There is little at first to connect Charles with Whitehall, but towards the end of the coronation year a curious scene took place there. The King, weary of the young Bishop and his twenty-nine priests who had come over with Henrietta Maria, decreed that they must return home. This they were very unwilling to do. With them were also to go an immense crew of attendants, whose vagaries disturbed both Whitehall and St. James’s. They exceeded in numbers even the four hundred who had formed the household of Henry, prince of Wales. Contemporary letters are full of their arrogance and greed. With the French priests came a crowd of English Jesuits and the like, whose position, as the law stood then, was wholly illegal. The story that Henrietta Maria had to do penance at the instance of her French confessor, by going barefoot to Tyburn to glorify the memory of the Gunpowder Conspirators, rests on very slight evidence. One thing is certain: if she went, it was at the instance of one of the English priests. Even at the present day few Frenchmen know anything of English history thirty years old. It was, however, one thing to resolve, another actually to get rid of these intruders. At first the King wrote to Buckingham, who was then at Paris, to try to persuade the queen-mother of the necessity of the step he contemplated, and, moreover, to ask her to “find a means to make themselves suitors to be gone.” Whether she complied or not, the Queen’s servants were far too well off to think of moving. Marshal Bassompierre came over in order to arrange matters, but without avail. His report of a stormy interview with Charles is a mass of bombast. The King, coming to Whitehall, and entering the Queen’s apartments to inform her that he must be obeyed—that he had put the matter into the hands of that stern soldier, Lord Conway, who had arranged everything—found “a number of her domestics irreverently dancing and curvetting in her presence.” He took her by the hand, led her into an adjoining chamber, and locked himself in with her. [Illustration: _The Guardroom, Scotland Yard_. _From an Etching by_ J. T. SMITH, 1805.] Meanwhile, Conway took the French Bishop and his priests into St. James’s Park, and informed them briefly of the King’s unquestionable causes of complaint, and of the arrangements made for their immediate departure. The Bishop refused to move, saying he regarded himself as an ambassador. Conway replied that he might regard himself as he pleased, but that if he did not depart peacefully he would be turned out by force.