“What would you do?”
“Give your island churls a taste of kingship, as we know it in France. My brother wouldn’t let his subjects so beard him. Oh, it’s abominable!”
“Ah, chère; for subjects your brother has a very different sort of people to deal with. In France they’re not yet come to clamouring for what they call their rights and liberties. Here in England they’ve got Magna Charta into their heads—to a craze.”
“I’d have it out of their heads, or have their heads off. Ciel! I’d reign King as King should, or resign. No! not resign. Sooner than that I’d waste the country with fire and sword—make it a wilderness.”
It was Henrietta, wife of Charles the First, who thus expressed herself to her husband. They were alone in the gardens of Whitehall Palace, sauntering side by side on a terrace overlooking the Thames, the afternoon being an unusually fine one. As they made a turn which brought Westminster Hall before their eyes, the angry fire in those of the Queen flashed up again, and she added—
“Anything but be dictated to by that canaille of a Parliament! Anything but let them go on as now?”
“How am I to hinder it, Henriette?” the King timidly interrogated.
“Dismiss—send them packing back to their constituencies, and let them prate away there as much as they please. Dissolve and do without them, as you’ve done before.”
“That would be to do without the money we so much need. My subjects are determined to resist every tax levied under Privy Seal or otherwise. I can no longer raise loan or sell monopoly. Your own secretary, Sir John Wintour, has just been telling me how the people of Dean Forest have been harassing him about the grant we gave him of its timber and mines. Impossible now to obtain the most insignificant supplies without their being sanctioned by this cabal called Parliament.”
“Then make the cabal sanction them.”