Henrietta Maria's life was a failure. She failed to commend either her person, her religion, or her political ideals, and she brought her husband a degree of unpopularity which without her he might have escaped. Her circumstances were hard. She could not help being a Catholic, nor the fact that under her womanly softness lay the absolutism which was in the Bourbon blood. Like Charles, she was called upon to weather a storm which she had not raised, and she had not inherited with her father's temperament and charm his unrivalled political sagacity. Moreover, she had to win her private happiness by humouring a despotic and difficult-tempered man, and she could hardly be expected to recognize that that man, in marrying her, had made, on public grounds, the greatest mistake of his life. James I, whose ideas were always too large for his circumstances, had dreamed of securing England's place in the comity of nations by marrying his son to the daughter of one of the great Catholic houses. The result was not increased honour abroad, but hatred at home, such hatred as Henrietta in her early life was unable even to suspect. Accustomed in her own land to see Catholic and Protestant dwelling at least outwardly in peace together, knowing that the Catholic faith was professed at most of the Courts and among most of the peoples of Europe, she could not appreciate the insularity of the English mind which saw in every Catholic a political assassin wearing the colours of the Pope and the King of Spain; nor was she aware of the historical facts, which if they did not justify, at least explained this point of view. And as she failed to understand England, so she failed to understand Europe. The outstanding fact of continental politics was the long duel which was going on between France and the House of Austria. France was eventually to be the victor, but it was to be a hard struggle, and few were sharp-sighted enough to see in the splendid Spain of Philip IV the signs of a decadence which had already set in. But Henrietta's blindness was more than a dimness of sight, which she shared with Cromwell and others of the great ones of her age. It hid from her that which it was essential to her to know, namely, that this struggle underlay the whole policy of her native land. Thus she failed to understand the real causes of the enmity with which Richelieu came to regard her and her husband, and thus in later days she was unable to grasp the attitude of Mazarin, or to appreciate why it was impossible that he should give her the fullness of succour for which she asked.