Henry was old enough to feel the separation from his brother and sister, to whom he was much attached. "I trust you omit not to pray diligently, as I do, day and night, that it may please God to restore us to happiness and to each other," he wrote with precocious seriousness to Charles, "I have a bow and arrow, with a beautiful quiver, tipped with silver, which I would fain send you, but I fear it may fall into the enemy's hands."[8] In another letter he tells Charles that "Rupert is here, blythe and well, safe and sound," that he is beginning to talk, and that his first words were "Praise the Lord", spoken in Bohemian.[9] In the following year, 1621, Rupert was very ill with a severe cold, and Henry wrote to his grandfather, King James:--"Sir, we are come from Sewneden to see the King and Queen, and my little brother Rupert, who is now a little sick. But my brother Charles is, God be thanked, very well, and my sister Elizabeth, and she is a little bigger and stronger than he."[10] A quaint mixture of childishness and precocity is noticeable in all his letters. "I have two {9} horses alive, that can go up my stairs; a black horse and a brown horse!" he informed his grandfather on another occasion.[11] Frederick, an affectionate father to all his children, was especially devoted to his eldest son, whom he made his constant companion. Of Rupert also we find occasional mention in his letters. "The little Rupert is very learned to understand so many languages!"[12] he says in 1622, when the child was not three years old. In another letter, dated some years later, he writes to his wife: "I am very glad that Rupert is in your good graces, and that Charles behaves so well. Certes, they are doubly dear to me for it."[13] But the Queen, so universally beloved and belauded, does not appear to have been a very affectionate mother. A devoted wife she unquestionably was, but she did not exert herself to win her children's love. "Any stranger would be deceived in that humour, since towards them there is nothing but mildness and complaisance,"[14] wrote her son Charles in after years; and, though Charles himself had little right so to reproach her, there was doubtless some truth in the saying. She had not been long at the Hague before she obtained from the kindly Stadtholder the grant of a house at Leyden, "where," says her youngest daughter, Sophie, "her Majesty had her whole family brought up apart from herself, greatly preferring the sight of her monkeys and dogs to that of her children."[15]