On 2nd November King Charles came up by water from Gravesend,[[130]] escorting, with all due respect, “Mary the Queen Mother.” Henrietta, it must be remembered, was always known in England in her own time as Queen Mary.
[130]. “Side-lights on the Stuarts.” Inderwick.
HENRIETTA MARIA, “MOTHER QUEEN”
In the grey November weather the banks of the Thames were not at their best, neither were the feelings of the exiled Queen, who was coming home at last. She too was changed. The short-lived beauty of expression and grace and vivacity had long fled, and it was a “little plain old woman” who sat on the deck of the royal barge, and gazed at scenes once familiar through a mist of tears. So she came back, an honoured guest indeed, but with all the wine of life drained to the lees, to a country which had dealt her the heaviest blows a woman could endure, in the past. She was coming, too, with a heart full of bitter wrath against the upstart who had forced herself, so she considered, into the circle of royalty. The Queen’s extreme anger, it may be noted, was, in her case, in some degree inconsistent, seeing that at one time she had contemplated a match between her elder son, the King of England (at that time if not de facto at least de jure), and one of Mazarin’s nieces, that bevy of lovely Mancini sisters, whose beauty was so famous in their day, for they, we are told, “sprang from the dregs of the people.”[[131]] Otherwise no one can wonder at the indignation of the haughty Bourbon princess, the daughter, on one side at any rate, of a line of kings (and even of the proud Hapsburg blood, through the once despised Medici ancestry); and she came now, as she said, “to prevent with her authority so great a stain and dishonour to the Crown,” by hindering her son James at all costs from publicly recognising his marriage.[[132]] Indeed her anger knew no bounds, and all her old prejudices against Anne’s father had awakened once more, adding fuel to the fire. At the moment, too, the Duke of York played into his mother’s hands, for he was then, as it were, reeling from the frightful blow of Berkeley’s base accusations, and only ready in his despair to repudiate alike his wife and child.
[131]. “Lives of the Queens of England.” Agnes Strickland.
[132]. “Life of Henrietta Maria,” J. A. Taylor; “Princesses and Court Ladies,” Arvède Barine.
There was also, it appears, a general opinion that the whole business spelt disaster to the Chancellor.
On 6th November, just after the Queen’s arrival therefore, Pepys notes that “Mr Chetwind told me that he did fear that the late business of the Duke of York’s would prove fatal to my Lord Chancellor,”[[133]] and the latter in his own History avers that he “looked upon himself as a ruined person,” and says bitterly that previous to this the Duke’s manner to him “had never anything of grace in it.”[[134]] Meanwhile Mary, Princess of Orange, had also come to England, and was adding her voice to the chorus of indignant reprobation. She could not for a moment think, so she said, “of yielding precedence to one whom she had honoured over much by admitting her into her service as maid of honour.”
[133]. “Diary.” 6th Nov. 1660.