Henrietta landed in France in the spring of 1644, and from that time until her husband's death her life was a continuation of that which she had led in Holland, namely, a perpetual struggle to gather together men and money—particularly the latter—to help on the cause of the King of England. For this she intrigued now with one foreign Prince, now with another, with the King of Denmark, with the Prince of Orange, with the Duke of Lorraine, the admirer of Madame de Chevreuse, the old enemy of Richelieu, with the Pope himself. The result was the undying hatred of a large section of the English people towards both her and her husband, and a growing distrust which had much to do with the King's final overthrow.
It is idle to blame her overmuch. It cannot be denied that hers were the mind and the will which impelled her husband along this fatal road; but he fell in gladly with her suggestions, and he was almost as eager as she for help from any quarter. She believed, moreover, that the Scotch rebels had set the example by intriguing with Richelieu, and she knew that the English Puritans had made it possible for an army of Scots, who at that time were looked upon almost as foreigners, to enter into England and to remain upon its soil. It would have required the brain of an Elizabeth to perceive that a king, by following such precedents, was courting disaster. Henrietta's brain, acute, lively, but never profound, was incapable of perceiving this. Besides, she was a Bourbon, and her simple political creed was identical with that of her husband: a King should be no tyrant, he should rule his people with justice and mercy; but it was his to command and theirs to obey, without asking questions as to matters with which they had no concern.
The exiled Queen spent some weeks at
"ces admirables Fontaines Où par douzaines et centaines Pluzieurs gens vont pour être sain Et qu'on nomme Bourbon-les-Bains."[308]
Their healing influence, together with the care of some of the most distinguished physicians of France,[309] restored her to such a small measure of health as enabled her to turn her steps towards Paris. The kindness she had received since her arrival in her native land was a preparation for the magnificent reception which awaited her at the capital. Her brother, the Duke of Orleans, came out as far as Bourg la Reine to meet her, and was quickly followed by his daughter, Mademoiselle de Montpensier, the richly dowered girl of whom Henrietta was already beginning to think as a possible bride for her eldest son. At Montrouge, on the southern outskirts of the city, the Queen of England received an even more distinguished attention, for there the Queen of France, accompanied by her two little sons, met her. Anne's kind heart was touched when she saw the sister-in-law from whom she had parted nearly twenty years earlier as a bride returning sad, sick almost to death, and bereft by ill-health and sorrow of the brilliant beauty which had then been hers. Forgetting the girlish unkindness which Henrietta had shown her in the past, remembering nothing but their common friends and enemies—Richelieu, Madame de Chevreuse, Jars, Montagu—the Queen of France took the Queen of England into her arms, and the two women clung together weeping and embracing. Then they climbed up into the royal coach, and Henrietta made the acquaintance of the little King, whose unexpected appearance in the world six years earlier had caused so much excitement, and of the still younger Duke of Anjou, "the real Monsieur" (as he was called in contradistinction to his uncle), who was one day to be her son-in-law. In such company there can have been no tedium in the long drive through the Rue S. Jacques, over the Pont Neuf, and through the Rue S. Honoré to the Louvre, where the kindness of Queen Anne had caused apartments to be prepared for the royal guest. That afternoon deputations from the city of Paris and from the various sovereign bodies waited upon Henrietta, and the ceremonies of reception were concluded a few days later by a State visit to Notre-Dame, where the Queen of England gave thanks to Heaven for her safe return to France through the ministry of the young Coadjutor Bishop of Paris, the witty and dissolute churchman who afterwards became famous as Cardinal de Retz, and who always retained a kindness for the exiled royal family of England.
