Henrietta Maria Part 24

[Footnote 419: D. G. Rossetti.]

[Footnote 420: Of Chaillot literally not one stone remains upon another.

The convent was destroyed in the Revolution, and its site is occupied by the Trocadero.]

CHAPTER XII

THE END

La mort a des rigueurs a nulle autre pareilles; Ou a beau la prier, La cruelle qu'elle est, se bouche les oreilles, Et nous laisse crier.

Le pauvre en sa cabine, ou le chaume le couvre, Est sujet a ses lois; Et la garde qui veille aux barrieres du Louvre, N'en defend point nos rois.

FRANcOIS DE MALHERBE

In the end the Restoration came as a joyful surprise to Queen Henrietta and her sons. After all the struggles, after all the intrigues, after all the schemes, Charles Stuart returned to the throne of his father by the free choice of a people afraid of a military despotism, weary of the disorders which had followed the death of Cromwell, and remembering that, after all, the exiled King had had little or no complicity in the deeds which brought his father to the scaffold. England was tired of Puritanism, and was preparing with all eagerness to welcome the Merry Monarch.

France, which had shown herself decidedly tepid in helping the King of England in his adversities, and had, even at the nod of the usurper, driven him beyond her borders, was quite ready to rejoice at his good luck. Even Mazarin offered the most gratifying sympathy, while Queen Anne and the common people manifested a more real gladness. The English colony in Paris was naturally almost beside itself with joy and triumph, which burst forth in noisy rejoicings, wherein music, drinking, and fireworks played about equal parts.

As for Henrietta, her joy was too deep for words. The small but pretty house at Colombes, where she now spent much of her time, was the scene of suitable festivity, but she was probably glad when she could retire to Chaillot to receive the sympathy of Mother de la Fayette, and to a.s.sist at a solemn Te Deum of thanksgiving, which was sung in the chapel of the convent. When the news came that her son, on his landing in England, had almost been torn to pieces in the delight of his subjects, her joy was complete. "At last," she wrote in a happy letter to her sister Christine, "at last the good G.o.d has looked upon us in His mercy, and has worked, so to speak, a miracle in this re-establishment, having in an instant changed the hearts of a people which has pa.s.sed from the greatest hatred to expressions of the greatest possible kindness and submission, marked, moreover, by expressions of unparalleled joy."[421] The King, her son, she added, would, she believed, be more powerful than any of his predecessors, a forecast in which she showed her usual lack of political penetration, for the English people, even in the delirium of loyalty of the Restoration, did not throw away the fruits of the long struggle.

Charles wrote most kindly to his mother, begging her to come to England to share his triumph, and she confessed, in a letter to her sister Christine, that she should like before she died to see her family reunited after their long wanderings, and "vagabonds no more." But she delayed several months, during the course of which her nephew, Louis XIV, whom she had once hoped to see her son-in-law, married the bride of his mother's choosing, the Infanta of Spain. The Queen of England, in company with her sister of France, repaired to the house of Madame de Beauvais,[422] whence, from a balcony overlooking the Rue S. Antoine, the royal ladies witnessed the entry into Paris of the King of France and his wife, Louis riding on horseback, and the bride sitting in a car drawn by six splendid horses.

Only a few weeks after this day of rejoicing Henrietta's joy was turned to grief, and even her pleasure in her son's restoration was dashed by the sad news of the death of her youngest son Henry, who had grown into a tall, fine young man, whose gallant bearing was much admired when he rode into London at the left hand of his brother the King, on the happy 29th of May.

The poor lad was smitten by the scourge of smallpox, and in a few days he was laid in the grave.

It was not until October that the Queen turned her steps towards England, accompanied by her youngest daughter, who was now a girl of sixteen, the beautiful

"Princesse blanche comme albatre,"[423]

who was soon to be the bride of her cousin Philip, the brother of Louis XIV. In spite of the happy occasion, it was sad to Henrietta to retrace the wedding journey of her youth, and to have to take part in festivities which recalled those of that long-pa.s.sed time. On this occasion she set sail from Calais, but it was again at Dover that she set foot upon the soil of her adopted country, which she had not seen for sixteen years, and which her daughter had left as a child too young for memory.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE RUE ST. ANTOINE, PARIS (SHOWING THE CHAPEL OF THE

