A very girl Henrietta remained for several years after her marriage. Politics did not greatly interest her, and her trust in her husband was such that she turned aside from serious matters to employ herself in bright trifles, for, to the _joye de vivre_, which came to her from her father, she added a delight in all that was pretty, which recalls her descent from Florence and the Medici. She had, also, a taste for the grotesque which was common in her day, and she long kept at her Court a pugnacious dwarf, by name Geoffrey Hudson, who, later on, during the exile, caused her considerable embarrassment by killing a gentleman in a duel. There is ample evidence of her interest in dainty possessions and amusements. Now she is writing to Madame S. Georges for velvet petticoats from her Paris tailor, or "a dozen pairs of sweet chamois gloves and ... one of doe skin." Now she is receiving "rare and outlandish flowers," or asking her mother to send her fruit trees and plants for her gardens, whose "faire flowers" she so cherished as to merit the dedication by Parkinson the herbalist of his Paradisus Terrestris. Or, again, she is setting out with her lords and ladies to celebrate in good old English fashion the festival of May Day, and to witness all those pretty rights of country festivity over which the withering wind of the Civil War had not yet passed. "Marke How each field turns to a street: each street a Parke Made green and trimm'd with trees: see how Devotion gives each house a Bough Or Branch: each Porch, each doore, ere this An Arke a Tabernacle is Made up of white thorn neatly enterwove As if here were those cooler shades of love."[85] Nor was the Queen merely an idle spectator. No sooner did the first snowy May bush catch her eye than, with all the zest of a village maiden, she leaped from her fine coach, and breaking off a bough placed it merrily in her hat. In all the revels of the Court Henrietta's was the moving spirit, but her sweetness of temper prevented her energy from degenerating into domineering. She was never really popular with the people at large, on account of her race and her religion, and there were murmurs now and then at Court about her undue preference for the Scotch. But that in her own circle she was tenderly loved there can be no doubt. Innocent,[86] yet so sprightly that she sometimes gave scandal without suspecting it; gay, yet with moments of sadness which only solitude could relieve; open and talkative, yet faithful to conceal secrets, "for a queen should be as a confessor, hearing all yet telling nothing"; sympathetic with sorrow, yet chaffing unmercifully the _malades imaginares_ of a luxurious Court; delicate in consideration for the feelings of the meanest of her servants, yet gifted with a caustic tongue used at times rather unsparingly. Such was Henrietta Maria, Queen of England.