Henrietta, who was always brave in illness, had hoped that the physical miseries from which she suffered would disappear with her confinement. Instead, she found herself rather worse than better. "The most miserable creature in the world, who can write no more"[304]--thus she describes herself in a letter to her husband written from her bed, and containing an account of her ailments. To crown all, she found that it was impossible for her to remain at Exeter. Essex was on her track, and to all the entreaties for a safe conduct to Bath, which she addressed to him by means of a French agent named Sabran who happened to be with her, he returned answers which in the circumstances were brutal. The Queen was no concern of his, he said. Henrietta, fearing above all things in her weak state the noise of firing which a siege would involve, dragged herself from her bed a few days after the birth of her baby, whose helpless life she confided to one of her attendants, the Countess of Morton. Accompanied by Jermyn and by her devoted confessor, Father Philip, she fled still farther into the western peninsula, down to that strange land beyond Truro which was then hardly considered a part of England, and where still lingered the accents of the Cornish tongue. There in the castle of Pendennis, which guarded the village of Penycomequick,[305] she found a refuge. She was indeed in a sad plight. Mayerne himself believed "that her days would not be many," and a compassionate Cornish gentleman wrote to his wife that "here is the woefullest spectacle my eyes yet ever looked on, the most worne and weake pitifull creature in ye world, the poore Queen shifting for an hour's liffe longer."[306]