VISITANDINES)

FROM AN ENGRAVING BY IVAN MERLEN]

Nor were the sad a.s.sociations of the past the Queen's only cause for sorrow. Her grief was still fresh for her dead son, and for her two living ones her mind was full of anxiety. "I am going to England to marry one and to unmarry the other," she had said on leaving Paris. She was revolving schemes in her head for a marriage between the King and a niece of Cardinal Mazarin, whose large dowry, it was thought, would be useful in paying off the army of Cromwell and in settling the discontent which surely must be still lurking in the newly converted country. But more painful thoughts were given to her second son. This young man, whose exploits, together with those of his younger brother, at the battle of the Dunes, had won the admiration of the French against whom they were fighting, and whose fame was so great that his praises were sung in the coffee-houses of distant Constantinople, had so far forgotten his high lineage as to contract an alliance with a young woman of low rank, of no compensating beauty and of somewhat doubtful character. It was small consolation to Henrietta that the lady she was called upon to welcome as d.u.c.h.ess of York was the daughter of Sir Edward Hyde. At first she sternly refused to recognize the marriage, and it was only the entreaties of her two most intimate friends and counsellors, Lord Jermyn and the Abbe Montagu, that induced her to be reconciled to her son and to receive his wife. Perhaps she was also influenced by the knowledge that her eldest son, who at this time was much under the power of Hyde, wished her to show mercy. Still, it was with an aching heart that she saw her gallant young son mated with a woman in every way inferior to him; and her chagrin would not have been decreased could she have looked into the future and seen the two daughters of Anne Hyde sitting, in succession, upon the throne from which they had thrust their father.

Queen Henrietta Maria was received with all kindness in England, which she found in such a fever of loyalty as to make it quite needless to think of the dowry of Mazarin's niece. The ever-fickle populace welcomed her with joy which made it difficult to believe that she had even been unpopular.

Her dowry was restored to her, and her son rewarded his mother's faithful servants. Jermyn, whose advocacy of the d.u.c.h.ess of York had not perhaps been quite disinterested, received the t.i.tle of Earl of St. Albans; and Montagu no doubt might also have obtained the recompense of his fidelity had he not by now regarded France and the Church as a truer _patria_ than his own country. As Grand Almoner to the Queen he presided over her ecclesiastical establishment, which was again settled at Somerset House, whither the Capuchin Fathers had returned to carry on a vigorous religious campaign, in which their superior, Father Cyprien,[424] who preached sermons "to touch the heart of demons," took an active part. The palace had been much knocked about during the war, and it was one of Henrietta's pleasures to restore it to its former beauty, an achievement which her old admirer, Sir William Waller, celebrated in smooth, polished verses of the type which was rapidly ousting the literary fas.h.i.+ons of an earlier day. The Queen showed a surprising memory for the persons and things of the past, and delighted her son's courtiers by the graceful tact with which she recalled their circ.u.mstances and asked after their wives and families. But she was not very happy. Probably she felt the loss of her former political influence. Certainly she felt all the bitterness of returning a lonely and widowed old woman to the scenes of her happy married life. Sometimes, when all was bright around her, she would be found in some retired corner, where, with eyes full of tears, she was dwelling in thought upon the happy days of the past, and thinking of him to whom her will had been law.

Thus by December, 1660, she had made up her mind to return to France; and after a parting saddened by the recent death of her eldest daughter, the Princess of Orange, who died of smallpox in London, she set out. Her journey was delayed by the serious illness of Princess Henrietta at Portsmouth, so that she did not reach Paris until the February of the next year. She was welcomed with much affection by her many friends, but perhaps the marriage of her daughter Henrietta, the daily companion of fifteen years, which took place with great eclat at the Palais Royal, made her life too lonely; for after the birth of the young wife's first child, a little girl to whom she was G.o.dmother, she determined to set out again for England, and report had it that there she meant to live and die. Her eldest son had just married a princess of Portugal, whose acquaintance she was anxious to make, and royal tact led her to add that she also wished to see the little daughter who had recently been born to the Duke and d.u.c.h.ess of York.

There was no lack of heartiness in the welcome of her sons. Both Charles and James put to sea to meet her; but, owing to stormy weather, their boat was driven back, and the Queen's first welcome was the joyous salvos of Dover which answered the thunder of the guns of Calais.

