This was the home in which Lady Strange spent the best part of the years of her married life, happily enough in the domestic relations of wife and mother, but hampered by the public and political complications in France, which were for ever hindering the payment of the money supplies belonging to her by inheritance, and troubled by yearly increasing anxiety for the disturbed condition of her adopted country. Charles, from the beginning of his reign, had given great offence to the nation by the taxations which he strove to impose upon it for the carrying on of his foreign wars. This discontent was aggravated by the favour which he showed to the Duke of Buckingham. The Duke had not merely a voice in every question of State affairs, for which privilege he did his royal master the doubtful service of defending him against the Parliamentary attacks which daily gathered in angry strength, but he crowned all by aspiring to and obtaining the command set on foot for the assistance of the Huguenots against the forces of Richelieu, which were beleaguering the city of la Rochelle. Buckingham’s religious convictions were however considerably less strong than his anger against the Cardinal, to whom his behaviour had begun to give offence ever since the day when he first set foot in the French Court and had cast amorous eyes upon Anne of Austria, the beautiful wife of Louis XIII. Buckingham took his fleet to Rochelle, having persuaded Charles that the expedition would be regarded with special favour by the English nation, since it was to contend for Protestantism and Protestants against the proud Romanist arch-priest. This might in a measure have proved to be the case had the undertaking been successful; and, since there is nothing that succeeds like success, it might have turned the whole course of subsequent events for Charles. But George Villiers was not of the stuff to measure arms with Armand de Richelieu, whose axiom was that there was “no such word as fail”—and the expedition was a total fiasco. Buckingham returned to England to organise a second attempt; but while waiting at Portsmouth for this purpose, he died by the hand of the assassin Felton.