The Queen watched the course of events with painful and unremitting anxiety. Nor was she a mere spectator. There yet exists the remarkable series of letters[266] which she addressed from Holland, some written by her own hand, some by that of a secretary, probably Henry Jermyn, to her husband. In them, more clearly than anywhere else, we see the working of Henrietta's fierce and determined mind at this crisis. How she urged Charles on, against the advice of more moderate counsellors, to take Hull by force, though Parliament had not begun hostilities. "Is it not beginning to put persons into it against your will?"[267] How she wished she were in the place of her son James, who was in that town. "I would have flung the rascal over the walls, or he should have done the same thing to me."[268] How she entreated and almost commanded the King to make no accommodation which would abate by one jot or tittle his royal power,[269] and how she threatened, in case he did not take her advice, to go to France instead of returning to England, "for to die of consumption of royalty is a death which I cannot endure, having found by experience the malady to be too insupportable."[270] How she exhorted him to take good heed that their children did not fall into the hands of the enemy, and to be faithful to the few friends whom she really trusted. It is evident that she was no wise guide for her unhappy husband, whose vacillations, born of a glimmering perception of the position of a constitutional King, roused her to scorn and almost to fury. She cannot be acquitted of having done all that lay in her power (which was much) to widen the breach between the King and his subjects in these early and critical days. Hers was the stronger spirit, and she knew it. The tone of her letters to "le roy monseigneur," if always loving is often peremptory, and sometimes even dictatorial, while she does not hesitate to show her contempt for his lack of decision and promptitude. She is ever exhorting him to courage, to energy, to vengeance. The day of mercy is gone, and it is time to give place to justice. Even her benedictions end in curses such as the Puritans excelled in heaping on the heads of their enemies and those of the Lord.[271] She had not for nothing sat at the feet of Richelieu. "Charles, be a King," is the burden of all her advice. In these letters to her struggling husband Henrietta seldom allows herself to give way; but the softer side of her nature, though often obscured by sterner elements, never wholly disappeared. "Pray to God for me," she wrote in her pain to Madame S. Georges; "for be assured there is not a more wretched creature in this world than I, separated from the King my lord, from my children, out of my country, and without hope of returning thence, except at imminent peril, abandoned by all the world, unless God assist me, and the good prayers of my friends, among whom I number you."[272]