“The Queen was brought to insist upon it, as part of the Articles, that she should name all her servants, and some unkindness arose upon it. The King was also distasted, that her Priests made the Queen to walk to Tyburn on Penance.
“Upon these Passages the King dismist, and sent back into France all the Queen’s French Retinue, acquainting the French King with it, and excusing it to him; but it was ill resented in France, and by them held contrary to the Articles of Marriage.”
That this was the account generally accredited and sedulously fostered by the anti-Romish party in the State, is further shown by a letter preserved in the Harleian MSS., written by Mr. John Pory, a well-known public man, who had been a Member of Parliament in 1610. After relating the dismissal of the servants and priests, he says:
“No longer agon then upon St. James his day last, those hippocritical dogges made the pore Queen to walke afoot (some add barefoot) from her house at St. James to the gallowes at Tyborne, thereby to honor the Saint of the day in visiting that holy place, where so many Martyrs (forsooth) had shed their blood in defense of the Catholic cause. Had they not also made her to dable in the durte in a foul morning from Somersett House to St. James, her Luciferian Confessor riding allong by her in his Coach! Yea, they have made her to go barefoot, to spin, to eat her meat out of tryne dishes (wooden dishes), to waite at the table and serve her servants, with many other ridiculous and absurd penances.”
There is a picture of the Queen’s penance, of which a reproduction is here given. The Queen is seen kneeling by the triangular scaffold, whither she has been accompanied by her Father Confessor—presumably a Cardinal—in his coach and six.
Of the “triple tree” itself, its origin and use, there is much to be said in later chapters on Tyburn.
Strangely enough, when, in 1628, Charles I. raised the jointure of Henrietta Maria to £28,000, one of the manors assigned to her to produce the additional £6000 was that of Hyde.
As already said, the Park first became under Charles I. the fashionable society rendezvous. Its greatest attraction, maybe, was the racing in the Ring. The occasions, when organised meetings took place, were special scenes of gaiety, and were evidently thought important events, as even among the State Papers there is preserved the agreement for a race that took place there. Though admitting the public so freely, and himself mixing among them, Charles still looked upon the Royal Park as a personal possession, and exercised his full authority within it. It was on one of these occasions that the King, seeing a licentious Berkshire squire among the company, peremptorily ordered him out of its confines, speaking of him to the courtiers as an “ugly rascal.” This expression the squire overheard. He went away quietly; but vowed vengeance, and gradually embittered the whole of his county against the King. He had, indeed, his revenge, for writ large on Charles I.’s death-warrant was the name of the “ugly rascal.”
In the tumultuous years with which the reign closed, Hyde Park saw other scenes. There the Parliamentary troops mustered in stern array; there Essex lay waiting with a small force the threatened attack on London by King Charles, who was expected to march from Oxford to seize the capital. There came band after band of sturdy patriots to join the Roundhead army, and General Lambert added his men to those of his chief. Raw recruits were drilled into the celebrated train-bands, and in Hyde Park Cromwell reviewed his invincible Ironsides, his own particular force whom he had especially trained to meet the cavalry attacks of Prince Rupert.