None but the most formal accounts remain to tell of Henrietta's impressions of her daughter-in-law, Catherine of Braganza. She can hardly have been pleased with the insipid girl whose bigoted piety and dull precision of character were not calculated to win the heart of an intellectual roue such as Charles II, who in women preferred a sparkling wit even to beauty. His mother, whose happy married life had made her shudder at the very name of illicit love, was no doubt judiciously blind where her sons were concerned; but she must have felt for this poor child whose chances of happiness were from the beginning very small. The two queens found a common interest in religion. Catherine was indeed _devote_ as Henrietta had never been; but the elder woman had throughout her life given sufficient proof of zeal, and she had recently written a letter to the Pope, informing him that the chief reason of her return to England was her desire to advance the Catholic religion in that land. The Court of Rome was getting weary of the ungrateful island on which "missioners, seminaires, regulars, seculars, archpriests, interposition of Princes, and what not,"[425] had all been thrown away. But Henrietta, true to her sanguine nature, still hoped to be the saviour of the English Catholics. Her chapel at Somerset House was once more the resort of the faithful, where hundreds abjured the heresy of their birth, some of which conversions were so amazing as to merit a place in the memoirs of Father Cyprien. Above all, the Queen knew that her eldest son, whose private opinions varied between the tenets of Hobbes and those of the Church of Rome, would have liked to be tolerant. What she failed to appreciate was that his wandering exiled life had taught him to sacrifice any private fancy or liking rather than go on his travels again.

Somerset House was not only a religious centre. Wherever Henrietta was there were laughter, wit, and cheerfulness. Even in the darkest days of the past she would dry her tears to laugh at anything which struck her as droll, and now, in her old age, though sorrow and self-discipline had softened the sharpness of her tongue, her conversation had the charm of that of a witty woman who had mixed with famous people, and who had borne a princ.i.p.al part in the events of the age which was just pa.s.sing away. Life had been to her what books are to more studious people; for, like the father whose wit she had inherited, she did not care for reading, and this, in her later life, she frankly regretted. She was now a "little, plain old woman,"[426] always quietly dressed, and worn out by trouble and ill-health; but the charm which was her cradle gift had not left her, and her Court proved much more attractive than that of her daughter-in-law, to whom nature had been less bountiful, and whose prim youth was no match for the sprightly age of the daughter of Henry IV.

But the rivalry was not to be a long one. It seems that the air of England had not agreed with Henrietta, even when she was young and happy; and now her health daily became worse, until at last her physicians told her plainly that if she remained in England she would die. Perhaps she was not altogether sorry for this decision. She loved her sunny native land, and her heart yearned for her youngest and dearest child and for her nuns at Chaillot. Moreover, the troubles of her previous visit had not pa.s.sed away.

She bade a loving farewell to the two sons whose faces she knew she would never see again, and then made for the last time the familiar journey to Paris, where she was received with the customary kindness of the French royal family.

The last years of Henrietta Maria's life were calm and peaceful, except for her ill-health. "I have never had a day free from pain for twenty years,"

she said shortly before her death to her friends at Chaillot. She had little to trouble her beyond the gentle sorrow of seeing those with whom she had been a.s.sociated pa.s.s, one by one, to the silence of the grave. Her brother, the Duke of Orleans, ended his restless life in the year of the Restoration, leaving his t.i.tle to his nephew, Henrietta's son-in-law.

Cardinal Mazarin pa.s.sed away in 1661, avaricious to the last, and counting with dying fingers the treasures to which his heart still clung. Four years later Queen Anne of Austria followed him, after an illness the infinitely pathetic record of which is to be found in the pages of Madame de Motteville. She was a great loss to her sister-in-law, the more so as Henrietta's faithful friend, the Abbe Montagu, was so high in her favour that it was feared he would succeed to the influence and position of Mazarin, and thus France be under a foreigner once more. The tie between these two was of no ordinary strength. Not only had Montagu been a friend and companion of the unforgotten Buckingham, but Anne never ceased to remember the service which he had rendered to her in the past. When he returned to France, after his long imprisonment, sobered by trouble, and so far from desiring the ecclesiastical honours on which his heart had once been set that he turned from them when offered, he became in some measure her spiritual adviser, a role for which he was well suited, as he knew probably better than any one else the secrets of the past. From his lips, at her own request, the dying Queen received the solemn intimation of the approach of death, and almost her last conscious words were addressed to him. "M. de Montagu knows how much I have to thank G.o.d for," she said, fixing her eyes on the Abbe as he knelt weeping beside her, words which both Madame de Motteville, who was present, and Montagu himself interpreted as bearing witness to Anne's innocence in the days when she compromised her reputation by vanity and coquetting.[427]

