“Never was monarch worthier to be so esteemed. He was a man of deep affections, and it was perhaps his most fatal quality where he loved to love too much. I have no grudge against that beautiful and most accomplished woman he so worshipped, and who was ever gracious to me; but I cannot doubt that Henrietta Maria was his evil star. She had the fire and daring of her father, but none of his care and affection for the people. The daughter of the most beloved of kings had the instincts of a tyrant, and was ever urging her too pliant husband to unpopular measures. She wanted to set that little jewelled shoe of hers on the neck of rebellion, when she should have held out her soft white hand to make friends of her foes. Her beauty and her grace might have done much, had she inherited with the pride of the Medici something of their finesse and suavity. But he loved her, Denzil, forgave all her follies, her lavish spending and wasteful splendour. ‘My wife is a bad housekeeper,’ I heard him say once, when she was hanging upon his chair as he sat at the end of the Council table. The palace accounts were on the table—three thousand pounds for a masque—extravagance only surpassed by Nicholas Fouquet twenty years afterwards, when he was squandering the public money. ‘My wife is a bad housekeeper,’ his Majesty said gently, and then he drew down the little French museau with a caressing hand, and kissed her in the presence of those greybeards.” “His son is strangely unlike him in domestic matters.”