Henrietta Maria was the sixth child and youngest daughter of Henry IV.
of France, by his second wife, Marie de Medicis. She was born at the
Louvre, November 25, 1609. Great as Henry was, he suffered his mind to
be swayed by predictions. He had been told that he should die the day
after his queen was crowned. To her great mortification, he would not
permit that ceremony to be performed until after the birth of his
youngest daughter. The queen prevailed on him to give orders for her
coronation at St. Denis, where it took place, when Henriette, who was
only five months old, was present, held in her nurse's arms, on one side
of her mother's throne, surrounded by her brothers and sisters--a group
of very beautiful children--the dauphin, too soon to be Louis XIII.,
Gaston, Elizabeth, and Christine. The next day Henry IV. was
assassinated by Ravillac in the streets of Paris, May 13, 1610.
The royal children were barricaded all that dreary night in the
guard-room at the Louvre, next to the chamber where the king's bleeding
corpse lay. No one slept in the palace excepting the infant Henriette,
whose peaceful slumbers in her nurse's arms were in strange contrast to
the grief and terror of all around, for it was believed that an
insurrection would follow the regicidal act. Again the infant princess
appeared in her nurse's arms, at the funeral of the royal hero of
France, and once more, at the coronation of her young brother at Rheims,
when she was only ten months old. Her governess was Mademoiselle de
Monglat, whom she used to call Mamanga. She received her education from
her brother Gaston's school-master, M. de Bevis: she was the constant
companion of Duke Gaston, who was only eighteen months older than
herself.
Henriette was the darling of her mother, perhaps her spoiled darling,
for Maria de Medicis, queen-regent of France, was neither wise nor
judicious. When the queen was deprived of the regency and her liberty,
Henriette was permitted to share her royal mother's captivity.
When the queen-mother recovered her liberty, the young Henriette, not
then fifteen, became the ornament of the court. Anne of Austria, the
young queen-consort of Louis XIII., cherished love and friendship for
her sister-in-law, of which Henriette found the benefit in her worst
fortunes.
When Henriette was only in her fourteenth year, she and her future
consort, Charles, Prince of Wales, unknown to each other, met at a ball
in the palace of the king her brother, early in February, 1623. The
Prince of Wales and his father's favourite minister, George Villiers,
Earl of Buckingham, were travelling incognito to Madrid, under the
homely names of Tom Smith and Jack Smith. The object of the Prince of
Wales was to see the infanta Donna Maria (with whom he was engaged by
the king his father in a treaty of marriage), and to make acquaintance
with her before they should be irrevocably bound in wedlock. The prince
and his companion halted at Paris, and went like others to see the
Louvre, and look at the royal family of France on the night of the ball.
Struck by their personal appearance, the Duke de Montbazan gave the
handsome and distinguished-looking strangers advantageous places in the
hall of the Louvre, where Charles saw the beautiful Henriette dance. The
circumstance was afterward mentioned to Henriette, who sighed, and said,
"Ah! the Prince of Wales needed not have gone so far as Spain to look
for a wife." She had not noticed Jack Smith in the gallery of the
Louvre, yet she had seen portraits of Charles, who was the most graceful
prince in Europe.
The Spanish match was broken off. Donna Maria afterward married the
Emperor of Germany. James I. demanded the hand of the beautiful
Henriette for his heir.
The English people preferred having a daughter of the Protestant hero,
Henry the Great, for their queen, to the grand-daughter of the cruel
Philip II. of Spain. Unfortunately, Henriette had been brought up in the
most ignorant bigotry by her mother. We have read a letter, very much
worn with often unfolding, of advice and instruction from this queen to
her daughter, regarding her conduct in England, in which she mentions
the belief of the English in the same terms as if they were Jews. Such
imputation the creed of the Anglican Church no more deserved than her
own. Unfortunately, her young daughter was utterly ignorant of all
history but that from prejudiced sources, as she afterward deeply
regretted to her friend Madame de Motteville.
The marriage articles were very tedious, and much disputed; a clause was
left by the council of James I., giving his son's consort power in the
education of her children until their thirteenth year; a clause
regretted by Charles, and which his determination to break afterward,
occasioned the only real unhappiness in his married life. When all was
ready for the betrothal, James I. died, March, 1624-5.
