Page:The Queens of England.djvu/505

 HENRIETTA MARIA OF FRANCE. 457 jewels." The immediate effects of this expulsion were tem- porary : a deep despondency on the queen's part, notwithstand- ing the politic advice of her mother, "to accede in all things to her husband, except in religious points" ; and a declara- tion of war by France ; Buckingham, who was its chief insti- gator, being commissioned to conduct the latter, and the former evil alleviated in a measure by the embassy of Bassompierre. The official duties, and their issues, of these two noblemen, were as opposite as their conduct of -them. The duke managed the war "more with the gaieties of a courtier than the arts of a soldier," which accounts for its ill success ; but the marshal evinced no less integrity than perception in availing himself of the absence of Buckingham to bring the royal couple to a better understanding of each other's mutual disposition, so as to deduce from the king himself a confession as to the arch- plotter of domestic strife — "My wife and I were never upon better terms ; she showing herself so loving to me by her discre- tion on all occasions, that it makes us all wonder at and esteem her." Her experience of the malignant influence almost pre- cluded the possibility of Henrietta's sympathizing with the king in his regret at the duke's assassination ; which he bit- terly lamented, notwithstanding that by this event the greatest barrier to his married happiness was removed, and, from "that nobleman being the object of popular hate, it withdrew the chief obstruction of the subjects' love to their king." The advent of the future hope of England, in the birth of a Prince of Wales (the first child, Charles James, having scarcely survived a day), inspired but little popular joy; and as the nativity of the young prince was, in the few next years, followed by that of the Princess Mary, the Duke of York, after- ward James the Second, and the Princess Elizabeth, each addi- tion to the royal family was distrustfully regarded as of a less fitting, because less decidedly Protestant, claimant to the crown, than the offspring of the Queen of Bohemia. The birth of the Prince of Wales was, however, harbingered by a supernatural presage of no common glory, in the "appearance of a star at noon-day" ; which elicited "numerous poetical rhapsodies of wonder and admiration," equally sincere, though less precious, proofs of loyalty than the present of "ambergris, china basons, a clock, and four pictures by Tintoret and Titian," proffered to the queen on the birth of the Princess Elizabeth. Perhaps the period of the greatest happiness and splendor of Charles the First and Henrietta was about 1633. Their