There is a story that Queen Henrietta Maria did penance under the gallows at Tyburn in expiation of the blood of the martyrs who had suffered thereon. That it was a matter of public report there can be no doubt, as we may read in the “_Reply of the Commissioners of his Majesty the King of Great Britain, to the proposition presented by Mons. le Maréschal de Bassompierre, Ambassador Extraordinary from his most Christian Majesty_.”[61] “They (_the Bishop of Mande and his priests_) abused the influence which they had acquired over the tender and religious mind of her majesty, so far as to lead her a long way on foot, through a park, the gates of which had been expressly ordered by Count de Tilliers to be kept open, to go in devotion to a place (_Tyburn_) where it had been the custom to execute the most infamous malefactors and criminals of all sorts, exposed on the entrance of a high road; an act, not only of shame and mockery towards the queen, but of reproach and calumny of the king’s predecessors, of glorious memory, as accusing them of tyranny in having put to death innocent persons, whom these people look upon as martyrs, although, on the contrary, not one of them had been executed on account of religion, but for high treason. And it was this last act, above all, which provoked the royal resentment and anger of his Majesty beyond the bounds of his patience, which, until then, had enabled him to support all the rest; but he could now no longer endure to see in his house, and in his kingdom, people who, even in the person of his dearly beloved consort, had brought such a scandal upon his religion; and violated, in such a manner, the respect due to the sacred memory of so many great monarchs, his illustrious predecessors, upon whom the Pope had never attempted, nor had ever been able, to impose such a mark of indignity, under pretext of penitence, or submission due to his see.” That Charles I. believed this story, there can be but little doubt, for, on July 12, 1626, he writes to his Ambassador in France: “I can no longer suffer those that I know to be the cause and fomenters of these humours, to be about my wife any longer, which I must do if it were but for one action they made my wife do; which is to make her go to Tyburn in devotion to pray, which action can have no greater invective made against it than the relation.”