Henrietta Maria

by Henrietta Haynes

SIR KENELM DIGBY
FROM AN ENGRAVING AFTER THE PAINTING BY VAN DYCK

And Naseby was more than a military defeat. On that fatal field, through some misfortune or negligence, fell into the enemy's hand the papers of the King.[332] Nothing more unfortunate could have occurred. The secrecy of these letters, which were shortly published in London with choice comments, was worth more to Charles and Henrietta than men or money. Their publication betrayed the schemes in which the Queen had been spending her strength for winning back England by foreign troops or by foreign gold. It revealed how greatly the King was under the influence of his wife, and how deeply she was compromised with the hated Irish. Most disastrous of all, it showed how at the very time that he was promising to support the Protestant religion and never to permit Catholicism, he was secretly giving her authority to pledge his word for the complete toleration of the hated religion. He stood revealed as what he was, a shifty and untrustworthy man. After Naseby Charles was never trusted again.

Henrietta probably did not appreciate the magnitude of the disaster, and she turned again cheerfully to the tortuous intrigues from which she hoped so much.

At first it seemed as if Sir Kenelm Digby's mission would be successful. The smaller Italian princes to whom he appealed he found indeed "a frugal generation," but the Pope received him with great kindness, and appeared charmed by his flow of persuasive eloquence and by the piety and fascination of his manners. He even gave him an order for 20,000 crowns, to be used in arms and munitions of war, which the Queen of England gratefully acknowledged from S. Germain in September, 1645.[333] So far so good, but neither she nor her agent knew the odds against which they were fighting. Henrietta always believed that her husband's leniency to the Catholics during his years of power had given him a claim upon the gratitude of the whole Catholic world. She also knew better than any one else what the hatred of the Puritans to her co-religionists really was, and what their domination might mean. But at Rome matters were looked at in another light. A certain interest was taken in Charles, and considerable sympathy was felt for his unhappy wife; but neither were trusted. Henrietta was believed to be guided by heretics, and even, through their influence, to have been in the past "a powerful instrument for the destruction of the Catholics and of the Catholic religion";[334] while Charles was disliked as a heretic, and his failures to keep his word—his persecution of the Catholics in 1626, his desertion of Strafford and the like—were reckoned up against him with pitiless accuracy. As he had been in the past so no doubt would he be in the future. It cannot be said that it was a misreading of Charles' character which led the Pope and his advisers to think that he would have taken the money of the Church and then thrown over the Catholics, if by doing so he could further his own interests. And there were other and better claimants in the case. Hopes at Rome were rising high with regard to Ireland. Urban VIII, in 1628, had thought it would be a nice arrangement for all concerned if that island were handed over to the Holy See. Innocent X's designs were not quite so far-reaching, and he recommended loyalty to the King of England; but he thought that it might be possible to coerce a faithless and heretic Prince by means of the Confederate Catholics. Moreover, that body, which had agents all over Europe, was fortunate enough to have in Rome a representative as able and effective as Sir Kenelm Digby was the reverse, in the person of Father Luke Wadding, of the Order of St. Francis. This friar left Ireland when he was a boy of fifteen, and he never saw again his native land; but throughout a long life which he spent roaming about the Continent he preserved a fervid Hibernian patriotism, of which the effects are felt to the present day.[335] At this time he was living in Rome, and any slight feeling of loyalty to the King of England which he may have once possessed had long ago been lost in the desire to see his faith and his race triumph over the hated oppressor. It was he who had prevailed upon Cardinal Francesco Barberini to send money to Ireland, and though he had not been able to rouse the cautious Urban VIII to any considerable effort,[336] he prepared with undiminished hope to use all his influence to win over Innocent X, from whose Spanish sympathies he augured the happiest results.

And indeed it was largely owing to the representations of this Irish friar that, in the summer of 1645, while Sir Kenelm Digby was still fêted in Rome, an envoy on his way from the Pope to the Confederate Catholics appeared in Paris bearing a large sum of money, which the indefatigable Wadding had amassed for the use of the faithful in his native land.

Giovanni Battista Rinuccini, Archbishop of Fermo, was a worthy ecclesiastic of middle age. It is said that he was appointed to this delicate mission to pleasure the Grand Duke of Tuscany, whose subject he was. He had, however, a certain interest in the British Isles, because as a young man he had been associated with a Scotch Capuchin, by name George Leslie, of whom he wrote an edifying biography, which may be considered an early example of religious romance.[337] Clarendon stigmatizes him as a "light-headed envoy," but the epithet is hardly happy as applied to this stern, unbending Churchman, whose unalterable determination it was that the money of the Church should not be squandered to further the interests of a heretic sovereign. In this respect, indeed, he followed with fidelity the instructions given to him which dwelt upon the necessity of the strongest guarantees of real benefit to the Catholics before money was advanced to the King of England, and which altogether would have been instructive, if not pleasant, reading for Charles and Henrietta.

The Queen was indeed already beginning to repent of her overtures to the Confederate Catholics,[338] for in the early part of the year some letters of O'Hartegan had fallen into the hands of the Roundheads, who caused them to be printed. These letters spoke disrespectfully of her, and showed how cheaply the Jesuit held the advantage of the King, so that Charles, who was wont to feel great indignation at every one's self-seeking and shiftiness except his own, wrote to his wife that the agent was "an arrant knave."[339] Rinuccini's arrival in Paris made matters worse. Henrietta was a Catholic, but she was a queen also, and it was an insult to which she could not tamely submit that the Pope should send an envoy to those who, after all, were rebels in arms against her husband. She wrote a dignified letter of remonstrance to Innocent, and she refused to receive Rinuccini except as a private person, a condition which the ambassador, one of whose strongest characteristics was his personal vanity, declined to accept.

The poor Queen was indeed in a mesh from which there was no escape, and she knew not how to carry out the task of so settling the affairs of Ireland that the King might be able to draw troops therefrom. She desired to make peace between Ormonde, her husband's Viceroy, and the Catholics, and her difficulties were such as attend all persons who, being in authority, are obliged to seek at one and the same time the help of representatives of opposing interests. Rinuccini, seeing her under the influence of Protestants, concluded, not unjustly on his own premises, that the duty of the Holy Father was to turn a deaf ear to her entreaties for aid, and to send such moneys as he could afford to the Confederate Catholics, whose loyalty to the Holy See was not compromised by any inconvenient devotion to a heretic Prince. Out in Rome Sir Kenelm was begging and praying for help, unconscious of the fact that the envoy was warning the Pope against him, and asserting, probably with some truth, that the rosy pictures which he drew of the intentions of the King of England with regard to the Catholics were greatly over-coloured. The Confederate Catholics in Ireland were waiting eagerly for the coming of Rinuccini, and had little desire to help the King of England, except in so far as such help would conduce to the realization of their chief object, the emancipation of Ireland from the hated foreigner.