“He unfastened his cloak and took off the medallion of the order of the Garter. The latter he gave to Juxon, saying with emphasis, ‘Remember!’ Beneath the medallion of St. George was a secret spring which removed a plate ornamented with lilies, under which was a beautiful miniature of his Henrietta. The warning word, which has caused many historical surmises, evidently referred to the fact that he only had parted with the portrait of his beloved wife at the last moment of his existence. He then took off his coat and put on his cloak, and pointing to the block, said to the executioner: ‘Place it so that it will not shake.’ ‘It is firm, sir,’ replied the man. ‘I shall say a short prayer,’ said the king, ‘and when I hold out my hand thus, strike.’ The king stood in profound meditation, said a few words to himself, looked upward on the heavens, then knelt and laid his head on the block. In about a minute he stretched out his hands, and his head was severed at one blow.”
Sorrow.
News travelled slowly in the days of long ago; and the trial, death and burial of Charles I. were over long before intelligence of the dire happenings in England had been carried into France. Queen Henrietta Maria, then in the Louvre Palace, Paris, had just received into her motherly arms her second son, James, who had successfully passed through the belligerent lines and reached safety in Paris. This joy was soon dulled into woe.
Ominous whispers among the Louvre circle and pitying glances caused the queen to make inquiries. The worst was soon told. The queen had expected imprisonment, perhaps even deposition and exile, but death, the official beheading of an English sovereign—had not once entered into her mind as among the possibilities. The queen sat silent and tearless among her sympathizing English attendants. Pere Gamache approached. She received him apathetically. Her aunt, the Duchess de Vendome, took her hand and held it caressingly—but the Queen seemed in a state of frozen woe; no moan, no sigh, no tear. Pere Gamache withdrew unobserved and searching through the royal chambers he found the little Princess Henriette, the four-year-old idol of the once happy Stuart home. Leading the child gently by the hand, he returned to the scene of grief.
At the touch of baby hands, the impress of childish kisses, the unhappy Queen seemed slowly to come back to life even as it was, and clasping her little daughter in rapturous tenderness to her breast she wept. Long and wildly she wept and the frightened child weeping responsively and clinging helplessly to her bosom saved her at last to sanity and to heroic endurance.
Tennyson has beautifully expressed this power of childish love and helplessness to save a mother from despair:
Home they brought her warrior dead;
She nor swoon’d, nor utter’d cry,
All her maidens, watching said,
“She must weep or she will die.”