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Art. VII.-Lives of the Queens of England. By Agnes Strickland. Vol. 8. pp. 478. London: Colburn.

FALLEN upon evil times, the queens of Charles the First, and Charles the Second suffered greatly, though from different causes. If the ties which bound them to their lords were severed in the one instance by the sword, in the other they were subjected to a slow corrosive process, which though less violent, was, perhaps, more painful. In the case of Henrietta Maria, it was an enemy who did it; but Catharine of Braganza was wounded in the house of her friend. The purifying storm which swept over England in the time of Charles the First, scattered for a time the domestic affections to the winds; but those affections and all others that were worth preserving, pined and withered in the noxious atmosphere of the court of Charles the Second.

The days of Henrietta Maria began in misfortune, and if she passed through life by a royal road, it only made her the more conspicuously wretched. She was born at the Louvre 25th November, 1609, N. s., and was only six months old when taken to attend the funeral of Henry the Great. Her next public appearance was in the cathedral at Rheims at the coronation of her brother Louis XIII., when she was ten months old. When between two and three years old, she was present at the nuptial festival of her sister Elizabeth with the king of Spain; and at the age of six years she accompanied her mother to Bourdeaux to deliver the young queen of Spain to her husband.*

It was during the escapade of Charles T. in his romantic expedition to Spain, in hopes of seeing the Infanta Maria Althea, and of expediting by his personal endeavours the match which every one else appeared to be occupied in delaying, that he saw for the first time the young daughter of Henri Quatre at the court of the Queen Regent, Mary de Medicis; and it appears to have been from Elizabeth of France, the young queen of Spain, that the proposal was first made to him to take for his wife her sister the princess Henrietta Maria. The objections to the match with the Infanta of Spain on the ground of her being a Roman-catholic, held good, also, with regard to the connexion with Henrietta, but not to the same extent. daughter of Henry the Great of France, once (and probably always in heart) a Protestant, was far more acceptable to the English people, than the grand-daughter of Philip 11., the most

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savage persecutor of the Protestants. They would certainly have preferred a Protestant princess, and their existing discontents were undoubtedly augmented and exascerbated by the consequences of the Catholic alliance. Pope Urban VIII. in some respects one of the best pontiffs who had ever filled the papal throne, and who had been one of the sponsors for the infant Henrietta, during his residence in France, when Cardinal Barbarini, was greatly averse to the match, from which he prognosticated nothing but misfortune: acutely enough forseeing, on the one hand, from the temper and sentiments of the English nation, that if the Stuarts should relax the penal laws against the Catholics, they must do it at the peril of their crown; and on the other, that if they followed out and enforced those enactments, the queen, as a Catholic herself, could enjoy no happiness in her adopted country. The two courts resolved, however, on the marriage, and the treaty contained two articles from which resulted the most lamentable consequences. The first was, that the children of the marriage should be brought up under the care of their mother till their thirteenth year; the other stipulated for a relaxation of the laws against the Catholics; and James 1. immediately acted on it, by ordering the release of all persons imprisoned for religion; the return of all fines levied on recusants; and the stoppage of the execution of all Papists convicted under the penal laws. To the former article we shall have occasion to refer hereafter; the enforcement of the latter was, as Pope Urban had predicted, the virtual commencement of the civil war. The objections of the pontiff appear to have been so strong, that he would not permit his nuncio to deliver his breve of dispensation for the marriage, till the queen-mother of France resolved to act without it. Had the first measures of Henrietta and her party in England been dictated by common prudence, much of the uneasiness which followed might have been avoided. It seems, however, to have been the intention of her mother, and the object of all her Roman Catholic attendants, to prevent the slightest concession on the part of the young queen to the opinions of her husband, or the wishes of his people. Though her mother could not accompany her, she put into her hand, at parting, a letter, of a tendency the most unwise, and containing directions the most inimical to her future peace and well-being, and of course to those of her husband.

The blame of Henrietta's conduct attaches most to her weak and bigotted mother, and the mischievous imbeciles with whom she surrounded her daughter; who at that period was a mere girl of sixteen, of unformed judgment and somewhat capricious temper, but capable under wiser management of better things.

Such too were the state and disposition of the United Kingdom at that time, with regard to politics and religion, that we much doubt whether Solomon himself, had he been a Romancatholic, could have exercised an influence over Charles 1. without serious detriment to his affairs.

Though the French attendants of the queen were dismissed, a good understanding between her and the king was not immediately established; and the complaints of Henrietta to her mother, were so frequent and serious, that the latter at length sent over the Duc de Bassompierre, a brave old comrade of Henri IV., and a man of talents and prudence, to inquire on the spot into the causes of the queen's dissatisfaction, and to take all necessary measures for removing them. He had so much regard for the daughter of his old friend, that finding the fault to be principally on her side, with perfect candour, and without regarding for the time her royalty, he treated her as a woman, remonstrated with her on her folly in constantly picking quarrels with the king, and treated her to a good sound lecture on the duties of a wife; and she, on her part, when her anger was over, had the good sense to perceive the value of his counsel, and to act accordingly: in consequence of which she secured the affections of her husband, and a life of uninterrupted domestic happiness for the next sixteen years.

