Read Online The Loves of Charles II by Jean Plaidy - Free Book Online

deed. And yet in England a good and noble man, religious, faithful and striving to act in a manner he considered to be right, might die and the people would cry: “God’s will be done.”

    It was February of that tragic year. There was a little more comfort in the bare rooms of the Louvre than there had been during previous months. But a worse tragedy overhung the palace; the servants knew of it; Anne knew of it; but there was no one who dared speak of it to the Queen. So they kept her in ignorance.
    Henrietta Maria, during those weeks, was subdued yet determined to be hopeful.
    “I often wonder why there is no news,” she would say to those about her. “But good it is that there should be no news. I know the people love the King, my husband. Perhaps they have already released him from captivity. Oh, it is a sad and wicked thing that he should be a captive. So good … so noble … the best husband any woman ever had. No child ever had a more kindly father. How happy we could have been!”
    Towards the middle of February she would wait no longer. Paul de Gondi had shown his goodness to her; he would not deny her in her great need. She would ask that a messenger be sent to Saint-Germain where there would certainly be tidings of her husband.
    Then they knew that they could withhold the truth no longer.
    Anne asked Lord Jermyn, the Queen’s most faithful adviser, to break the news to her. “For,” she said, “you will do it better than any of us could. You will know how to soothe her.”
    He went to Henrietta Maria in her apartments. With her was the little Princess, Anne Morton and Père Cyprien de Gamaches.
    Jermyn knelt before the Queen.
    She said at once: “You have news from England?”
    He lifted his face to hers; his lips quivered, and she knew, even beforehe spoke. A blank expression crept over her face; her eyes were mutely pleading with him not to speak, not to say those fateful words.
    “Madame, dear Madame, on the 30th of January, the King, your husband, laid his head upon the block …”
    She did not speak.
    “Madame,” resumed Jermyn, his voice broken with a sob. “Madame … Long live King Charles II.”
    Still she did not speak. Anne placed her hand on the shoulder of the little Princess who was looking at her with wondering eyes, and gently pushed her towards her mother. The Queen, putting out her hand, reached for her daughter and held her fast to her side; she still looked blankly before her and said not a word.

    The little Princess was bewildered. She was five years old; she lived in the great Palace of the Louvre, but the vast rooms were deserted and there was war in the streets. She could not understand her mother’s sudden passionate embraces, the great floods of tears and what seemed to her the incoherent ramblings. Her mother had changed. She wore somber widow’s mourning; she was constantly in tears; she referred to herself as
La Reine Malheureuse;
and little Henriette would cry with her, not knowing why she cried.
    “Ah, you do well to weep!” the Queen would say. “Do you know that but for you I should not be here now. I should be with the Carmelite nuns in the Convent of the Faubourg Saint-Jacques; that is where I yearn to be, to pray for strength to help me bear this burden of living. Ah,
ma petite
, I pray that you will never feel as I do. I pray that you will never be beset with doubts as your poor mother is this day. There are many who say I brought him to this—that good and noble man! They say that had he never attempted to arrest the Five Members seven years ago, civil war would have been averted.
I
urged him to do that. I did not believe that any would dare oppose the King to the extent of going to war. I believed that we could govern without a Parliament. Oh, my little Henriette, have I, who loved him, brought him to the scaffold?”
    Henriette did not know what to answer; she could only take her little kerchief and wipe away her mother’s tears.
    And now her mother