Henrietta's health, which had never recovered from the strain of the Civil War and the terrible experiences of her last confinement, became worse and worse; so that in December, 1668, she wrote to her son Charles that her remaining days would not be many. She suffered much from sleeplessness and fainting fits, and even the waters of Bourbon, which she had long been accustomed to drink every year, afforded her little relief. The thought of death had ever been to her, as to her accomplished friend Madame de Motteville, one of terror. She did not like even to speak of it. "It is better," she was wont to say, "to give one's attention to living well, and to hope for G.o.d's mercy in the last hour." But now that death was drawing near it lost something of its terror, and she said quite openly that she was going to Chaillot to die. "I shall think no more of doctors or medicine," she added, "but only of my soul." In this spirit she went out to her house at Colombes to spend there the golden days of a French autumn, until the feast of All Saints should call her to her convent. "The Queen-Mother is extreme ill, and seems to apprehend herself extremely,"[428] wrote Ralph Montagu, the English amba.s.sador in Paris, on September 7th, 1669.

A few days later the end came. To the Queen's sleeplessness was added an aversion from all food, and at the request of the King of France, who was much attached to his aunt, a consultation of doctors was held, among whom the princ.i.p.al place was taken by Vallot, a man of great experience, who was first physician to the Crown of France, but who, nevertheless, was believed by some to have been negligent in his care of Queen Anne. He, thinking that Henrietta's great weakness came from her distressing insomnia, advised that she should take a grain of some sedative at night. The Queen, who had explained her symptoms with great clearness, objected the opinion of Sir Theodore Mayerne that such remedies were dangerous to her const.i.tution, adding, laughing, that an old gipsy woman in England had once told her that she would never die except of a grain. Vallot listened respectfully, but he was unconvinced, so that his patient, feeling her reluctance to be foolish, agreed to follow his advice. The day wore on, and after a quiet evening with her ladies, Henrietta retired to bed as usual; but she did not feel very well, and it was suggested that she should not take the opiate.

However, she could not sleep, and when her physician was called to her bedside she asked with some eagerness for the drug. He administered it in an egg, after which the Queen lay down again, to fall into a sleep which became deeper and deeper, until it pa.s.sed into the last sleep of death.[429]

With daybreak all was confusion at Colombes. Messengers hurried off to Paris to acquaint the King of France with the news of his aunt's death, and to S. Cloud to break the sad tidings to the d.u.c.h.ess of Orleans, who would be her mother's truest mourner. By some strange oversight or malice the English amba.s.sador was left to hear the intelligence by chance. Ralph Montagu, who had a very poor opinion of the Earl of St. Albans, whose position as Lord Chamberlain to the late Queen gave him considerable power, believed that that n.o.bleman had purposely kept him in ignorance, so that there should not be "left a silver spoon in the house."[430] In the interests of the King of England he hurried off to the King of France, who, in spite of the protests of the Earl, caused seals to be placed upon his aunt's property until it could be properly disposed of.

There was great mourning for Henrietta in France, not only because she was personally beloved, but because the King and the people saw in her not so much the widow of the King of England as the last surviving child of the much-loved Henry the Great. High and low vied with each other in their desire to do her honour, and Louis XIV expressed his wish that she should lie by her father in the royal Abbey of S. Denys, where he ordered that a splendid funeral service, following the precedent of that of his mother, should be celebrated at his expense. He immediately dispatched a _lettre de cachet_[431] to the Prior and monks of the house, ordering them to receive with all honour the body of the Queen of England.

