Walter Montagu, after his hasty flight from England, had been received with rather unexpected kindness by Richelieu. He spent, however, most of his exile at Pontoise, where he made friends with Mother Jeanne Séguier,[265] a lady who combined the professions of a Carmelite nun and of a political intriguer, and to whom he probably owed an acquaintance with the rising Mazarin, which was rapidly ripening into friendship. But, in spite of the seduction of French affairs, he did not forget the lady to whom his allegiance was pledged; and in the late spring of 1642 he hurried to Holland to give advice in matters where his intimate knowledge of the French Court was invaluable. For Henrietta's eyes were turning to her native land as a possible refuge in case of the worst. She had wished to go to Cologne, where her poor old mother lay sick to death; but her masters in Holland forbade her. Ireland, which had been suggested, seemed "a strange place"; so sometimes she thought she would go to her beloved nuns in the Faubourg S. Jacques, and there, where she had been so happy, hide her humiliated head in case of her husband's discomfiture. She knew that Richelieu hated her, and she deeply resented the attitude taken up by the French ambassador in London; but she thought, and thought justly, that Louis XIII, or rather the Cardinal, would not, for very shame, refuse her, a daughter of France, an asylum in the extremity to which her affairs had come. Her Grand Almoner, Du Perron, who had not felt it necessary to risk himself in England again, wrote from Paris that she would be given entertainment in France in case of need. He also gave the welcome news that he was coming to see her on behalf of her brother the King, on receiving which intelligence her elastic spirits rose high with hope, so that she wrote friendly letters both to the great Cardinal himself and to Mazarin, with whom Montagu had smoothed her way. It was a comfort to feel that she had an assured retreat, for the news from England became more and more exciting. The setting up of the King's standard at Nottingham on August 22nd, 1642, made the war a reality. The first blood shed in civil strife since the battle of Bosworth was drawn at Powick Bridge on September 23rd, 1642. On October 23rd the first regular engagement between the rival armies took place at Edgehill.