Nothing could exceed the kindness and sympathy which were shown to the Queen, kindness all the more welcome because she was aware of the annoyance it would cause to her enemies. "I am so well treated everywhere that if my lords of London saw it, I think it would make them uneasy,"[310] she had written to her husband shortly after her landing in France. She was assigned a pension of 10,000 crowns a month, which enabled her to keep up a fitting establishment, and in addition to her lodgings at the Louvre she was given the Chàteau of S. Germain-en-Laye, where she had played as a child, and where, half a century later, her son was to wear out a more desolate exile. Her own affairs prospered. Her health improved surely if slowly. She had the comfort of the presence of faithful servants—Jermyn, who acted as her secretary, Henry Percy and Lady Denbigh, who herself had tasted the full bitterness of civil strife in the death of her husband, who fell fighting for the King, and in the defection of her eldest son to the rebels, which sorrows bound her all the more closely to the Queen, who had shown the tenderest sympathy with her bereavement. Moreover, in Paris Henrietta found many friends. Familiar faces, indeed, were missed. The Bishop of Mende had not been given time to learn wisdom by experience, but had "made an angelical end" at the siege of Rochelle, dying in the same year as his enemy Buckingham. Madame S. Georges, who had found an honourable position as governess to the heiress of Montpensier, had passed away in 1643, and Louis XIII was gone, so that all his sister could do for him was to journey to S. Denys and to sprinkle his tomb with holy water. But old servants, such as the Bishop of Angoulême, were there to welcome her; and in the brilliant Paris of the day she came across not only friends of the past—M. de Chateauneuf, the Chevalier de Jars, and others—but new acquaintances, who soon became friends, of whom perhaps the most interesting was the accomplished Madame de Motteville, herself one of the band of exiles whom the death of Richelieu had brought back in triumph to the Court of France.
Nor did she fail to attract the exiles of England to her own Court, where she gathered round her some of the men of wit and learning whom the evil times had forced to quit their native land. Thither came "Master Richard Crashaw, Master of Arts of Peterhouse, Cambridge, well known for his excellent poems,"[311] who was introduced to the Queen's notice by a brother poet, Abraham Cowley, at this time Jermyn's secretary. It can hardly be supposed that Henrietta understood the highly difficult poems of the Cambridge mystic, but perhaps she talked with him of S. Teresa,[312] whose praise inspired some of his choicest work, and whom she herself had learned to love as a child among the Carmelites in Paris. Moreover, Crashaw was interesting as a recent convert to Catholicism. "Being a meer scholar and very shiftless,"[313] he was quite destitute in the French capital when he was found by Cowley, and he was delighted to accept Henrietta's hospitality. He dwelt nearly a year at her Court, making many friends by his talents and virtues, of whom the chief was Lady Denbigh. Her he exhorted, not without success, to follow his religious example, and to her he dedicated his book of poems, Carmen Deo Nostro, which was published after he had passed on to the Court of Rome, bearing a letter of introduction written to Innocent X by the Queen's own hand.[314] To the exiled Court of England came also another poet, Sir William D'Avenant, whose welcome was the warmer because he had been concerned in the army plot. At the Louvre he wrote the dreary verses of Gondibert, and dedicated them to Thomas Hobbes, that daring philosopher who had likewise found a refuge in Paris, where, apart from the turmoils of England, he was able to reflect upon those principles of government wherewith he startled the world a few years later on the publication of The Leviathan. To these literary refugees must be added English Catholic nobles, such as Lord Montagu, and ladies of the same persuasion, among whom was prominent the Dowager Countess of Banbury, a lady who, after a not irreproachable career in England, had settled down in Paris to enjoy the reputation of a rich dévote.
But no social pleasures and attentions could satisfy Henrietta, whose heart was with her struggling husband. "There is nothing so certain as that I do take all pains I can imaginable to procure you assistance, and am as incapable of taking any delight or being pleased with my being here, though I have all kinds of contentments, but as I hope it may enable me to send you help."[315] These words, written to the King on November 18th, 1644, were no idle sentiment; they are the truest epitome of her life in Paris.
The royal cause was balancing between hope and fear. The defeat of Marston Moor, on July 2nd, 1644, had been indeed a terrible blow, but new hope was infused into the party by the surrender of Essex in Cornwall, a victory peculiarly grateful to the Queen, who could not forget the Earl's ungallant conduct to her. The great need was men and money, and to procure these was the end of Henrietta's unremitting efforts. For this she carried on negotiations with the Prince of Orange, by means of an English Catholic named Stephen Goffe, for the marriage of Prince Charles with his daughter; for this she attempted to mortgage the tin mines of Cornwall; for this, above all, she carried on personally and through Jermyn long and weary negotiations with the Court of France.