Thus by December, 1660, she had made up her mind to return to France; and after a parting saddened by the recent death of her eldest daughter, the Princess of Orange, who died of smallpox in London, she set out. Her journey was delayed by the serious illness of Princess Henrietta at Portsmouth, so that she did not reach Paris until the February of the next year. She was welcomed with much affection by her many friends, but perhaps the marriage of her daughter Henrietta, the daily companion of fifteen years, which took place with great éclat at the Palais Royal, made her life too lonely; for after the birth of the young wife's first child, a little girl to whom she was godmother, she determined to set out again for England, and report had it that there she meant to live and die. Her eldest son had just married a princess of Portugal, whose acquaintance she was anxious to make, and royal tact led her to add that she also wished to see the little daughter who had recently been born to the Duke and Duchess of York. There was no lack of heartiness in the welcome of her sons. Both Charles and James put to sea to meet her; but, owing to stormy weather, their boat was driven back, and the Queen's first welcome was the joyous salvos of Dover which answered the thunder of the guns of Calais. None but the most formal accounts remain to tell of Henrietta's impressions of her daughter-in-law, Catherine of Braganza. She can hardly have been pleased with the insipid girl whose bigoted piety and dull precision of character were not calculated to win the heart of an intellectual roué such as Charles II, who in women preferred a sparkling wit even to beauty. His mother, whose happy married life had made her shudder at the very name of illicit love, was no doubt judiciously blind where her sons were concerned; but she must have felt for this poor child whose chances of happiness were from the beginning very small. The two queens found a common interest in religion. Catherine was indeed _dévote_ as Henrietta had never been; but the elder woman had throughout her life given sufficient proof of zeal, and she had recently written a letter to the Pope, informing him that the chief reason of her return to England was her desire to advance the Catholic religion in that land. The Court of Rome was getting weary of the ungrateful island on which "missioners, seminaires, regulars, seculars, archpriests, interposition of Princes, and what not,"[425] had all been thrown away. But Henrietta, true to her sanguine nature, still hoped to be the saviour of the English Catholics. Her chapel at Somerset House was once more the resort of the faithful, where hundreds abjured the heresy of their birth, some of which conversions were so amazing as to merit a place in the memoirs of Father Cyprien. Above all, the Queen knew that her eldest son, whose private opinions varied between the tenets of Hobbes and those of the Church of Rome, would have liked to be tolerant.