Meanwhile at Colombes on a bed of state lay the corpse.[432] But that same evening, following the custom of the times, the heart was taken out, enclosed in a silver casket, and carried to its last resting-place at Chaillot. A sorrowful company escorted the precious relic, which was met at the door of the convent by the religious, each of whom held in her hand a lighted taper. Then in a set little speech the Abbe Montagu, as Grand Almoner to the late Queen, delivered it over to the Superior, commending it to the pious care of the community.

Two days after this mournful little ceremony the body was carried through the Porte S. Denys, along the road which Henrietta had traversed as a bride, to the royal abbey, where it was to rest. There, watched by faithful guardians, it lay in a chapel behind the choir for more than a month, until the 20th of November, when the funeral service was celebrated. The obsequies were a magnificent affair, comparable with the splendours of the long-ago wedding. In the great church hung with black, on a magnificent mausoleum supported by eight marble pillars and blazing with a quant.i.ty of lighted tapers, Henrietta, who, living, had known what it was to lack the necessaries of life, lay as a King's daughter in her death, and that the contrast might be the more complete, her body, which had long laid aside the trappings of royalty, was covered by a gorgeous pall "of gold brocade covered by silver brocade and edged with ermine." By the will of the King representatives of the sovereign bodies were present, while the mourners included princes and princesses and even one of higher rank, for Casimir, the ex-King of Poland, who had exchanged his crown for a monk's frock, had journeyed to do honour to the Queen of England from the great Abbey of S.

Germain des Pres, where he was spending a peaceful old age, and where his tomb may be seen to this day. The attendance of clergy indeed was not large, but that was only because orders had been issued that the sovereign bodies should be saluted before the prelates, an insult which the pride of the Church could not stomach.

After a new and delightful rendering by the choir of the _Dies Irae_, the Bishop of Amiens ascended the pulpit. Francis Faure was probably selected for this office partly because he had been a servant of the dead Queen in her early married life, and partly because she had taken pleasure in hearing him deliver the panegyric of S. Francis de Sales in the chapel of the convent of Chaillot on the occasion of the saint's canonization. It seems, however, that this "_cordelier mitre_", as Gui Patin calls him, was not very popular with Parisian audiences, for the discourse which he delivered at the funeral of Queen Anne was severely criticized, and his sermon on the Queen of England had no better reception. Nevertheless, it reads as the work of an honest and affectionate man earnestly striving, not always indeed with success, to avoid that flattery of the great of which the times were so tolerant, but which is peculiarly vain in connection with death, the great leveller. His text was, "Watch and pray"; and he dwelt with some sternness upon the awful suddenness of the Queen's end, of which the Chaillot nuns said sweetly that it was the mercy of G.o.d to save her from the apprehension of the death which she feared so much. The discourse[433] was long, and it was nearly four o'clock in the afternoon before the body of Henrietta Maria was lowered into the royal vault, to lie beside that of her father.

But the pious care of Louis did not end at S. Denys. Nearly a week later (November 25th) another service was celebrated in Paris itself, at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, as an additional mark of the King's respect for his aunt. The Duke and d.u.c.h.ess of Orleans were again the chief mourners, while this time the preacher was Father Senault, Superior of that Congregation of the Oratory from which the Queen, ever since her marriage, had chosen her confessors.[434] He was a preacher of repute, as well as a writer of distinction, and his discourse on this occasion met with the "marvellous success which attends all his actions."[435]

But before this, before even the service at S. Denys, the most famous of Henrietta Maria's funeral sermons had been preached. The filial piety of the d.u.c.h.ess of Orleans could not permit that her cousin the King of France should be the only person to do honour to her mother's memory. Her thoughts naturally turned to the convent at Chaillot, which her mother had loved so dearly, and where so much of her own youth had been spent. There the Queen had already been mourned by the good nuns; there Ma.s.ses were offered for her soul. It was but fitting that there also should be celebrated the solemn service offered by her daughter's devotion.

