placed on it, first excited the insane fanatic who murdered him to fulfil it, and thus it brought its own accomplishment.

This fatal coronation at last took place on May 13, 1610. Notwithstanding her tender age, the infant Henriette was present at St. Denis. She was held in her nurse's arms on one side of her mother's throne,' and was surrounded by her elder brothers and sisters, who likewise assisted at the grand ceremonial, and were, with her, recognised as the children of France. These were, Louis the Dauphin, who became, a few hours after, Louis XIII.; Elizabeth (afterwards the wife of Philip III. of Spain); Henry, duke of Orleans (who died young); Christine (afterwards married to the duke of Savoy); and the infant Gaston, duke of Anjou, so well known in history afterwards as duke of Orleans.

The king and his children returned to Paris after the coronation, but the queen remained at the abbey, in order to make her grand entry into Paris on the following Monday, which was considered the most important part of the pageant.

The next day the mind of Henry IV. was utterly overwhelmed and depressed by the remembrance of the prediction which threatened him; and to divert his thoughts, he ordered his youngest son, Gaston, in whose infant frolics he took the greatest delight, and the baby princess Henriette, to be brought to him; and in the wholesome relaxation of playing with these dear ones, the hero recovered his usual hilarity, and despising his superstitious fears, he went out as usual in his coach,2 through the streets of Paris. He was brought home pierced to the heart by the knife of the maniac regicide, Ravaillac. Thus was our Henriette, with all France, rendered fatherless.

The whole of the dreary night of the 14th of May, the melancholy and terrified inmates of the Louvre kept watch and ward over the body of their murdered king, and his little children. At first it was believed that the blow was struck by some political enemy, and that a great insurrection would succeed. The royal little ones, the eldest of whom, Louis XIII., was but nine years old, were barricaded in the guard-room of the Louvre, and the king's guards, in armour and with their partizans crossed, surrounded them. During this awful vigil, all hearts beat high with anxiety, and no eyes closed except those of the infant, Henriette, whose peaceful slumbers in her nurse's arms formed a contrast to the alarm around her. It was soon discovered that the murder of Henry the Great arose from private malice or madness, and that all the French people mourned his loss as much as his family; on which the royal children were restored to their mother, and returned to their usual apartments. There the little Henriette remained secluded till the 25th of June following, the day she was six months old; when her great father's obsequies took place. She was carried forth in the arms of madame de Monglat, and made one in the long, doleful procession from Paris to St. Denis. She was required personally to assist in the sad solemnity. An asperge being put into her innocent hand, she was made

'Life of Henrietta Maria, 1671. 'Memoires de Sully.

3 L'Etoile.

to sprinkle his murdered corpse with holy water,' in that part of the funeral ceremony, where the nearest relatives and friends of the deceased walk in procession round the bier, and perform this picturesque act of remembrance. It is still a national custom in Normandy for infants to be thus carried.

The next public appearance of the royal babe was at the coronation of the little king, her brother, Louis XIII., which took place in the cathedral of Rheims, October 17, 1610, when she was little more than ten months old. Henriette was carried, at this ceremony, in the arms of the princess of Condé, herself an historical character of no little interest. The princess of Condé had just returned, with her high-spirited husband, from exile in Flanders, whither the lawless passion of the late king had driven them.

Since the death of Henry the Great, his widow had been appointed to the regency of France, during the minority of the little king. Then the folly and weakness of her character became manifest by her conduct in dismissing her husband's popular ministers, and exalting her own unworthy countryman and domestic, Concini, to the head of the French government. This outrage produced the natural consequence of a violent insurrection, led by the princes of the blood; the little Henriette and the rest of the royal children were hurried from Paris to Fontainbleau, till the faction was appeased: It was the first movement of civil war, which never ceased to rage in France during the domination of Marie de Medicis as queen-regent.

Blois and Fontainbleau were the two palaces where Henriette resided chiefly in her infancy. About twelve months afterwards, the duke of Orleans, the second brother of Henriette, sickened and died. A great outcry was made against M. le Maitre, the physician who attended on the royal infants; for no one connected with royalty was believed, in that age of crime and slander, to die by the visitation of God, but all by the malice of man. The consequence was, that the queen-regent was forced to effect a temporary reconciliation with the relatives of her royal husband, and invite all the princes and princesses of the blood to see the five surviving children.*

Before the little Henriette had completed her third year, she was carried to the nuptial festival of her eldest sister, Elizabeth, with the king of Spain, which was kept with the utmost splendour at the palace of the Place Royale.

