HENRIETTA MARIA OF FRANCE,

QUEEN OF CHARLES THE FIRST.

THE fair and ill-fated consort of one of England's most unfortunate sovereigns is entitled, from the peculiar circumstances in which she was placed, to the utmost lenity. Not sixteen when called upon, in the onerous position of queen, to sway the agitation of parties already influenced by violent prejudice against each other, she found religion employed as a subterfuge for republicanism, and herself, from the nature of her creed, regarded, upon her arrival in England, with a suspicious dislike, which incensed the bigotry she had perhaps otherwise never evinced. Her education, also, had been calculated to pervert the accuracy of her judgment. A beautiful and spoiled child, nursed amidst court intrigue, descended from a king whose dazzling qualities threw a false lustre over his many and inexcusable faults, she was early taught to view truth through a distorted medium; so that, in the retrospect, it is conceivable that even the horror of her father's assassination, after escape from "fifty conspiracies," partook less of tragic reality than of exciting romance. After his death, left under the influence of her haughty mother, she necessarily imbibed much of her bigotry and pride; an effect maintained for some period after her marriage by continued correspondence with the French court, and the pernicious and interested counsels of priests and dependants.

Henrietta Maria was born at the Louvre, November 25, 1609, being the youngest child of Henri the Fourth of France and Marie de Medicis, his second wife. Her birth was heralded by the king's concession to his consort's reiterated desire that her coronation should be celebrated without further delay; Henri's previous reluctance to that ceremony having been excited by the jealousy of his artful mistress, the Marchioness de Verneuil, and by her employment of fortune-tellers to prognosticate that he would not survive the coronation of the queen a single day.

At length, after every representation, though urged for "three

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entire days" by Sully, in behalf of his beloved master's misgivings, had failed to induce the queen to forego her wishes, it was agreed that the enthronement should take place on the 13th of the following May.

In the dark consummation of the fatal tragedy we cannot wonder that the previous and subsequent conduct of Marie should have caused her to be regarded as implicated; for, beside ill terms subsisting between the royal pair, the queen is said to have been "ni assez surprise, ni assez affligée" at the intelligence. The Duc d'Epernon, previously almost paralyzed by infirmity, at once manifested a revival of energy which enabled him to secure the regency to the politic widow of the murdered monarch; in fact, it is too evident that every preparation had been made to remove those obstacles which an uncrowned queen, during the lifetime of her divorced predecessor (Margaret de Valois), might otherwise have experienced.

The years of infancy even of illustrious personages, as being anterior to their future greatness, present little of interest in detail. Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, afterwards Pope Urban the Eighth, named the princess after both her parents, and the two earliest occasions of her appearance in public were the contrasting and rapidly successive spectacles of her mother's coronation and her father's funeral. For some time the monotony of her life was unbroken, except by the festivities attendant upon the accession of her young brother, Louis the Thirteenth; the companionship of Gaston, afterwards Duke of Orleans; and the nuptials of her two sisters, Elizabeth to Philip the Fourth of Spain, and Christine to Amadée Victorio the Tenth, Duke of Savoy. Her attachment to her mother, which was ardently returned, amounted to a species of idolatry, and she early evinced strong inclinations towards music and painting; while a religious education, enthusiastically conducted by a Carmelite religieuse, rendered her faith in the tenets of her church strict and decided. Very early also did this little princess give promising tokens of that extreme fascination of manner and sweetness of disposition which, added to rare beauty, and a voice of the most thrilling melody, constantly elicited the admiration of her countrymen, before whom it was the policy of those in power to present her, in order to diminish their own unpopularity. Alternate fêtes and civil feuds, involving much personal vicissitude-by flight and participation of the queen-mother's imprisonment-formed, however, a most unfit discipline for her character. In fact, the records of the time are replete with the quarrels and reconciliations of Marie and the king her son, and the elevation and depression of the favourites of each.