Part 14

But now his mother, who lived remote from him and had never come into his life but to bring doom with her, like the terrible, mysterious queen in Maeterlinck's _Mort de Tintagiles_, reappeared. What was the exact secret of her hold, what fears she worked on, what hopes she appealed to, cannot be said; but her effect was like the effect of blackmail. The young Earl with the ardent ambition and the noble ideals yielded--with what anguish the indecision of his whole future career indicates--to the inexplicable influence of his mother. One of the first steps in that life of brilliant promise was one of treachery. The would-be saviour of England secretly trafficked with the Court of St. Germain. Nor was he allowed to stand forth as an open champion of the Stuarts whom he could not love; he was made to remain at Whitehall as William of Orange's chief and most confidential Minister in order that his mother and the Jacobites might know all that was going on there. That such a man as Shrewsbury could continue to play this double game long was impossible. His pleas to be allowed to resign the seals of office were pitiable, and his behaviour, when his treachery was finally denounced and King William nobly and secretly gave him the chance to clear himself by a lie which he professed to believe, was painful. The King's attitude on this occasion gave him a fresh chance; he took it but to betray it and his own better nature. At last his conscience could endure the strain no longer; he left office and the country after a veritable martyrdom of ten years. "Had I a son," he said, "I would sooner bind him a cobbler than a courtier, and a hangman than a statesman."

After the death of his mother, who, if not wilfully, at least heartlessly, contributed quite as much as his own temperament to the ruin of his career, he returned to England in Queen Anne's reign. But now, though his country, still believing in him, "called" him and he tried to respond, it was too late. He flung all his influence on the side of liberty and Protestantism, but his statecraft was demoralised by his past experiences, and his opportunity, which seldom comes to a man more than once, had been bungled in the previous reign. Like his mother, he too was born out of his fitting age. In the more congenial atmosphere of our day he would have won something more worthy of his great talents than his dukedom and garter. To his lofty ambition such prizes were of small account beside what his soul lost in grandeur.

Of all tragedies those of one's ideals are the saddest. The lives of statesmen who have failed are always interesting, and as English history is full of such the book that may some day record them will be worth both reading and writing. In such a work, of a surety, the career of the first and only Duke of Shrewsbury, who set out not to win fame and fortune, but to do what he believed right, and miserably failed, will be not the least dramatic. Like Tyrconnel, he was more sinned against than sinning; to be forgotten by posterity as they are is not so dreadful as to have the faint memory of them revived by the fleeting mention of some "Wanton Shrewsbury" or other. To us the marring of her son seems the greatest of this Messalina's crimes.

"MADAME"--HENRIETTA, DUCHESS OF ORLEANS

THE FRENCH COURT--THE EVIL GENIUS OF THE RESTORATION

As she was French in all but her birth, the favourite sister of Charles II. can only be said to belong to the Court of the Restoration by courtesy. Nevertheless, on the occasion of her two short visits to England during her brother's reign the impression she created was so lasting, so sympathetic, that posterity, like her own generation, has agreed that of all the women who graced Whitehall the most fascinating was Madame.

She was born in the thick of the Civil War at Exeter, whither her mother had fled, and from which soon after her birth the _Reine Malheureuse_ was also obliged to flee, leaving her child to the care of the faithful Lady Dalkeith. On the capitulation of Exeter the royal infant fell into the hands of the Parliament, to which the charge of such a prisoner was extremely embarrassing. It was, however, relieved from its dilemma by Lady Dalkeith, who was a woman of courage and resource. For Cromwell, very rightly looking upon every adherent of the Stuarts as a possible conspirator, decided to dismiss her and confine the tiny princess at St. James's, under his own supervision, whereupon Lady Dalkeith promptly fled the country with her charge.

The story of their flight to Dover on foot, clad in the rags of peasants--a disguise to which the little girl had such an objection that she angrily announced to all they met, "that she was not a peasant boy, but the Princess Henrietta of England"--when related at the French Court no doubt excited a suitable thrill. But Parliament was not ridiculous enough to pursue such fugitives, and they crossed to Calais in the ordinary French packet. Such was Madame's _début_ on the theatre of life. She was two years old at the time. Fifteen years later she again appeared before the public as a star, so to speak,--a _rôle_ in which she scored a brilliant popular success. Like most such intervals, these intervening years were obscure, hard, discouraging.

For Queen Henrietta Maria, widowed, exiled, and impoverished to the condition of shabby gentility, was not a cheerful mother to live with. She was always weeping, praying, and plotting, and her _enfant de bénédiction_ had a cheerless childhood. Rooms had been assigned to the Queen of England at the Louvre, and the sum of forty thousand livres had been voted her by the Parliament of Paris. But it was soon _mangé_ by her son and his beggared followers, and there was often real misery in that little Court at the Louvre.