Henry IV., from the first moments of their existence, had, with his own hands, severally consigned his infants to the care of madame de Monglat, a lady who was distantly related to the queen. The beautiful daughter of madame de Monglat, who was about the same age with the elder princesses, had an appointment in the nursery of Henriette; she

'Memoirs of the Life and Death of Henrietta Maria, queen of Charles I., dedicated to Charles II., 1671. A very scarce and valuable private history of this queen. We have been favoured with the copy by the kindness of sir George Strickland, M. P., from the library of his learned and lamented brother, Eustachius Strickland, Esq., of York. L'Etoile. Life of Henrietta Maria, 1671.

2 Ibid.

exercised through life no little influence over her mind. The young king (who was treated with great severity by the queen-regent) was excessively fond of madame de Monglat, and called her Mamanga; and the princess Henriette called mademoiselle de Monglat, who superintended her infant toilette and arrangements, by the same endearing appellation, as we shall see in her letters. The word is an Italian amplification of endearment, meaning mamma: the children of France had probably learned it from the lips of their Italian mother. Meantime the love of the infant, Henriette, for her own mother amounted to passion, for with the partiality often noted in weak parents, the queen indulged her not a little, and probably spoiled her.

Of all persons that ever reigned, Marie de Medicis was the worst calculated to train a future queen-consort for England, and the sorrows of her daughter in future life, doubtless were aggravated by the foolish notions of the infallibility of sovereigns which had been instilled into her young mind.

Henriette, and her young brother, Gaston, received the practical part of their education from M. de Brevis, a very learned man, who had been attached to several embassies. How this nobleman managed the princess is not known: he controlled her brother Gaston, by tying a rod to his sash when he deserved punishment.

There is a miniature oil-painting, in beautiful preservation, to be seen at this hour, with other curiosities, in the lotel de Cluny, at Paris, which quaintly represents the princess and her brother Gaston in their childhood. Their mother, queen Marie de Medicis, is seated at dinner, in a chamber at the Louvre, or perhaps the Place Royale. The croissié windows open on a garden with orange trees and embroidered parterres; to the left of the royal dinner table is a state bed of scarlet velvet, with a scarlet velvet counterpane: the queen sits at the head of the table in a grand velvet fauteuil. Madame de Monglat is at dinner, seated at her left hand, and in an angle, screened from general observation by the draperies of the queen and their governess, are seated, both in the same low chair, very near the ground, the petite Madame (princess Henriette) and the petit Monsieur (Gaston, duke of Orleans). They are about the ages of three and four, but their costumes are, according to the usages of the era, grotesque miniatures of the reigning fashions. The little Henriette wears the ruff, the hood, cap, and puffed sleeves of that era; and her childish brother has the broad beaver hat, looped up, a scarlet velvet cloak, and hose. The conduct of this infant cavalier is by no means in unison with his mature garb. The queen has just given her little ones" somewhat from the dinner table." Henriette holds on her lap the dish, out of which both are eating; she looks askance on Gaston, somewhat disdainfully, without condescending to turn her head, for he has abstracted a large piece, more than his share, from the dish, and is devouring it greedily. The little princess seems equally shocked at his breach of etiquette as at his gluttony. She is in the act of raising her elbow to admonish him: the expression of her face is most amusing. The queen, in profile, slily notes the proceedings of her infants. Two beautiful maids of honour wait behind them. The whole gives a lively

picture of the queen-regent's court, in home life. No male attendant is present in the scene.

The religious education of the princess Henriette was guided by an enthusiastic Carmelite nun, called Mère Magdelaine. She visited this votary at stated times during her childhood, and consulted her constantly respecting her conduct in life.' It is possible that the Carmelite might be sincere and virtuous, and yet not calculated to form a character destined to a path in life so difficult as that of a Roman-catholic queen in protestant England.

