In April Charles set out for Scotland. He left his wife almost regent in his absence, for he had ordered the Council to defer to her advice. Henrietta was thus in a position of greater importance and authority than ever before, and she had the satisfaction of feeling that her influence over her husband was steadily increasing. The difficult circumstances, now beginning to entangle her as in a net, were developing that love of intrigue which had already shown itself in happier times. She had, moreover, no mean instructors in the art of diplomatic chicanery in two women who at this time were together at her side exercising a considerable influence over her. Madame de Chevreuse and Lady Carlisle, since the arrival of the former in England, had joined hands in a friendship which had its origin, perhaps, in a common hatred of Richelieu, but which might be easily accounted for by similarity of character and aims. Madame de Chevreuse could, indeed, boast a wider experience, for she had taken all Europe for her stage, while Lady Carlisle was content to play her part in the comparative obscurity of the British Isles; but a restless love of power and domination, which expressed itself in a determined effort to influence by womanly charms those who by force of intellect or by accident of birth were making the history of the time, was common to both, as also was a real talent for intrigue, which enabled these society ladies so far to conquer the disadvantages of their sex as to become of considerable importance in affairs. Of such teachers Henrietta was a willing learner and in some sense an apt pupil. She, too, learned to plot and to scheme, to play off enemy against enemy, and to attempt to win over a chivalrous foe by honeyed words. But she never became in any real sense a diplomatist. Her brain, quick to seize a point of detail and sometimes sagacious in weighing the claims of alternate courses of action, had not sufficient grasp to take in the broad outlines of a complicated situation, nor the judicial faculty which can calmly appraise even values which are personal. It is the misfortune of the great that they breathe an atmosphere of fictitious importance which induces a mental malady, whose taint infects all but the strongest intellects and the largest hearts. From the worst forms of this disease, as it appears, for instance, in Louis XIV, who at the end of his life believed himself to be almost superhuman, Henrietta escaped, by the strong sense of humour which was her father's best legacy to her. However obsequious her attendance and however regal her robes, she knew at heart that she was but a woman of flesh and blood as the rest; but the more subtle workings of the poison of flattery she could not escape, and the great weakness of her diplomacy--a weakness which that of her husband shared to the full--was her inability to appreciate that things precious to her were not necessarily so to other people, and that her friends and her