In 1628 the queen gave birth to a son, who died, however, on the same day; but on the 29th of May, 1630, Henrietta presented her royal consort with another prince, afterwards Charles H., a remarkably plain child, who, with more consistency than he showed on most other points, grew up as ugly as he was born. The queen, herself, was fully conscious of his lack of comeliness; and there is an amusing letter written by her, to her former attendant, Madame St. George, in which she very candidly describes what Miss Strickland not unaptly calls 'the solemn ugliness of her fat baby. As this is the first record extant concerning Charles 11., having been written by his own mother in the first year of his life, we give the few lines of her letter in which it is embodied.

'MAMIE ST. GEORGE, -The husband of the nurse of my son going to France about some business of his wife, I write you this letter by him, believing that you will be very glad to ask him news of my son, of whom I think you have seen the portrait that I sent to the queen my mother. He is so ugly, that I am ashamed of him ; but his size and fatness supply the want of beauty. I wish you could see the gentleman, for he has no ordinary mien: he is so serious in all that he does, that I cannot help deeming him far wiser than myself.'-p. 60.

In 1663 the Duke of York was born, and named James, after his grandfather. From this time the royal pair lived happily together; the queen learned English, and studied to please her husband, and was rewarded with that success which ladies generally achieve when they make it their business to do so.

The destiny which overshadowed the house of Stuart, appears to have directed their good, as well as their bad, actions, to their disadvantage. The reception given by Charles to Mary de Medicis, the mother of his queen, when she was driven from France by the tyranny of her former creature, Richelieu, appears to have excited the hatred, and, of course, the uncompromising hostility of that base and cruel churchman. It operated to the disadvantage of the king in another and more important quarter, also that of the people of England. The plague of French locusts, which had accompanied Henrietta to this country, had made its second advent in the train of her mother.

'Henrietta related, with tears, to Madame de Motteville, 'how dreadfully the king was embarrassed by the extravagance of her mother's attendants; and when he could not find means to satisfy their rapacity, they had the folly and malignity to carry their complaints to parliament, and petition for larger allowances-that parliament which had viewed the visit of the queen-mother with inimical feeling, and had considered the circumstance of a second establishment for the Catholic worship at court with angry disgust.'p. 75.

In after life, Henrietta Maria dictated to her friend, Madame de Motteville, a tract, entitled, 'Abrégé des Revolutions d'Angleterre;' from which the following statement is taken by Miss Strickland, and to which we beg the attention of our readers, as shewing the opinion of Charles 1., of the book of Common Prayer :

'Henrietta declares, that when a vast number of books of Common Prayer were prepared to be sent to the Scotch (at the time of the liturgy being forced on that unwilling people), her husband, glad to take the opportunity of her attention being then forcibly drawn to the subject, brought her one of the Common Prayer Books, and sat down by her for a whole evening, and prevailed on her to examine it with him. He pressed on her notice the fact, which no living creature can deny, that though there is much in the mass-book not to be found in the Common Prayer Book, yet there are very few pages in the Common Prayer which are not supplied from the massbook and breviary. Henrietta's prejudices were scarcely neutralized by this conviction, for she adds directly, it was this fatal book which occasioned the first revolt in Scotland.' -p. 76.

In the critical aspect which the king's affairs began to assume, his difficulties were, on more than one occasion, much enhanced by the unguarded manner in which the queen allowed

herself to speak of state affairs. Perhaps no single incident contributed more to the final rupture between the king and the parliament, than the attempt of the former to arrest the five members of the commons, and its failure-and that failure was brought about entirely by the imprudence of the queen.

She only, was aware of the intention of the king to arrest the five members: to her he had said on leaving her, 'If you find one hour elapse without hearing ill news from me, you will see me, when I return, the master of my kingdom.' The queen sat with her watch in her hand till the hour had expired, and then, no longer able to contain herself, exclaimed to the lady in waiting, the Countess of Carlisle, Rejoice with me, for at this hour the king is, as I have reason to hope, master of his realm; for Pym and his confederates are arrested before now!' Lady Carlisle happened to be connected with, and in the interest of, some of these members of the parliamentary party; and having reason to believe that the king had not yet accomplished his treacherous and unconstitutional purposes, gave prompt notice to the parties concerned, of his intention. They escaped, and the king succeeded only in exposing himself to the opened eyes of his parliament, in all the nakedness of baffled tyranny. 'It would have been well,' says Miss Strickland, 'if Henrietta had heard and heeded the warning axiom of the Countess Tertsky, in Wallenstein, regarding the portentous nature of 'shouts before victory.' '*

Affairs soon afterwards took such a turn, that the king, on 23rd February, 1641-2, accompanied the queen to Dover, on her way to Holland, whither she betook herself, for the purpose of raising supplies for her husband, to enable him to resist the measures of the parliament. It was during her absence that Sir John Hotham refused to admit the king into the town of Hull, on which he had marched, for the purpose of securing the stores and magazines. This was the first overt act of the parliament against the king.

Into the politics of the day, or the course of the civil war, we cannot enter; but shall select a few of the most striking incidents in which the queen was concerned, by way of illustrating her character. Two of these incidents may serve to show us, the one, that she inherited some portion of that magnanimity which characterised her illustrious father; the other, that the influence of a Stuart atmosphere had somewhat clouded her perceptions as to the difference between meum and tuum.

On her return to England, under the convoy of Van Tromp, * They are not the words of the Countess Tertsky, but those of Wallenstein himself, addressed to the Countess. Vide the 'Piccolomini,' act fourth, scene seventh-the end.