The cavaliers of Yorkshire and Lancashire poured in to swell her forces. Prince Rupert met her at the head of his victorious cavalry; and she was welcomed by her king on his own victorious field of Keinton, near Edgehill.
For a few months the beautiful city of Oxford was the seat of the English court, over which Queen Henrietta presided. Hope existed among the cavaliers that the discontents of the people would be finally silenced by force of arms. The queen afterward reproached herself that she was too much flushed with success to plead with earnestness for the peace which the whole people now desired. Her triumphs had been dearly bought; chronic rheumatic fever had seized on her delicate frame, owing to the hardships of her campaign. The king's fortunes changed; the year 1644 opened disastrously, and the poor queen had to seek a safer shelter than Oxford, as she was near her accouchement. Charles I. escorted his beloved consort to Abingdon; and there, on April 3, 1644, with streaming tears and dark forebodings, this loving pair parted. The queen sought relief from the fever at Bath, but there she could not stay; it was an abode of horror; the dreadful civil war had filled the bright city full of decaying corpses.
Henrietta took shelter in loyal Exeter, and there gave birth to her daughter, afterward Henrietta, Duchess of Orleans. The queen-regent of France, her sister-in-law, generously sent her 50,000 pistoles. Henrietta reserved very little for her own needs, but sent the bulk of the sum to her husband. In less than ten days the Earl of Essex commenced his march, intending to drag the sick queen from her childbed, to be tried before his masters of the Parliament for levying war in England. His approach on this manly errand caused the sick queen to rise and fly, leaving her babe in Exeter, to the care of Lady Morton. The queen went through great dangers by the way,[2] but at last embarked with her faithful ladies (who joined her in various disguises) on board a little bark bound for Dieppe. It was chased and even cannonaded by a parliamentary cruiser. Her ladies sent forth piercing shrieks as a shot struck the vessel. The daughter of Henry the Great compressed her lips, and uttered not a cry. At the moment all seemed lost, a little fleet of Dieppe vessels issued out of the port of loyal Jersey, when the enemy made off. Then a storm sprang up, which drove the queen on the coast of Bretagne, where she landed at Chastel.
[2] See "Lives of the Queens of England."
Great was the love with which Henrietta was received by the queen-regent and her young sons and all the French people. Anne of Austria gave her distressed sister-in-law 12,000 crowns per month, and inducted her into the royal apartments of the Louvre, the young king leading her to them by the hand. All the money Henrietta received she sent to the king her husband, reserving the smallest modicum for her own use. The fever hanging on her in France, in order that she might be near the baths of Bourbon for its cure, the queen-regent lent her the castle and park of Nevers. Her convalescence was stopped by an accident that grieved her. One of her most efficient aids in her misfortunes was her dwarf, Geoffrey Hudson. He had lately saved her life in her desperate retreat from Exeter; and she had found him faithful in all her fortunes, ever since the little man had stepped out of a cold pie to the side of her plate at Nonsuch; he was at that time eighteen years old, and eighteen inches high. He had grown four or five inches since he had been in royal service, and done heroic deeds. During the retirement at Nevers one of the queen's gentlemen of the household tormented and mocked Geoffrey, until the brave little man, who contrived to manage his steed better than many horsemen four feet taller, challenged Croft to fight him in the park at Nevers. The joking cavalier armed himself with a huge squirt, but Geoffrey took a pistol; and, as his hand was as unerring as his heart was bold, his persecutor fell at the first fire. Croft only met with his deserts; yet Queen Henrietta had to write very humbly to the all-powerful prime minister, Mazarine, that "Le Jofroy," as she called the little man, might not be put to death.
Letters perpetually passed between the sick queen and her husband. Love-letters they were, in the truest sense of the term. The heart of Henrietta yearned for the little babe she had left at Exeter. When the king had raised the siege of that city the infant was presented to him, and he caused her to be baptized by the name of her absent mother, Henrietta; but he was compelled to leave her under the care of his loyal lieges in the west. When all was lost on the king's side, Lady Morton escaped with this little one to France, in the disguise of a pedlar-woman, taking the royal infant of two years old on her back, disguised as a beggar-boy. Often the little princess, who did not approve of the change, tried to tell the wayfarers on the Dover road that "she was not Pierre the beggar-child, but the princess." No one understood her babble but her loving guardian, who succeeded in getting her charge safe to Paris and the queen. "Oh, the joy of that moment," wrote Pére Gamache, who saw the meeting between the royal mother and the babe, lost and again found. "How many times we saw her clasp her, kiss her, and then kiss her over again. The queen called her the child of benediction, and charged me to teach her the Roman Catholic faith." And this, of course, was turned against King Charles, then enduring the worst malice of his enemies in England.
The flames of civil war spread from England to France; and Paris was, before the close of 1647, involved in the war of the Fronde. It was occasioned by quarrels concerning taxation. Anne the queen-regent and her children retired to St. Germains; but the extreme love the citizens of Paris bore to Queen Henrietta made her stay at the Louvre, where she could obtain earlier intelligence of King Charles, who after enduring imprisonment in various places, was soon to be put on what his enemies called a trial.
Meantime winter in its most terrific form had set in. Famine reigned, as it usually does in civil war. Queen Henrietta had sent all her money to her distressed husband. Her officers had none to buy food, and had dispersed themselves in Paris to save her the cost of feeding them. Fierce battles were fought hourly in the streets. In the broils Queen Henrietta and her little daughter were forgotten. She was then writing to the French ambassador at London concerning the impending fate of her husband. She felt neither hunger nor the freezing atmosphere in this absorbing occupation. Providence guided M. de Retz, who was all-powerful with the Paris Parliament, to visit the hapless queen. She was sitting by the bed side of her little child. "You find me," said the queen, calmly, "keeping company with my Henrietta. I would not let the poor child rise to-day, for we have no fire." De Retz immediately sent the queen relief from his own resources, which she thankfully accepted, and then exerted his eloquence so successfully in the Parliament, by mentioning the distresses of the daughter of Henry the Great and her child, that a bountiful supply was accorded.
We must leave Henrietta for a while in Paris, to follow her hapless husband to the close of his tragic fate. The king had heard, from time to time, of the preparation of a court to try him. Murder he expected. He was brought prisoner to London, January 15, 1648-9, and taken to St. James's Palace, where, for the first time, he was deprived of royal attendance, and left alone with his faithful Herbert, who fortunately was sufficiently literary to be the historian of his master's progress to his untimely tomb.
Violent expulsions had taken place from the intimidated House of Commons, until only sixty-nine members remained, who thought themselves fitted for the task of king-killing. Yet some found themselves mistaken as to the hardness of their hearts, when they saw their king face to face, and heard him speak.