The taste for solid learning in the education of princesses was somewhat on the decline in the seventeenth century; and in the place of the elaborate pedantry which had prevailed in the preceding age, the lighter acquirements were cultivated. Henriette, and her play-fellow duke Gaston, had inherited inclinations for the fine arts from their Medician ancestors: they were distinguished for passionate love of painting, practical skill in architecture, and scientific knowledge of music. In after life the princess Henriette lamented her ignorance of history to madame de Motteville, declaring that she had had to learn her lessons of human life and character solely from her own sad experience, which was acquired too late, when the irrevocable past governed her destiny. Marie Antoinette made nearly the same observation, when educating her children in the doleful prison of the Temple. The ancient pedantry had at least the advantage of introducing its pupils to the startling facts contained in the pages of Tacitus and Livy. In place of such acquirements the youngest daughter of France learned to dance exquisitely in the court ballets, and to cultivate a voice, which was by nature so sweet and powerful, that if she had not been a queen, she might have been, as Mr. D'Israeli truly observes, prima donna of Europe. The education of the young princess was perpetually interrupted by the recurrence of some gorgeous statepageant or other, in which her presence was required. When she was but six years old her mother took her to Bordeaux, to be present at the imposing ceremonial of delivering her eldest sister Elizabeth to the young king of Spain, as his wife, and receiving in exchange Anne of Austria, the Spanish bride of Louis XIII. The family intercourse between Henriette and her sister-in-law, Anne of Austria, thus began at a very tender age; and she was domesticated with this sister-in-law most intimately for ten years before she left France.

The political position of the princess Henriette, as a younger daughter, in a country where the salique law prevailed, did not seem to authorize her mother in thus perpetually bringing her before the public. Perhaps the queen-regent used her infantine beauty, and the passionate tenderness with which it was well known the people of France regarded this child of their great Henry, as a means of counteracting her own deserved unpopularity. With this view, the young princess formed one in the grand entry of Paris, which took place at the pacification between the queen-regent and the princes of the blood, May 11, 1616. This peace proved but a short respite to the civil war which desolated France dur

1 Bossuet.

3 Life of Henrietta Maria, 1671.

ing the regency of Marie de Medicis. Her reign was, however, soon after brought to a conclusion, by the slaughter of her favourite Concini, and the assumption of power by the boy-king of France and his boyminister, the duke of Luynes. The queen-mother was sent under restraint to the castle of Blois, where her captivity was softened by the society of her favourite daughter. Nearly three years of the life of the princess Henriette were passed in this seclusion, till she was drawn from her mother's prison to be present at the wedlock of her second sister, Christine, with the duke of Savoy. Henriette was not suffered to return to her mother after this ceremony. She was the only unmarried daughter of France; and her own marriage now became matter of consideration by her brother's ministry. The next year, 1620, a reconciliation was effected between the queen-mother, Marie de Medicis, and her son, Louis XIII. By means of her almoner, who afterwards obtained such notoriety as cardinal Richelieu, she acquired more influence in the government of France than ever, and of course took a decided part in the disposal of her daughter. The count of Soissons, a younger prince of the Condé branch of the royal family, pretended to the hand of the princess very pertinaciously. He claimed it, in reward of his great services at the siege of Rochelle. His addresses were not discouraged, although hopes were entertained that the young princess would become queen of Great Britain. This prospect did not appear till after the marriage between Charles, prince of Wales, only surviving son of James I., was broken off with the long-wooed infanta.

The early youth of Charles has already been detailed in the biography of his mother, Anne of Denmark: we left him, in 1619, by her deathbed. Since that time he had become the most elegant and accomplished prince in Europe, both in mind and person. Deeply impressed with the idea that a man's affections must be possessed by his wedded partner, whether he were prince or peasant, if he had any hopes of leading a virtuous and happy domestic life, he had early set his mind on wooing in person the bride to whom his hand was destined. The Scottish princes, since the time of their high-spirited ancestor, James V., had shown consideration to the feelings of the princesses they had married, seldom known in the annals of royalty. Instead of receiving the bride as a shuddering victim, consigned to the mercy of a perfect stranger, James V. and James VI. had encountered considerable dangers to make acquaintance with their wives, and induce some friendship and confidence before the nuptial knot was tied. This family example was implicitly followed by Charles when he undertook the romantic voyage, incognito, to Spain, accompanied by the duke of Buckingham, in order to woo Maria Althea, the second daughter of Philip III. of Spain, and the sister of the young sovereign, Philip IV. On this expedition, as they passed through Paris, the prince of Wales and Buckingham, dis

1 Melville mentions in his Memoirs that, while the second marriage of James V. was debated in his council, that prince secretly departed from his palace in the disguise of a court page; and after he had arrived at the court of France, he rejected the princess of Vendôme, to whom he had been destined, and chose the lovely widow of the duke of Longueville for his queen.