The famous Cardinal de Retz, who during the Fronde was a sort of king in Paris, describes with his mocking pity the state in which he discovered the English royalties when one day in mid-winter affairs obliged him to call on Henrietta Maria.

"You see," said the _Reine Malheureuse_, whom he found at the bedside of her daughter, who as a child was thought to be consumptive, "I am keeping Henrietta company; I dare not let the poor child rise to-day as we have no fire."

"The truth was," adds de Retz ironically, "that no tradespeople would trust her for anything. Posterity will hardly believe that a princess of England, granddaughter of Henry the Great, had wanted a faggot in the month of January to get out of bed in the Louvre, and in the eyes of the French Court! We read in history with horror of baseness less monstrous than this, and the little concern I have met with about it in most people's minds has obliged me to make a thousand times this reflection: _That examples of times past move men beyond comparison more than those of their own times_. _We accustom ourselves to what we see, and I doubt whether Caligula's horse being made a consul would have surprised us so much as we imagine._"

Owing to the cynical de Retz, it no doubt consoled Henrietta Maria to be assured that "a princess of England would not keep her bed the next day for want of a faggot."

But his generosity seems to us to have been prompted from a far less noble impulse than that of the chivalrous Duke of Ormond. For this Bayard of the British peerage sold his order of the Garter for the benefit of his Queen, and was "compelled to put himself in prison, with other gentlemen, at a pistole a week for his diet."

These days of adversity, however, came to an end, and after the Fronde was subdued Henrietta Maria enjoyed all the privileges of her royal birth. Not that she availed herself of them; on the contrary, grief had taken most of the joy out of life for her, and though she lived in the closest intimacy with her sister-in-law, Anne of Austria, the Regent, and in the midst of a brilliant Court, she was scarcely ever seen out of her own apartments. But grief did not kill Henrietta Maria's ambition. She longed to see a crown on her daughter's head. So the young princess, who shared her mother's rigid seclusion, was carefully educated with the secret object of making a suitable consort for her cousin, the young King.

In looking back on these dreary years of girlhood Henrietta could remember but a single joy they had contained. It was a joy, however, so great that its memory coloured this entire period. This was the real affection that her brother Charles, alone of mortals, during an all too fleeting visit to Paris, evinced for her. The emotional child, whose affections were being choked by the austerity of her mother's life, paid back her brother's kindness to her with compound interest. He began by treating her as a plaything with which he liked to toy in an idle moment and ended by making her his friend and confidante. To her he was like a hero of romance. No one in that graceless, dashing crowd of exiled Cavaliers, whom necessity had turned into adventurers, followed his fortunes with such an eager sympathy. No one in those long years of baffled hopes and fruitless efforts was more firmly convinced that he would come to his own again. When his star had completely vanished in the dazzling sunlight of Cromwell, when even the astute Mazarin believed that the throne of England was for ever lost to the Stuarts, the insignificant Henrietta in her dreary room at the Louvre never despaired. It is perhaps only a girl who could, under such circumstances, have maintained such an unshaken faith. Charles never forgot it. Cynical and insincere with all, he remained to the last ever frank and true to his sister. She wished no greater reward.

Owing to the simplicity of her life no one in the brilliant French Court remarked the almost imperceptible development of those spiritual charms that were to turn an obscure princess into a fascinating queen of hearts. As a child she was not at all pretty, and all her physical defects were heightened by perpetual colds, and toothaches, and sore eyes. The complete lack of taste with which her mother dressed her, and a certain blue-stocking air that her intellectual cramming gave her were, moreover, little calculated to excite admiration. It was, on the face of it, absurd to imagine that Louis, palpitating with youth and health and pride and the joy of life, would dream of choosing such a princess for his queen. Pride alone would have prevented him from placing on the throne beside him one whom he considered as a poor relation living on his charity. Besides, his boy's head at the time was full of Mazarin's nieces; he was kissing Hortense, flirting with Olympe, and plighting undying troth with Marie.

Henrietta Maria, however, had learnt nothing from her prolonged lessons in defeat; she was one of those women who resist, not from obstinacy, but from habit. Having set her heart on seeing her daughter Queen of France she intrigued accordingly. The most important accomplice in the making of the match was Anne of Austria, the King's mother. The relations between the sisters-in-law were of the most cordial description, and Anne, like an anxious mother terrified lest her favourite son should make a _mésalliance_--an event that in Louis' case seemed quite likely--decided that the sooner he was married the better. Of course she had a list of marriageable princesses to choose from, but as in her anxiety there was no time to be lost her choice was confined to one of two on the spot. These were "La Grande Mademoiselle" and the Princess Henrietta, both of whom were her nieces; but as no love was lost between Anne and the former, the princess of England who had lacked a faggot to warm herself by suddenly found herself arrived within measurable distance of the throne of France.