On November 12th the chapel of the convent, which the care of the religious had caused to be hung with mourning, was crowded by those who had come at the invitation of the d.u.c.h.ess of Orleans to do honour to her mother's memory. These were no royal obsequies due to Henrietta's quality as a daughter of France, but an offering of domestic love, and, as was befitting, the celebrant of the Ma.s.s was the late Queen's faithful, lifelong friend, Walter Montagu. But for the preacher was found one who has caused this simple service to be remembered while S. Denys and Notre-Dame are forgotten. The Abbe Bossuet was already Bishop-elect of Condom, but when he stood in the pulpit of Chaillot he still wore the dress of a simple priest. The discourse was p.r.o.nounced "with much applause of the audience,"[436] wrote dryly the official chronicler of these events. It will be remembered as long as the French tongue. To one heart it spoke with something more than the charms of oratory, for from this day Henrietta of Orleans dated her friends.h.i.+p with the good Bishop. She did not know that in less than a year the same eloquent voice would be raised over her own dead body, and that her young life would have become, like her mother's, nothing but a text for a sermon.[437]

There was some difficulty about the Queen's property, as she died intestate. By the law of England everything she died possessed of pa.s.sed to her eldest son; by the law of France her property would be equally divided among her children or their representatives. The property was not large, and Ralph Montagu believed that when the debts were paid there would be little left "but her two houses at Colombes, which would sell for ten or twelve thousand pistols, and were always, if she had made a will, intended to be given Madame." The person most inclined to dispute the claim of the King of England was the Duke of Orleans, who, perhaps knowing his mother-in-law's intentions, proposed that his wife should take the property in France as her share, leaving to her two brothers their mother's jointure, which had been granted for two further years. But another claimant appeared in the person of Henrietta's grandson, the Prince of Orange, who said that if Monsieur took a share he should advance a claim, otherwise he would submit to the pleasure of the King of England. Madame finally persuaded her husband to desist, which was esteemed a great service to her brother, as by the terms of the late Queen's marriage contract it would have been very difficult to parry his claims. Thus the whole of Henrietta's slender fortune fell to her son Charles II of England. But since he had always had a kindness for the nuns of Chaillot, he gave to them the furniture of his mother's apartments there. Some of it was too fine for them, and this portion they sold for the benefit of the house.

They had no use for Flanders tapestry, for state beds or arm-chairs; but they kept, among other things, two feather beds, all the linen and pottery, and three very beautiful pictures. The proceeds of the sale enabled the nuns to build ten new cells, as well as to lay aside a sum of money for the expenses of the yearly commemoration of their royal foundress.[438]

Of those who mourned for Henrietta Maria it remains to say a few words. The future history of her two sons and of her nephew, Louis XIV, is too well known to need remark, except that it may be mentioned that James, in the tardy repentance of exile, found much comfort and edification among the nuns of Chaillot. The tragic fate of her daughter has already been referred to. Henrietta of Orleans, in the bloom of a beauty which recalled that of her mother, died at S. Cloud in the autumn of 1670, not without suspicion of poison. The Earl of St. Albans[439] returned to London, where he spent a drinking and card-playing old age, of which the most notable achievement was the foundation of St. James's Square, by which means he may almost claim the t.i.tle of founder of modern West London, where Jermyn Street yet preserves his name. Walter Montagu, his friend of many years, had a very different fate. After the death of his three patronesses, the Queen of France, the Queen of England, and the d.u.c.h.ess of Orleans, he was made to resign the Abbey of S. Martin's, Pontoise. He returned to Paris and entered the Hospital of the Incurables in the Rue de Seve.[440] "My lord," said an English priest[441] of remarkable piety, who was waiting there for death, as he saw the Abbe enter, "you are come to teach me how to die." "No, Mr.

Clifford," replied Montagu, "I have come to learn from you how to live."

In this calm retreat his last years flowed quietly away. He "only occupied himself with the eternal years and with the practice of all the vertues,"[442] said the chronicler of S. Martin's; but incidentally he was able to render many services to the English colony in Paris, though his cousin Ralph complained that he had grown "very ignorant and out of fas.h.i.+on."[443] He died peacefully at the Incurables in February, 1677, and his body was carried to S. Martin's, at Pontoise, of which he had been a princely benefactor, to be buried in the chapel[444] of S. Walter, the first Abbot of the house and his patron saint, which he had beautified at great expense. Mother Jeanne, who still ruled over the Carmelites of Pontoise, caused a Ma.s.s to be sung for his soul, and equal honour was paid to his memory by the English Benedictine nuns of the same town. In Paris another old friend was doubtless thinking of him, for in a retirement almost monastical Madame de Chevreuse yet lived, one of the last of those who had gathered at the brilliant Court of Charles I and Henrietta Maria.