Driving and walking became daily more fashionable at the Piccadilly end of Hyde Park. The gay and frivolous George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, was wont to trip along in all his frills and frippery, or sitting stately in his coach drawn by six horses, joking with King Charles, and urging the monarch to some fresh imprudence. Many looked darkly on the silly intercourse between these two men. Charles, clinging to the ambitions of his powerful minister, with the obstinacy of a weak and incapable nature, was far advanced on the way to the scaffold, when John Fenton,—mixing with the crowds assembled at Portsmouth to witness Buckingham’s departure for France,—stabbed the favourite to the heart.
Queen Henrietta Maria’s Penance at Tyburn beneath the “Triple Tree.”
From an old Print in the Crowle Collection, British Museum.
An incident of which much has been made, and which there is little reason to doubt was grossly exaggerated by the religious bigots of the time, associated Charles’s Queen, Henrietta Maria, with Hyde Park. The early years of his French marriage were certainly not happy, the meddling household of the Queen’s French attendants and Catholic priests being responsible for the luckless monarch’s domestic broils. His fierce hatred of their interference obtains expression in a letter to Buckingham, by virtue of which the lot were “sent packing.” It is addressed to his “faithful, constant, loving friend Steenie”:
“I command you to send all the French away to-morrow out of the towne, if you can by fair meanes (but stike not long in disputing), otherwise force them away, dryving them away lyke so manie wilde beasts, until ye have shipped them, and so the devil goe with them. Let me heare no answer, but of the performance of my command.”
Whatever his subsequent weakness, Charles I. was at least in early years of kingship a forceful letter-writer.
Shortly before this missive was dispatched, the King had been moved to intolerable anger by the accounts presented to him of the infamous treatment of his Queen by her Popish entourage. In the early summer of 1626, Henrietta had asked to spend a certain time in retirement and devotion. After a quiet day passed in the services of her church at the chapel in St. James’s Park, she turned into Hyde Park, directing her walk towards Tyburn, whether by intention or not remains unknown. In any case, it was quite probable that, especially impressed by her religious seclusion, she bethought herself of those who, not so many years before, had suffered as martyrs on that gruesome spot for the very religion she held so dear. She knelt to pray for them, and perhaps for strength to bear her own weary lot.
A week or two passed before the tale of her surreptitious visit to Tyburn reached the King. He was told that the Queen had been made to walk thither barefoot as a penance, and to offer up prayers for traitors who had ended their days on Tyburn gallows.
Whitelock’s Chronicle gives the Protestant version of the affair:
“Distastes and jealousies were raised about the Government of the Queen’s Family; wherein the King held himself traduced by some of her French servants, who said that the King had nothing to do with them, he being an Heretick.