Page:The Queens of England.djvu/506

 458 THE QUEENS OF ENGLAND. second son, James, was then born, and his birth was celebrated by a masque given by the gentlemen of Lincoln's Inn and the Temple to the king and queen. At this period the court was adorned by the presence of many celebrated men. Waller was producing his lyrics in its honor ; Vandyke was immortalizing not only the beauty of the queen, but the person of her hus- band, as well as of all the most distinguished of his courtiers. Inigo Jones was not only rearing public buildings, but devising masques and ballets for the royal pleasure ; and Ben Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher were writing their great dramas. Yet already dark clouds lowered. The popular dislike to Hen- rietta's religion soon associated itself with every act and feeling of herself. Her mother, being driven from the friendly asylum of the French court by her son's unnatural malignity, "insomuch that Louis even plotted her destruction," the filial solicitude of Henrietta, who, in the extremity of the queen-mother's afflic- tion, affectionately invited her to England, and for two years entertained her with the distinction becoming her station even in the plenitude of power, though equally natural as praise- worthy, was vituperated and misrepresented by fanatical malice. But the daughter's early acquaintance with persecution her- alded the dawning greatness of the heroic wife; and as her husband's perils grew more imminent in the threatening storm of political anarchy, her promptitude and talent, stimulated to keenest exercise by conjugal affection, proved her no degen- erate descendant of the favorite monarch of France. Burnet, indeed, whose dislike is manifest, accuses her of "fondness for intrigues, and want of judgment," and affirms that "to her little practices, as well as to the king's own temper, the sequel of all his misfortunes was owing ;" but this is rebutted in part by the testimony of a political opponent, who speaks of her abhorrence of mischief as well known, and also by the impres- sion her sagacity invariably produced to the encouragement of her partisans, and to the fear of the parliamentary council. It is indeed to be lamented -that Henrietta's feelings, by a too common error of her sex, somewhat impaired her judgment, and at times frustrated the success of those plans so felicitously propounded, under adverse circumstances, by her zeal and energy. Accordingly we find her, in the year 1639, the mem- orable epoch of the king's inauspicious expedition to Scotland, raising no less than forty thousand pounds from the Roman Catholics of England in his behalf ; yet, shortly after the pacifi- cation, with singular imprudence, encouraging him in a meas-