For on this journey she was at last resolved. Her health had not improved, and it was thought that she was suffering from the common English complaint, and was going into a decline. Probably she did not fear a rebuff from France, but she knew that she would have to fight for her departure with the House of Commons. Another, and perhaps an unexpected, obstacle presented itself. Mayerne vindicated his Puritanism by certifying that his royal patient was in no need of change of air, and that her malady was as much of the mind as of the body--a diagnosis which was probably correct but highly inconvenient. In this moment of almost universal reprobation, when even her co-religionists for whom she had done so much looked coldly on her, Henrietta may have found some consolation in the kindness of a number of women of London and Westminster, who, in a petition to Parliament against the proposed journey, not only dwelt upon the loss to commerce which would follow the removal of the Queen's Court, but added kind words of her, praising the encouragement she had given to the calling of Parliament, and saying, with much truth, that since her coming to England "she hath been an instrument of many acts of mercy and grace to multitudes of distressed people." Richelieu's answer to Henrietta's request for the hospitality of France was another grave disappointment. Never for one moment had the French Cardinal's vigilant eye been turned from England or its Queen. Madame de Chevreuse, Mary de' Medici, the Duke of Valette, the inclinations towards a Spanish alliance, all he had noted, and now was the day of reckoning. Not even in these closing years of triumph would he admit into France one who might scheme against his interests. The refusal was absolute, and in vain did Henrietta send a special agent to press her claims. The Cardinal was inexorable, and the excellent reasons which he gave for his decision--such as the certain ruin of the Catholics by the Queen's absence, and the danger in such desperate circumstances of leaving the country--failed to convince his correspondent that her request was refused solely for her own sake. So great was her mortification that she was unable to hide from her servants the chagrin which she felt that she, a daughter of France, the child of the great Henry, was refused in her sickness and sorrow the shelter of her native land.