A few days later, about eight o'clock in the morning, a coach stopped at the door of Sir Kenelm's lodgings, from which descended Chavigny, the Secretary of State, and the Chevalier de Jars. Chavigny, after he had greeted the astonished knight, waved his hand towards his charge and said, in the courtly accents of a French diplomatist, "Monsieur, I have the orders of the King and of M. le Cardinal to place this gentleman in your hands. He is no longer the prisoner of the King of France, but of the Queen of England."[206] "It is to be hoped," Montagu had written a few weeks earlier to a member of the French Government, "that the end of this affair will be the beginning of that end to which we have always looked, namely, a good understanding between the Queen and M. le Cardinal."[207] This hope was not fulfilled. Henrietta was indeed greatly pleased at her friend's release, and she cannot have failed to admire the graceful manner in which the great man had granted his favour, but a single act of kindness on the one hand and a single sentiment of gratitude on the other could not overcome the mutual distrust of years. Moreover, events were even then occurring which were destroying any good feeling of which the incident may have been productive. For some years Mary de' Medici had been casting her eyes upon England as a possible refuge. She disliked the Low Countries, where she was living, and as she felt no desire to return to her native Florence, which was the place of retirement selected for her by Louis XIII, or rather by Richelieu, she thought that it might be wise to take advantage of the kindness which her son-in-law, the King of England, had always felt for her. Her presence was not desired in England; she was considered, with some justice, a quarrelsome and mischief-making old lady, and her bigoted religious attitude, joined with the favours which she showed to Spain, were sufficient to make her unpopular among the people. Charles, however much he might pity her as the victim of Richelieu, dreaded, short of money as he was, so expensive and inconvenient a guest. Even Henrietta, with the thought of her childhood in her mind, was afraid of her mother's arbitrary interference. "_Adieu ma liberté_," she sighed. Perhaps the Queen-Mother gathered that she would not be welcome, for the project seems to have been in abeyance when England was startled by the arrival of another exiled lady whose character and career presented even more of excitement and variety. [Illustration: THE DUCHESS OF CHEVREUSE AFTER THE PICTURE BY MOREELSE ONCE IN THE POSSESSION OF CHARLES I]