Marie de Medici, the queen-mother, had obtained the highest reputation for sanctity, charity, and prudence. Of her beauty, those charms which could rival the attractions of the famed Gabrielle d’Estrées, the chroniclers of the day speak loudly. In the affections of her royal husband she had, however, suffered, not so much from the influence of her rival’s comeliness, as from the wit and vivacity of Gabrielle’s conversation. Like her son, Marie de Medici was slow in speech, and the French accounted her dull and uninteresting; but, for the “main grounds of attending to her profit or her power,” she was, writes an eye-witness of her career for four years,[414] “provident enough, and her commanding and high spirit, caused her to be obeyed in all in which she was permitted to meddle.”[415] And the event justified this opinion. Her daughter-in-law, Anne of Austria, daughter of Philip the Third of Spain, had been several years the wife of Louis the Thirteenth, when Charles and Buckingham saw her in all the perfection of her youthful loveliness at Paris. Born in the year 1602, Anne must have been at this time in her twenty-second year. She is described as having been, at the age of fifteen, when (having been married the year previously by proxy) she was first introduced to her royal consort, singularly attractive. An ancient lady of the court drew a lively picture of her appearance to Madame de Motteville. “The first time that she saw the Queen,” said that chronicler of other days, “she was seated upon cushions, after the Spanish fashion, surrounded by a number of ladies; she was dressed in green satin, embroidered with gold and silver; her sleeves hanging, but caught up on the arm with immense diamonds, serving as buttons. She had on a close ruff; and on her head a small hat, of the same colour as her gown, from which hung a plume of Heron’s feathers, adding, by their dark hue, to the beauty of her hair, which was extremely light, and frizzed in large curls.”[416] Such, in early youth, was the appearance of that Princess whose attractions proved eventually a source of peril and discredit to Buckingham. Her portraits give us no idea of a beauty so commanding as that which is implied by the extraordinary influence of her attractions; but it is probable that, like that of most Spanish women, it faded prematurely, and that her great charm consisted in the gaiety of her temper; in her sweetness and generosity of character; and in a certain sentimental turn of gallantry, which she conceived not to be incompatible with female virtue. At the period of Charles’s first visit to Paris, Marie de Medici still ruled paramount over the weak character of her son. It had been her aim, even before the death of Henry the Fourth, to win the cold affections of her only offspring, as well as those of the son of her rival, the Marquis de Verneuil, to herself. At the time when Anne of Austria, a child, gave her hand to