To facilitate matters Anne gave a dance in honour of Henrietta, who was then eleven and very precocious, if equally unattractive, for her age. The young King, who by all the rules of etiquette, which he observed so faithfully in after life, should have offered his hand to his cousin, accorded this honour, to his mother's dismay, to the Duchesse de Mercoeur, the eldest of the beautiful nieces of Mazarin. Anne, who though now no longer Regent, nevertheless deluded herself with the thought that her influence over her son was still paramount, was covered with mortification and lost her head. She went up to her son and ordered him to dance with his cousin. But the expression on Louis' face warned the observant Henrietta Maria that another humiliation was imminent for her, and she tried to avert it with a tact that was hardly to be expected of her by at once intervening between the mother and son, declaring that her daughter had hurt her foot and could not dance.

"Well, then," cried the exasperated Anne, "if Henrietta does not dance neither shall Louis."

The boy, intensely mortified at the scene his mother was making before the whole Court, was quick to guess her motive. Having led the Duchesse de Mercoeur back to her seat, he went up sulkily to his cousin and asked her to dance. But the next day when Anne, who had had time to cool, coaxingly explained to him her plans for his marriage, he replied firmly, with all the pride of a boy of seventeen, "that he did not like little girls."

Anne of Austria did not patiently brook attempts to thwart her, but in this instance by wisely discerning her master in her son she managed to marry him--in his own good time--to another niece, the daughter of her brother, the King of Spain. As for the Queen of England, her disappointment was very bitter, and she wept and prayed and plotted against Cromwell more than ever. While Henrietta returned to her former obscurity, and though she did not cherish resentment against Louis, for whom she cared quite as little as he cared for her, she did not forget the slight she had received from him.

At last the day of triumph she had anticipated for her brother arrived.

When the news reached Paris of the _gaudeamus_ with which Charles II. was received in England, Henrietta Maria and her daughter were transported with joy. The sister of the King of England became at once a _partie_ eagerly sought after. Among those who wished to marry her was the Emperor. She, however, willingly consented to the proposal for her hand made by France on behalf of Monsieur, Louis XIV.'s brother, not because she loved him, but because such an alliance was to the interest of her own brother. This marriage was no sooner arranged, to the great satisfaction of Henrietta Maria, to whom the thought of her daughter on the steps of the French throne was almost as pleasing as the sight of her on the throne itself would have been, than the Queen and the Princess went to England to share in the triumph of King Charles.

Without detailing the events of this visit, on which Henrietta's right to be classed among the beauties of the Court of Whitehall rests, quite as much as on the fact of her birth, it will be sufficient to say that it was a success. With the restoration of Charles to the throne of his ancestors, Stuarts of every degree of consanguinity had flocked to London. They came from all over Europe, rich and poor, blood relations and collaterals; there never had been in the history of the family such a reunion. As most of them wanted something, a young king in the hour of victory could not but be generous; offices and honours rained on Stuarts of Blantyre and Stuarts of Richmond; places and pensions on aunt-Queens of Bohemia, on princely cousin Ruperts, and dowager sisters of Orange. Retrenchment was a word that had not been invented to frighten nations with in that day. But of all her family the one who got the lion's share of this prodigal profusion was the Princess Henrietta. The others took the wealth of the people, she won its heart.

In the bacchanal joy of the Restoration sentiment was conspicuous. The interest in the dramatic romance of the dynasty was heightened by the well-known sympathy between the King and his youngest sister. Though she had grown up unobserved in the French Court, England had been following her career. Cavaliers had noisily drunk her health on the Rhine, in the army of Condé, in the Highlands, and in whispers all over Cromwell-ridden England. Even the Puritans had heard with sentimental contempt--for there was sentiment in them too--of Charles Stuart's letters to the little girl in the Louvre, which bore the simple, pathetic address, "For my dear, dear sister." To this member of the family at least the nation was prepared to give no grudging welcome. The sudden and overwhelming gladness that had come into her life had transformed her into a fascinating girl of seventeen. Beautiful in the vulgar, plastic sense she was not, yet she created the impression of beauty. Like Madame de Pompadour, she possessed the _beauté sans traits_. The lights in her expressive eyes, the swift changes of her mobile face, spoke to all of the sympathy and gaiety of her temperament. The praises of Whitehall echoed in the coffee-houses, everybody talked of her, everybody wished to see her. Her public appearances were ovations. It was impossible to resist her smile. It was the smile of one who seems to desire nothing so much as to please. In a princess this is even more winning than tact in a king. "On dirait qu'elle demande le coeur," says M. Anatole France, "voilà le secret de Madame."

