CHAPTER X
THE QUEEN OF THE EXILES
Rememberance sat as portress of this gate. William Browne
It was the beginning of the year 1649. France, which four years earlier had seemed so secure a refuge, was itself torn by civil war. The day of Barricades had come and gone; Paris was in the hands of the Frondeurs, deserted by Queen Anne and by the little King who had retired for safety to S. Germain-en-Laye: Mazarin seemed to the full as unpopular as even Strafford had been.
Within the city, in the palace of the Louvre, the Queen of England yet lingered; she would gladly have escaped to her relatives at S. Germain, but when she attempted to do so she was stopped at the end of the Tuileries Gardens. However, she had little fear; she knew that she was popular with the people, who preferred her sprightly ways to those of the dévote Spanish Queen, who thought of nothing but convents and monks, and she was content to wait upon events. It is true she was exceedingly uncomfortable; little by little the seemly establishment she had kept up in the early days of the exile had dwindled as she strained every nerve to send supplies to her husband, but she had never known need until now, when for six months her allowance from the King of France had not been paid. However, one day, when in the bitter cold of January she could not even afford a fire, she received a visit from the Coadjutor Bishop, who was a man of great importance among the Frondeurs. Little Princess Henrietta, who had been smuggled over to France in 1646 and who was now about four years old, was lying in bed. "You see," said the Queen, indicating the little girl and speaking with her usual cheerfulness, "the poor child cannot get up, as I have no means of keeping her warm." De Retz, in spite of his leanings to liberalism, was so shocked that a daughter of England and still more a granddaughter of Henry the Great should be in such a plight, that he prevailed upon the Parliament to send a considerable sum of money to the Queen of England.
It was never the physical accidents of life that weighed upon Henrietta—these she could bear so lightly as to shame her attendants into a like courage; but there was worse than cold or privation, worse even than the fear lest her native land might be rushing to the same fate as had overwhelmed the land of her adoption.[367] The real misery was the anxiety which was gnawing at her heart for her children, and above all for her husband. During the day she was able in some degree to divert her mind from it, but in the silent watches of the night it overwhelmed her.
She had begged and entreated the French Government to intervene between Charles and the foes in whose hands he was; but after her long experience of Mazarin she was not surprised at the ineffectual character of such intervention as the French ambassador gave. In Paris people were too much taken up with their own troubles "to take much notice" or to "care much of what may happen to the King of England."[368] Lower and lower sank the Queen's hopes, until at last all that she desired was to be at her husband's side to uphold him in his trouble. Laying aside in her great love the pride which prompted her to ask nothing from her enemies, she wrote to both Houses of Parliament asking for a safe conduct to England. Even this sorry comfort was denied her: her letters, the purport of which was known, were left unopened, to be found in that condition more than thirty years later among the State Papers.
In Paris the days dragged on. The city was so blockaded it was almost impossible for letters to enter it. There was great uncertainty as to the fate of the King of England, but sinister rumours, which probably came by way of Holland, began to be rife. One day Lord Jermyn presented himself before Henrietta and told her that her husband had been condemned to death and taken out to execution, but that the people had risen and saved him. Thus did the faithful servant attempt to prepare the Queen; and even over this shadow of the merciless truth she wept in recounting it to her friends.
But at last concealment was impossible. Father Cyprien was at this time in attendance on the Queen, and one evening as he was leaving her dining-room at the supper hour he was stopped at the door and asked to remain, as she would have need of his consolation and support. His wondering looks were answered by a brief statement of the fate of the King of England, at which the old man shuddered all over as the messenger passed on. Henrietta was talking cheerfully with such friends as the state of Paris permitted to gather round her, but she was awaiting anxiously the return of a gentleman whom she had sent to S. Germain-en-Laye. Jermyn (for it was he who had taken upon himself the task of breaking the hard news) said a few words intended to prepare her; she, with her usual quickness of perception, soon saw that something was wrong, and preferring certainty to suspense begged him to tell her plainly what had happened. With many circumlocutions he replied, until at last the fatal news was told.
"Curae leves loquuntur, graves stupent," is the comment of Father Cyprien, the spectator of this scene. Henrietta was utterly crushed by so awful a blow, which deprived her, by no ordinary visitation, but in so unheard-of and terrible manner, of him who had been at once "a husband, a friend, and a king"; she sank down in what was not so much a faint as a paralysis of all power and of all sensation except that of grief; she neither moved nor spoke nor wept, and so long did this unnatural state continue that her attendants became alarmed, and, in their fear, sent for the Duchess of Vendôme,[369] a sweet and charitable lady whose whole life was devoted to doing good and of whom the Queen was particularly fond; she, by her tears and her gentle sympathy, was able to bring Henrietta to a more normal condition in which tears relieved her overcharged heart. All the next day she remained invisible, weeping over the horror which to her at least was unexpected, for she had never believed until the last that the English people would permit such an outrage, and recalling, with bursts of uncontrollable grief, the happy days she had spent with the husband who had been her lover to the end. "I wonder I did not die of grief," she said afterwards, and indeed, at first, death seemed the only thing left to be desired, but