"Jamas muere un triste Quando convienne que muera."[370]
On the following day, however, she was sufficiently recovered to receive Madame de Motteville, who was setting out for S. Germain-en-Laye. The Queen asked her friend to come and kneel beside the bed on which she was lying, and then taking her hand she begged of her to carry a message to the Queen-Regent. "Tell my sister," said Henrietta, "to beware of irritating her people, unless" (with a flash of the Bourbon spirit) "she has the means of crushing them utterly." Then she turned her face to the wall and gave way once more to her uncontrollable sorrow. Only one thing could have increased her grief, and that was the knowledge, mercifully hidden from her, of the part which she had played in bringing her husband to his terrible doom.
It was but a few days later that she roused herself to go for a short visit to her friends, the Carmelite nuns in the Faubourg S. Jacques;[371] but there fresh agitation awaited her, for thither was brought the last tender letter which her husband had written for her consolation when he knew that he must die. As she read it grief once more overcame her and she sank fainting into the arms of two of the nuns who stood near; but she was stronger now than when she had met the first shock. Flinging herself on her knees before the crucifix which hung on the wall and raising her eyes and hands to heaven, she cried, "Lord, I will not complain, for it is Thou who hast permitted it." A similar courage upheld her in receiving indifferent acquaintance and uncongenial relatives who came to pay visits of condolence. Mademoiselle de Montpensier, indeed, considered that her aunt was less affected by her husband's death than she should have been, though she had the grace to add that it was probably self-respect and pride which forbade the widow to show the depth of her sorrow; this was undoubtedly the case. Henrietta might open her heart to dear friends such as Madame de Motteville or the Duchess of Vendôme, but she could not expose the sacredness of grief to the curious eyes of her niece, who not only had shown herself very indifferent to the charms of the Prince of Wales, on which, perhaps, Henrietta had descanted rather too frequently, but was inclined to regard the Queen of England's tales of the happiness and prosperity of her married life as somewhat highly coloured.
The execution of Charles I caused an unparalleled sensation throughout Europe, and indeed the world. Kings shivered on their thrones and despotic governments trembled. Sovereigns had indeed been murdered with a frequency which made such tragedies almost commonplace, but it was without precedent that a king should be put to death after a judicial trial by the hands of his own subjects. Even in far-away India a king who heard the news from the crew of an English ship replied that "if any man mentioned such a thing he should be put to death, or if he could not be found out, they should all dy for it."[372] In France the horror was specially felt, both on account of the close ties which bound together the two royal houses and because, owing to the unforgotten murder of Henry IV, regicide was a crime particularly odious to all good Frenchmen, who abhorred the views held on this subject by an advanced school of Catholicism. Moreover, the state of the country was such as to cause apprehension of a civil war similar to that which had caused the tragedy. "It is a blow which should make all kings tremble," said Queen Anne. Even the rebellious Frondeurs were shocked at the news. Many a gallant Frenchman would gladly have unsheathed the sword to avenge the murder of Charles Stuart, and many did take up the pen to exhort Christian princes to lay aside their differences and to turn their arms against the English murderers, which, of course, those potentates were not prepared to do, though they had a just appreciation of the offence offered to all kingship in this audacious act. Even the name of the much-loved Pucelle d'Orléans[373] was invoked in the cause, while a living lady, Dame Isabeau Bernard de Laynes, was so overcome by her feelings that she broke into verse, beginning—
"Hereux celui qui sur la terre Vengera du roi d'Angleterre La mort donnée injustement Par ses subjects, chose inouye, De lui avoir osté la vie Quel horrible dérèglement."[374]
Zealous Catholics shook their heads and said that now the real tendencies of the impious Reformation were appearing, which theme Bossuet developed with great effect when he came to preach Henrietta's funeral sermon;[375] others, more liberal-minded, contended that the two great religions of Rome and Geneva could live together very well, as was proved in France, but that the King of England had allowed all kinds of sects and sectaries, a course which clearly could only lead to disaster; the Sieur de Marsys, the French tutor of the young Princes of England, translated the story of the trial into French that all Frenchmen might read and ponder the monstrous document.[376] It was even said that the little Louis XIV, who was not yet eleven years old, took to heart in a way hardly to be expected the murder of his uncle, as if the child saw through the mists of the future another royal scaffold and the horrors of 1793.
Henrietta received plenty of sympathetic words and visits of condolence, but she received little else. It was believed that the condition to which Mazarin was reduced by the Frondeurs had emboldened the rebels in England to commit their last desperate act, but the instructions which the Cardinal penned to the French ambassador in London, before the fatal January 30th, show that his fear of the Spanish was a good deal stronger than his desire to help the King of England, and after the tragedy he only expressed polite regrets that France had not been able to follow the good example of Holland, which had protested against the regicide, and made a great favour of recalling the ambassador and refusing to recognize the republican agents in Paris. It was reserved for an old servant of Henrietta to show sympathy in a more practical manner. Du Perron, who at the request of the Queen of England had been translated to the See of Evreux, found himself detained by the Frondeurs, sorely against his will, in his own cathedral city. Ill, and wounded in his tenderest feelings by a compulsory semblance of disloyalty, he so took to heart the news of the terrible death of King Charles, to whom he was greatly attached, that he became rapidly worse and died in a few days.
The story of the heroic manner in which Charles met his terrible death wrung tears from many an eye in Paris. Henrietta, who had lived with him for twenty years, must have known that he would not fail in personal courage. After all, misfortune was no novelty to the House of Stuart. Charles' own grandmother had mounted the scaffold of Elizabeth, and of his remoter ancestors who sat upon the throne of Scotland few had escaped a violent death; when the moment came he was ready to fulfil the tragic destiny of his race. To his widow his royal courage was so much a matter of course that it brought her little consolation; but some real comfort she might have known could she have foreseen that such ready acceptance of his fate would not only blot out in the mind of his people the memory of his many failings, but would throw a glory over his name and career which has not completely faded even to the present day.
HENRY JERMYN, EARL OF ST. ALBANS
FROM AN ENGRAVING