Next morning they embarked at Gravesend, the king choosing to enter his capital by the grand highway of the Thames, that he might show his bride the stately shipping of his noble navy, which greeted the royal procession as it passed on its progress up the stream with thundering salutes, while the river was covered with thousands of boats and beautiful barges belonging to the nobility and merchants of London. A violent thunder-shower came on as the procession neared the landing-place at Whitehall; the queen, however, waved her hand repeatedly to the people. She was splendidly dressed; like the king, the colour she wore was green.
Even in the first days of his marriage, Charles I. saw strong reason to lament he had admitted the Roman Catholic colony with his young queen. His position was extremely difficult; he foresaw all its dangers, and came early to the resolution of neutralizing the worst features of the case. The queen was childish in years; her reason totally uncultivated; she was, moreover, alike ignorant of the language and history of the country. Her confessor and her bishop were probably not less bigoted than herself; and the king knew that their celebration of rites, of which they would abate not one jot, was the greatest offence in the eyes of his people. It was his ruin, as the natural good sense of Henrietta afterward acknowledged, in her confessions of passionate penitence to her friend, Madame de Motteville.
Charles I. found great cause to regret the establishment of his queen's Roman Catholic train of priests and attendants, besides other injurious stipulations in the marriage treaty his dying father's council had ratified. The queen was but an unreasoning girl of sixteen, entirely guided by the unusually large train she had about her. She would not learn English, and was encouraged by her French attendants to pay little regard to the customs and prejudices of the nation over which her consort reigned. Thus, she would not be crowned, February 2, 1626, lest she should join in the rites of the Church of England; she was the only Queen of England who ever refused her coronation; this deeply grieved her husband and incensed his people, who never forgave the offence, as she found afterward to her cost.
Charles was crowned solus. Henrietta viewed the coronation procession from the palace gate-way by King Street. Her French officials were accused of capering irreverently during the solemnity—as they were not in the abbey, that was no great crime; yet the next time Charles I. caught them capering he made it an excuse for a general clearance. He thus got rid of six ecclesiastics, many French ladies, especially of Madame St. George, who claimed the privilege of occupying a seat in the royal carriage wherever the king and queen went, to the great annoyance of Charles. Her place, as the queen's first lady, was filled by the Protestant Madame de la Tremouille. Only Pére Gamache and another very quiet humble priest were allowed for the service of his queen's chapel by Charles I. Such innovations enraged the young queen greatly; she threw herself into agonies of rage at the departure of her French attendants; and in her fury contrived to break the windows of the king's closet or private apartment at Whitehall, although he restrained her by keeping the casement shut, and holding both her wrists, because he forbade her to bid them farewell when they embarked at Whitehall stairs. The king did not send them empty away; 22,000l. was distributed among them; nevertheless, the French women of the royal bed-chamber carried off all the queen's clothes, as lawful perquisites, leaving, besides the dress she wore, only an old gown and three chemises—not good for much. The king tenderly soothed his afflicted consort, who seemed to be reconciled; but before the close of the year, 1626, she manifested such temper that Louis XIII. sent his father's old friend, the Duke de Bassompierre, as ambassador-extraordinary, to inquire into his sister's conjugal unhappiness.
Mischief had been made by the king's prime minister, the Duke of Buckingham, as plainly may be seen by the royal letters extant.[1] Since the times of Henry VIII. the boundaries of the royal parks of Whitehall and St. James had been decorated with gallows, and many of them loaded with human heads and quarters. In the first month of Henrietta's arrival in London, it was said that her priests had caused her to make a pilgrimage to the gallows where the last Roman Catholic priests had been put to death for their faith, that she went barefoot, and knelt there praying. Bassompierre, who talked until he lost his voice, and after great exertions, made out this accusation, which the young queen utterly denied. "She never was near the gallows," she said, "never at that time knew where it was, until lately when she was walking with the king in Hyde Park." A fine terminus to the evening walk of a fair young queen under eighteen! Another tale was embodied in council-minutes, "that the queen's priest had made her, for penance, eat off wooden trenchers." When Bassompierre asked her, "How about the wooden platters?" the queen disdained to reply.
[1] These letters of entertaining facts of Bassompierre's doings are to be found in the "Lives of the Queens of England," by Agnes Strickland.
Henrietta could not express herself in English, and Bassompierre, her countryman, who knew not one word of it, certainly argued her defence at a great disadvantage. However, he privately gave Henrietta the good advice to humble her high spirit to her husband, and endeavour to conciliate his friend. The perverse Henrietta then quarrelled with him, defied Buckingham, and behaved worse than ever to Charles. But the brave Frenchman, who had fought through the Huguenot wars by her heroic father's side, and had known her from her babyhood, of course looked upon her as on any other spoiled girl of seventeen. He soon told her his mind, and induced better behaviour. Finally he left the royal pair much better friends than he found them.
War soon after ensued between England and France. King Charles supported the independence of Holland, which Cardinal Richelieu had vainly tried to make him crush. He likewise fitted out a navy, and sent it to the relief of the French Protestants. It was under the command of Buckingham, no seaman, though brave enough. Of course the naval war was unsuccessful. Before another expedition sailed, Buckingham was assassinated at Portsmouth, August, 1628, by Felton the fanatic. And with him ceased all Henrietta's married infelicity.
The Parliament of Charles refused all supplies for the war in behalf of the Protestants, unless he consented to put to a death of torture every Catholic priest exercising the rights of his religion, and gave his veto for confiscating the property of all Roman Catholics in his realm. Charles was more tormented by the Roman Catholics than any man in his dominions, and they would have done all they could against him; yet he was too good in heart and spirit to authorize such wholesale robbery and murder. He thought the penal law already cruel enough, and perhaps he wished them to be put on the same footing as the great Henry, his queen's father, had left the French Protestants. From this period may be dated the disunion between king and Parliament. He ceased to summon it. If we may believe Sir William Temple, the chief agitators against Charles in the House of Commons were the bribed tools of his avowed enemy, the powerful and unscrupulous French minister, Cardinal Richelieu.
The queen had given birth to her first-born, a prince that died as soon as christened. She next brought into the world, May 29, 1630, another son, a fine babe, having the brown complexion and strong features of the Queen of Navarre, Henrietta's grandmother. The child was named Charles by Dr. Laud, in St. James's Chapel. It is amusing to read the young mother's opinion of the solemn ugliness of her first-born in the following letter, written by her to her dear friend, Madame St. George, then in France, and state governess of Henrietta's niece, Mademoiselle de Montpensier.