The acceptance of the English marriage for Madame Henriette Marie of France was Richelieu’s first step in the way of return to Henry IV.’s foreign policy. The idea of an English alliance, of course, was not originally his. Long before Henry’s youngest child was born, a marriage had been suggested between one of her elder sisters and Henry, Prince of Wales. At the same time, Louis the Dauphin was to have been betrothed to Princess Elizabeth, James the First’s eldest daughter--a strange destiny for the Protestant heroine, the “Queen of Hearts,” “th’Eclipse and Glory of her kind!” But Henry’s liking for England seems to have cooled considerably as time went on, and his latest political turn, doubtfully and unwillingly made, was in the direction of the Spanish marriages brought about by Marie de Médicis. As for Henriette Marie, only six months old when her father died, he had carelessly promised her hand to the young son of his cousin the Comte de Soissons. He would probably have broken this promise. The Queen-Regent had no scruples in doing so, to the rage and disappointment of Monsieur le Comte. The present negotiations in their earlier stages were not Richelieu’s work. He was not in power in 1620, when Luynes, a poor diplomatist, tried to turn the mind of the English King towards an alliance with France rather than with Spain; nor in 1623, when the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Buckingham, those two “venturous knights” lingering incognito in Paris on their way to Madrid, witnessed a ballet at the Louvre in which Princess Henriette, now thirteen years old, was dancing. It was afterwards said that Charles fell in love with the graceful little lady on that occasion, so that his failure to capture the Infanta of Spain troubled him little personally. As to Buckingham, who with all his faults and frivolities had some of the ideas of a statesman, he was already inclined to the French alliance, seeing in it the one means of defending the foreign Protestants and balancing the power of Spain. Through the winter of 1623-4, envoys of more or less dignity were passing between London and Paris, and the marriage was talked of openly. All this time, no doubt, Richelieu was in favour of it, and his influence, as the Queen-mother’s chief adviser, set that way; but long delays dragged out the affair, even after the coming of the English Ambassadors Extraordinary, Lord Holland and Lord Carlisle. The chief difficulty, as with Spain, was the religious question. La Vieuville’s weakness as to this, in Richelieu’s opinion, nearly wrecked the negotiations. After he himself became a Minister in April, there was no more danger that France would, in Carlisle’s words, “be ridden with a discreet high hand.” The delays were of Richelieu’s causing, and the “high hand” was that of France. He meant to oppose Spain and the Empire and to assist--with discretion--the German and Dutch Protestants; but he also meant the Catholic Church