“Steenie—I have received your letter by Dick Greame. This is my answer. I command you to send all the French away to-morrow out of the town, if you can by fair means (but stick not long in disputing), otherways force them away—driving them away like so many wild beasts until ye have shipped them; and the devil go with them. Let me hear no answer, but of the performance of my command. So I rest
“Your faithful, constant, loving friend,
“C. R.
“Oaking, the seventh of August, 1626.”
As the French invented all sorts of vexatious delays, the yeomen of the guard at last jostled them out, carting them off in nearly forty coaches. They arrived at Dover after four days’ tedious travelling, wrangling, and bewailing. The squib did not burn out without one final detonation. As the vivacious Madame St. George stepped into the boat, with perhaps some insolent gesture of adieu, a man in the mob flung a stone at her French cap. A gallant Englishman who was escorting her instantly quitted his charge, ran the fellow through the body, and returned to the boat. The man died on the spot, but no notice, it appears, was taken of the murderer.
In Somerset House, at the Christmas masque of 1632-3, Charles’s high-spirited queen took part for the last time in a masque. Unfortunately for Prynne, the next day out came his Histriomastix, with a scurrilous marginal note, “Women actors notorious whores!” for which the stubborn fanatic lost his ears.
Queen Henrietta had, in Somerset House, an ostentatiously magnificent Catholic chapel built by Inigo Jones, which became the scene of spectacles that were gall and wormwood to the Puritans, who were already couching for their spring.
Their time came in March 1643, when Roundheads, grimly rejoicing, burnt all the pictures, images, Jesuitical books, and tapestry.[105]
Five of the unhappy queen’s French Roman Catholic servants are entombed in the cellars of the present building, under the great quiet square.[106]
Here, close to his own handiwork, that distinguished architect, Inigo Jones, who had lodgings in the palace, died in 1652.
About the same time the House of Peers permitted the Protestant service to be held in Somerset House instead of in Durham House. This drove out the Quakers and Anabaptists, and prevented the pulling down of the palace and the making of a street from the garden through the chapel and back-yard up into the Strand.[107]