Some anxiety was shown lest the young king, Charles I., should not
ratify his father's treaty; but the wooing ambassadors, the Earls of
Carlisle and Holland, had described the young princess in such
favourable terms that Charles was eager to complete the agreement. In
one of Holland's letters to Charles she is thus mentioned: "In truth,
she is the sweetest creature in France, and the loveliest thing in
nature. I heard her the other day discourse with her mother and her
ladies with wondrous discretion. She dances--the which I am witness
of--as well as I ever saw. They say she sings most sweetly; I am sure
she looks as if she did!" In the course of a few days the Earl of
Holland heard this wonderful voice. "I had been told much of it," he
wrote; "but I find it true that neither her singing-master, nor any man
or woman in Europe, singeth as she doth; her voice is beyond all
imagination!" The musical and vocal powers of the queen-mother of
France, Marie de Medicis, were likewise of the finest order; and her
youngest daughter had inherited from her, gifts lavishly bestowed by
nature on the children of Italy.
Pope Urban VIII. was exceedingly adverse to the English marriage: he had
been Henrietta's god-father when he was cardinal legate in France. He
was unwilling to grant a dispensation for his god-child wedding out of
their Church; putting his objection on his duty to guard her happiness,
rather than the usual polemic wranglings. No one can deny that his
historical acumen was right in what he said--"If the Stuart king relaxed
the bloody penal laws against the Roman Catholics, the English would not
suffer him to live long. If they were continued, what happiness could
the French princess have in her wedlock?" These were the words of
wisdom, and ought to have been heeded. But the unwise prejudice against
placing a princess on the English throne of lower rank than the
royalties of France or Spain, unduly influenced James I., or rather his
English council, since he did not act thus in his own case.
Charles I. and Louis XIII. resolved to proceed with the betrothal
without Urban's dispensation, which, of course, caused it to be sent
very quickly. Henriette and Charles I. were betrothed, May 8, 1625, by
proxy. She was dressed in a magnificent robe woven with gold and silver,
and flowered with French lilies in gems and diamonds. The marriage took
place three days afterward. The palace of the Archbishop of Paris (but
lately destroyed) stood just behind Notre Dame; a gallery-bridge
connected it with that cathedral, hung with violet satin, figured with
gold fleur-de-lis; the marriage procession passed over it from the
palace to Notre Dame. The bride was led by her young brother Gaston, and
was given away by the king, Louis XIII.
The Duke de Chevreuse, a near kinsman of Charles I., was his proxy; he
was attired in black velvet; but over this plain attire wore a scarf
flowered with diamond roses; the queen-mother shone like a pillar of
precious stones; her long train was borne by two princesses of the
blood, Condé and Conti. The marriage took place in the porch of Notre
Dame; the English ambassadors, and even the proxy of England, out of
respect to the religious feelings of Charles I., withdrew from Notre
Dame during the concluding mass.
The Duke of Buckingham, ambassador-extraordinary from England, arrived
at the conclusion of the ceremony. He was angry because he was too
late--and certainly behaved in a most extraordinary manner while in
France. Subsequently, he was on ill terms with the young Queen of
England.
The Duke of Buckingham caused many delays by his flighty conduct. At
last the cortège of the bride approached Boulogne. Charles I. came to
Dover Castle to meet and welcome his queen. Her passage was dangerous.
The king had that Sunday retired to Canterbury, thinking the bride could
not embark in the storm. However, she landed at Dover, June 23, 1625, at
seven in the evening. At ten, next day, the king arrived while she was
at breakfast; he wished to wait, for she had been very ill with
sea-sickness. Yet the bride rose hastily from table, hasted down a pair
of stairs to meet the king, then offered to kneel and kiss his hand; but
he wrapped her up in his arms with many kisses. "Sir, I have come to
your majesty's country to be commanded by you," were the set words the
poor bride had prepared for her first speech to Charles, but her voice
failed, and ended with a gush of tears. Charles kindly led her apart,
kissed off her tears, and said he should do so while they fell. His
tenderness soon soothed the weeping girl, and she entered into familiar
discourse with the royal lover. Charles seemed pleased that she was
taller than he had heard; and, finding she reached the height of his
shoulder, he glanced downward at her feet. Her quickness caught his
meaning, and she said to him, in French, "I stand on my own feet; I have
no help from art; thus tall am I, neither higher nor lower."
The young queen then presented all her French attendants to Charles,
beginning with her cousin, the beautiful Madame de St. George, formerly
her governess, now her first lady of the bed-chamber. To her the king
very early took an antipathy.
