religious indignation of the people, the "divinity which hedges a King" was still strong enough to restrain him in some measure when referring to the Queen of England. No such scruple deterred him in speaking of a foreign ecclesiastic and of a foreign Queen, the latter of whom was hated, not only on religious grounds, but as the recipient of large sums of money--as much £100 per day--which the country could ill afford. Henrietta was becoming more and more busy with matters of high politics. It was evident that the Parliament was a failure, but one gleam of brightness cheered the darkness of its last days. Strafford, exerting to the utmost his unrivalled powers, was able to win over in some degree the Upper House, and the Lords by a considerable majority voted that the relief of the King's necessities should have precedence of the redress of grievances. It seemed a great victory, and Henrietta, dazzled by this unexpected success, recognized at last what the man was whom she had slighted. "My Lord Strafford is the most faithful and capable of my husband's servants,"[226] she said publicly, with the generosity of praise from which she never shrank. Nevertheless, there were those, justified by the event, who doubted the real value of such a service; the spirit of the Commons was not thus to be broken, and on May 5th the King dissolved the assembly which is known, from its twenty-three days of existence, as the Short Parliament. After the breaking of Parliament the deep discontent of the nation burst forth in riots and in a flood of scandalous pamphlets directed against unpopular characters. Henrietta, who was believed to have counselled the dissolution, lost much of the limited popularity she had hitherto enjoyed, and behind her again the populace saw the sinister figure of her mother stirring up strife in England as she had in France. Rosetti, who, as the symbol of the dreaded approximation to popery, was particularly odious, was thought to be in such danger of personal violence that Mary de' Medici offered him the shelter of her apartments. He refused, perhaps wisely; for a few days later a letter was brought to the King threatening to "chase the Pope and the Devil from St. James, where is lodged the Queene, Mother of the Queene." Mary, when she heard of this letter, was so frightened that she refused to go to bed at all the following night, though she was protected by a guard, captained by the Earl of Holland and Lord Goring, which had nothing to do, as the threat proved to be one of those empty insults of which the times were prolific.