Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 25.djvu/440

Henrietta Maria two Hothams, who, though they were in the service of the parliament, offered to betray to her Hull and Lincoln.

On 16 June Henrietta Maria arrived at Newark at the head of a small army which she was conducting to her husband. She lingered there in hopes of the surrender of Hull and Lincoln. On the 29th the two Hothams were arrested and their design was frustrated. On 3 July ‘her she-majesty generalissima, and extremely diligent with 150 waggons to govern in case of battle,’ as she described herself, finding that her plan of surprising Lincoln had also failed, set out for Oxford. She was met by Rupert on the 4th at Stratford-on-Avon, where she was the guest of Shakespeare's daughter [see under, 1575–1635]. On the 13th she met her husband at Edgehill. Her first request was that he would raise Jermyn to the peerage. If the scandals afloat had had any foundation, it is hardly likely that she would have called attention to them in this way, and still less likely that she would have slaved night and day as she did in the service of a husband to whom, if rumour was to be credited, she had been unfaithful. On 14 July the united pair rode into Oxford.

Well-intentioned as the queen was, she had too little knowledge of England to render her advice other than harmful to her husband. She was all for foreign alliances and for bringing into the country armies from Ireland and the continent. She is said to have been vehemently opposed to the siege of Gloucester, and in this case the event has been held to justify her advice. She was certainly most imprudent in treating with rudeness the peers Bedford, Holland, and Clare, who deserted parliament and sought to make their peace with the king. It was a time when Charles's cause seemed likely to be triumphant. Later in the year his strength declined, and the plans for foreign assistance again assumed prominence. In the beginning of 1644 the queen favoured a proposed marriage between the Prince of Wales and a daughter of the Prince of Orange, which, as she hoped, would lead to a Dutch intervention in the king's favour (Jermyn to Heenvliet, 12–22 Feb., in, 2nd ser. iv. 98). Before long the position at Oxford appeared so insecure, that it was resolved that Henrietta Maria should seek a safe refuge when the king left for the campaign, and on April 17 she actually set out for Exeter, where she gave birth to her youngest child Henrietta. Her health suffered, and frightened at the approach of the army of Essex, who refused her a safe-conduct to Bath, she made her way to Falmouth harbour, whence on 14 July she sailed for France. A parliamentary vessel fired into the one in which she was, but on the 16th she landed unharmed at Brest.

The bad state of the queen's health made it necessary for her to visit the baths of Bourbon. Here she was attended by Madame de Motteville, sent to her by the queen regent, and was visited by her brother Gaston. When she was sufficiently recovered she was established before the end of August at St. Germains, and received from the queen regent a pension of twelve thousand crowns a month. Her first object, however, was to assist her husband, and she stripped herself of her remaining jewels and of the equipage beseeming her rank in order to carry out this object. Something, too, was gained by the sale of tin forwarded from the Cornish mines. Nor did she desist from pushing various political schemes of the same kind as those which had so often failed before, and she had not been long at St. Germains before she gave her confidence to a jesuit named O'Hartegan, who had come as an agent of the Irish confederate catholics to urge Mazarin to support them. The queen was for some time hopeful of obtaining large sums from Mazarin, with the help of which an Irish army might be launched against England, but Mazarin had no money to apply to such purposes.

Another scheme which occupied Henrietta Maria in the closing weeks of 1644 and in the beginning of 1645 was the gaining of the Duke of Lorraine, who at last promised to bring ten thousand men to Charles's aid. At the same time she pushed on the negotiation for her son's marriage with the daughter of the Prince of Orange, the consideration for which was to be the loan of ships to transfer the duke's army into England. Before the end of April, however, the Dutch refused to allow the duke to pass through their territory, and, as the French would not allow him to go through theirs, the prospect of receiving help from him had to be abandoned. In May 1645 Rinuccini arrived in Paris on his way to Ireland as papal nuncio, but the queen would have little to do with him, and preferred to send Sir Kenelm Digby to Rome in June to negotiate independently with Pope Innocent X for pecuniary aid to the Irish catholics.

A great part at least of these secret negotiations was published when copies of Charles's letters to his wife fell into the hands of parliament after Naseby, but Henrietta Maria did not lose confidence. In October 1645 she listened to Sir Robert Moray, who had come to Paris to plan an alliance between Charles and the Scots on the basis