Money was as necessary to her as to any of the others of her family; _she_ had never had a farthing of her own. But to none of the Stuarts did the nation give so gracefully and so quickly. The House of Commons not only voted her a gift of ten thousand pounds, but sent her the money on the same day. But in the midst of all this popularity and joy a great gloom fell over Whitehall. Henrietta's youngest brother, the Duke of Gloucester, had died of small-pox just before she arrived in England; and now her only sister, the Princess of Orange, fell ill of the same disease and succumbed after a short illness. This tragedy occurring at such a time "wholly altered," says Evelyn, "the face and gallantry of the whole Court." Henrietta Maria, terrified lest she should lose her only surviving daughter, on whose future she built such high hopes, eagerly hastened to leave a country which seemed to bring nothing but disaster to her family. Their departure was facilitated by the impatience of the French Government to conclude the projected alliance with England--an impatience manifested through the anxiety of Monsieur in regard to the health of his _fiancée_. Within less than three months of leaving Paris for London the Princess was back in the city of her adoption, and shortly afterwards her marriage with the French king's only brother took place, by which she became, as regards rank, the second woman in the kingdom.

Those who remembered what an insignificant girl she had been were amazed at the change in her. It was not, however, she who had changed, but merely the light in which she had stood. Heretofore, because it had not considered her, the world took it for granted that she was not worth considering. But now as the wife of the first prince of the blood all eyes were turned upon her, while she, like an understudy who suddenly finds herself in the _rôle_ for which she has been trained, acted her part to the best of her ability. That she electrified the French Court as she had done Whitehall did not in the least surprise the few who had known her intimately; on the contrary, they confidently expected her success. Madame de Motteville, a shrewd observer who knew her well, had predicted that "when she appeared on the great theatre of the Court of France she would play one of the leading parts there."

To her the _ancien régime_ owed its two chief characteristics--its gaiety and its grace. She possessed "une vivacité d'esprit et une élégance de manières" that in casting their spell over women as well as men created a model which made France down to the Revolution the supreme arbiter of taste in Europe. Her own natural ability--a quality that very few of the Stuarts lacked--sharpened and refined by the careful education her mother had given her, made her readily discern true genius from its sham. The artistic and intellectual appealed to her strongly. In the searchlight that the people fix upon royalty she was never seen to better advantage than when in the company of the elect of the nation. If Louis XIV. may be compared to Augustus, Madame was his Mecænas. She more than he made his fame splendid. It was she who mined and refined the ore which Louis stamped with his name. La Rochefoucauld and Bussy-Rabutin, Bossuet and Boileau, Condé and Turenne, Madame de Sévigné and Madame de La Fayette, all alike found in her an eager, sympathetic, and even a critically discriminating admirer.

In her day the peasants did not count as human beings; they were considered either as food for cannon or the mine that produced the gold of the upper classes. When the "people" were spoken of it was the _bourgeoisie_, the Third Estate, that was meant. The distance between this class and the throne was so bridgeless that only a revolution, one hundred and fifty years in the building, could span it. But across even this vast space the fascination of Madame penetrated. In the sublime _oraison funèbre_ that the great Bossuet pronounced over her dead body, he merely stated the simple truth when he declared that the people of Paris shuddered when, like a clap of thunder, there resounded over the city the appalling news, "_Madame se meurt! Madame est morte!_"

That smile, "which seemed to ask for one's heart," had captured that of Paris as it had that of London.

Stories of her enthusiastic appreciation of genius were related everywhere, but none touched the people like those which showed her in the act of levelling the barriers between the idols of the masses and the heroes of the Court. Everybody knew that she wept over Racine. Everybody had heard how Boileau had been drawn from his obscurity by a quotation from his unknown poem with which she had greeted him, when passing by chance through an ante-room in which the poor poet was waiting to solicit the patronage of some great lord. Everybody remembered that she had stood sponsor to the child of Molière, and had "Tartuffe" acted in her own house before the King while the Church was condemning the play and demanding that the author should be burnt alive. In a country like France such things strike the imagination. With the "people" Madame could not but be popular.

At the same time she became "toute la joie, tout le plaisir de la cour." If the long reign of Louis XIV. had a gorgeous summer in Athenaïs de Montespan, and a bleak winter in Madame de Maintenon, brightened for a brief moment by the sunshine of the lovely Duchess of Burgundy, it had a joyous spring in Henrietta of England. This Golden Age of France, as it has been termed, was never so happy as when Madame infected Fontainebleau and Versailles with her gaiety.