Had she been a Protestant and a woman of profound sagacity, she might have saved her husband. As it was, by her reckless defiance of forces whose strength she was unable to appreciate, she hurried him to his doom. She lived at a great moment, and she had no greatness to meet it. Herein alone is her condemnation. She has received more than her fair share of blame, for she has been made the scapegoat of Charles' faults. The tragedy of her fate rivals that of Mary Stuart or of Marie Antoinette, but she missed the historical felicity of a violent death, so that she has failed to touch the popular imagination. Had she done so, the most charming queen who ever sat upon the English throne, the daughter of the man whom France still adores, would have been saved from a verdict at the tribunal of posterity which, if not altogether unjust, is totally inadequate. HENRIETTA MARIA CHAPTER I THE DAUGHTER OF FRANCE In this more than kingly state Love himself shall on me wait. Fill to me, Love, nay, fill it up; And mingled cast into the cup Wit and mirth and noble fires, Vigorous health and gay desires. ABRAHAM COWLEY On a May morning in the year of grace 1625, a young girl, watching in the Château of the Louvre in the city of Paris, was awaiting the greatest event which had yet come to disturb the tenor of her life; for, before the sun had set, she, Henrietta Maria of France, would be the betrothed wife of Charles, King of England. It was a brilliant match for the little Princess, the youngest child of Henry IV, King of France, and of his wife Mary de' Medici of the great Florentine House: she owed it in part to the far-reaching policy of the father she had never known, and in part to the exertions of her mother and of a new favourite of that lady, M. de Richelieu. As she was only fifteen years old[1] she was, perhaps, too young to enter into the political aspect of the matter, but she was fully alive to the social and ceremonial advantages to which it would entitle her: a few years before she had gazed with envy at the honours prepared for her elder sister, Christine, the bride of Savoy: now she could afford to think of them almost with contempt, for, to her, the bride of proud England, far more splendid homage was about to be offered. Nor, though the bridegroom was absent and both betrothal and wedding would have to be by proxy, was he unknown. Henrietta had seen him when he was in Paris on the return journey of his romantic expedition to Spain, and she knew that he was a tall and proper man, handsome in face and royal in bearing, with a certain melancholy persuasiveness of address which not even a slight stammer could spoil. "I do not think he need have gone quite so far as Spain for a bride," she had said then, with the freedom of her tender years; even now, nearly a year later, she felt such an interest in her prospective bridegroom, that by the help of an old servant she