her rank as Queen-Consort, and where she frequently gave entertainments which reflected the taste and grace of their hostess, and to which she had the pleasure of inviting her husband, the King.
Henrietta was not a lady of literary tastes, and in spite of the fact that the Scotch poet, Sir Robert Ayton, was her private secretary, her patronage of general literature was confined to smiling on poets, such as Edmund Waller, who presented her with copies of complimentary verses, and to receiving the dedication of devotional works, usually translated from foreign originals. But to the drama she was devoted, and she specially liked the pretty and fashionable plays known as masques, of which the veteran laureate, Ben Jonson, wrote a number, and of which a younger poet, John Milton, produced in Comus, the most famous example. Henrietta was delighted with the great pageant and masque offered to their Majesties by the Inns of Court in 1633,[76] and even the grave Laud, when he entertained royalty at Oxford in 1638, provided a play, Cartwright's Royal Slave, for the amusement of his guests. But the Queen's pleasure was not only as a spectator. As a child she had been accustomed to take her part in private theatricals acted in the spacious salons of the Luxembourg, where Rubens' voluptuous women looked down upon the royal actresses. She brought the taste for these amusements with her to England. The first Christmas after her marriage she and her ladies acted a French pastoral at Somerset House, in which she took the leading part. "It would have been thought a strange sight once,"[77] commented sourly her new subjects.
But she was not to be deterred from her pleasures. She was always too careless of public opinion, and, as an acute and sympathetic observer remarked somewhat later, she was a true Bourbon in her love of amusement. To a lady whose dancing was something quite unusual, and whose sweet voice and skill in touching the lute testified to real musical taste, dramatic representations were naturally attractive. Her second English Christmas was enlivened by a masque, in which, as her French attendants were gone by this time, she had the assistance of her English friends. Her own band of players was always ready, and played for her amusement, now at Hampton Court, now at Somerset House, and it was owing to her influence and patronage that theatres increased to such an extent in the capital that the Puritan feeling of the City was aroused, which produced an order in Council "for the restraint of the inordinate use and company of playhouse and players." The playgoers were to content themselves with two theatres, of which one was to be in Middlesex and the other across the river in Surrey, while no plays were to be acted on Sunday, in Lent, or in times of common infection.
But the merrymakings of the Court became more instead of less as the years went on. In 1631 the Queen was so taken up with her Shrovetide play that she had no thoughts to spare for important news which came from France, and the next year she took the principal part in an elaborate play, The Shepherd's Paradise, which was written for her by Walter Montagu, who added to his fine manners and diplomatic skill some pretensions (if nothing more) to literature. This play, which is of the allegorical type so dear to the heart of the seventeenth century, is indeed a very poor one, and hardly contains a line which rises above the level of an indifferent verse-maker. It is, moreover, fatiguingly long, and the Queen must have found her part a great labour to learn, specially as, notwithstanding her seven years' residence in England, she was not yet perfect in the English tongue, and indeed was acting partly in order to improve herself in this necessary accomplishment.[78] Her companions in the play were her ladies, for not a man was admitted even to take the male parts. But in spite of difficulties, when the night of the representation came, everything went off merrily at Somerset House; all acted with great spirit, and the Queen was able to speak with playful conviction the oath of the new queendom to which she had been elected:—
"By beauty, Innocence, and all that's faire I, Bellesa, as a Queen do sweare, To keep the honour and the regall due Without exacting anything that's new, And to assume no more to me than must Give me the meanes and power to be just, And but for charity and mercies cause Reserve no power to suspend the Lawes. This do I vow even as I hope to rise From this into another Paradise."[79]
The author of these lines was in high favour, not only with the Queen, but with the King, who went out of his way to congratulate his father, the Earl of Manchester, on such a son. This approval more than compensated for the castigation of the pastoral by another poet, whose verses, unlike Montagu's, still retain power to charm:—
"Wat Montague now stood forth to his trial, And did not so much as suspect a denial; But witty Apollo ask'd him first of all If he understood his own Pastoral.