Shortly before this missive was dispatched, the King had been moved to intolerable anger by the accounts presented to him of the infamous treatment of his Queen by her Popish entourage. In the early summer of 1626, Henrietta had asked to spend a certain time in retirement and devotion. After a quiet day passed in the services of her church at the chapel in St. James’s Park, she turned into Hyde Park, directing her walk towards Tyburn, whether by intention or not remains unknown. In any case, it was quite probable that, especially impressed by her religious seclusion, she bethought herself of those who, not so many years before, had suffered as martyrs on that gruesome spot for the very religion she held so dear. She knelt to pray for them, and perhaps for strength to bear her own weary lot. A week or two passed before the tale of her surreptitious visit to Tyburn reached the King. He was told that the Queen had been made to walk thither barefoot as a penance, and to offer up prayers for traitors who had ended their days on Tyburn gallows. Whitelock’s _Chronicle_ gives the Protestant version of the affair: “Distastes and jealousies were raised about the Government of the Queen’s Family; wherein the King held himself traduced by some of her French servants, who said that the King had nothing to do with them, he being an Heretick. “The Queen was brought to insist upon it, as part of the Articles, that she should name all her servants, and some unkindness arose upon it. The King was also distasted, that her Priests made the Queen to walk to Tyburn on Penance. “Upon these Passages the King dismist, and sent back into France all the Queen’s French Retinue, acquainting the French King with it, and excusing it to him; but it was ill resented in France, and by them held contrary to the Articles of Marriage.” That this was the account generally accredited and sedulously fostered by the anti-Romish party in the State, is further shown by a letter preserved in the Harleian MSS., written by Mr. John Pory, a well-known public man, who had been a Member of Parliament in 1610. After relating the dismissal of the servants and priests, he says: “No longer agon then upon St. James his day last, those hippocritical dogges made the pore Queen to walke afoot (some add barefoot) from her house at St. James to the gallowes at Tyborne, thereby to honor the Saint of the day in visiting that holy place, where so many Martyrs (forsooth) had shed their blood in defense of the Catholic cause. Had they not also made her to dable in the durte in a foul morning from Somersett House to St. James, her Luciferian Confessor riding allong by her in his Coach! Yea, they have made her to go barefoot, to spin, to eat her meat out of tryne dishes (wooden dishes), to waite at the table and serve her servants, with many other ridiculous and absurd penances.”