The same eventful day, the bride, the king, and court set out for
Canterbury, where the marriage was to be celebrated. On a beautiful
extent of greensward, called Barham downs, a banquet was prepared; and
in the pavilions the bride-queen was introduced to the ladies of her
English household, and the noblemen and gentlemen appointed to her
service. That evening, Charles and Henrietta were married in the noble
hall of St. Augustine, Canterbury.
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 Père 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; 22,000_l._ 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.
[Footnote 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.
"MAMIE ST. GEORGE:--The husband of the nurse of my son going to
France about some business, I write you this letter, believing you
will be very glad to ask him news of my son, of whom I think you
have seen the portrait I sent to the queen, my mother. He is so
ugly that I am ashamed of him; but his size and fatness atone for
his want of beauty. I wish you could see the _gentleman_, for he
has no ordinary mien. He is so serious that I cannot help deeming
him wiser than myself.
"Send me a dozen pair of sweet chamois gloves, also one pair of
doe's skin, a game of _poule_, and the rules of any games now in
vogue. I assure you that if I did not write to you often, it is not
because I have left off loving you, but because--I must confess
it--I am very idle.... Adieu! the man must have the letter."
The queen gave birth to her eldest daughter, November 4, 1631, at St.
James's Palace. The babe was baptized Mary by Dr. Laud.
The king could not longer delay his coronation as King of Scotland; as
for the queen, she refused investiture with the crown-matrimonial of
that realm even more pertinaciously than she had done that of England.
Within a few weeks of her consort's return, she presented him with
another son, born at St. James's, October 14, 1633, named James, in
memory of his grandfather, James I. Charles devoted his second son to
the marine service of his country, and caused his education to tend to
every thing naval. He became one of the greatest admirals and marine
legislators in the world, but one of the most unfortunate of our kings.
The birth of the Princess Elizabeth occurred January 28, 1635.
Queen Henrietta was a fond mother, and bestowed all the time she could
on her nursery. Occasionally, her divine voice was heard singing to her
infant, as she lulled it in her arms, filling the galleries of her
palace with its rich cadences. Royal etiquette forbade her gratifying
unqualified listeners with its enchanting melody.
At this period of her life Henrietta was heard to declare herself the
happiest woman in the world; happy as wife, mother, and queen. Henrietta
Maria was not only the queen, but the beauty of the British court; she
had about the year 1633 attained the perfection of her charms, in face
and figure; she was the theme of every poet, the star of all beholders.
The moral life of Charles I., his conjugal attachment to his queen, and
the refined tastes of both, gave the court a degree of elegance till
then unknown.
In Vandyke's painting of Henrietta she is represented as evidently very
young; the features are delicate and pretty, with a pale clear
complexion, beautiful dark eyes and chestnut hair. Her form is slight
and exquisitely graceful. She is dressed in white satin; the bodice of
the dress is nearly high, with a large falling collar trimmed with
points. The bodice is made tight to the form, closed in front with bows
of cherry ribbon, and is finished from the waist with several large
tabs, richly embroidered. The sleeves are very full and descend to the
elbows, where they are confined by ruffles. One arm is encircled with a
narrow black bracelet, the other with one of costly gems. She wears a
string of pear-shaped pearls about her neck; a red ribbon twisted with
pearls is placed carelessly in her hair at the back of her head. She
stands by a table, and her hand rests on two red roses, which are placed
near the crown.
All was peaceful at this juncture; the discontents of the English
people while Charles I. governed without a parliament were hushed in
grim repose, like the tropical winds before the burst of the typhoon.
Prynne, in his abusive libel called Histrio-mastrix, first interrupted
this peace. He attacked Henrietta for performing in masques played only
in her own family. He was condemned to the pillory by the Star Chamber
conclave. Henrietta, to her honour be it recorded, did everything in her
power to save him from the infliction of his cruel sentence; but even
her intercession was fruitless. Yet Prynne himself said, after the civil
wars that ensued, "King Charles when he took my ears should have taken
my head."
Henrietta, though a very fond mother, did not indulge her children in
any thing which was foolish or improper. The following letter from her
to her eldest son Charles, Prince of Wales, written at the request of
his governor, the Marquis of Newcastle--who had been unable to induce
the young prince to swallow the physic which it was considered necessary
for him to take--is still preserved in the British Museum: