Every day now I looked for a messenger from the Pope. I imagined myself telling Charles what I had been able to achieve. How delighted he would be with his clever little wife!
In the meantime there was the baby and the time for its arrival was getting nearer and nearer.
It happened on the eighth day of the month. The birth was easy and the child healthy. This time it was a boy, and I was so delighted when they put him into my arms. The ordeal which I had been dreading was over and there seemed to be no fears about this one.
“I do declare,” I said to Lucy, “I never felt so well after having given birth to a child.”
“It’s a good sign,” Lucy told me. “The boys always come more easily than the girls.”
I forgot everything else in the next few days and just lay in my bed. Charles came to see me and the boy and we were very happy for a while. I had only one regret. I had no good news from the Pope to give him.
Never mind, I told myself, it will come and it will be a further reason for rejoicing.
Then he had to leave for the Border because the Scots were at their mischief again.
It was about a week after he had left when the messenger came from the Pope. Eagerly I read what he had written and I have rarely been so disappointed in my life. The Holy Father would be willing to help and could send as many as eight thousand men. He would do so as soon as the King of England embraced the Catholic Faith. Until then the Holy Father regretted that he would be unable to do anything to help.
My disappointment was so bitter, I just buried my head in the pillows and wept.
After that I suffered such a tragedy that I forgot all my anxieties about everything else.
My little Anne fell ill. She had always been the delicate one and had been troubled by a cough from her birth, but after the arrival of my son, whom we christened Henry, she seemed to grow worse.
I was with her night and day toward the end and I prayed constantly that her life might be spared to me. She was three years old and although I had lost Catherine this was not the same. Catherine had died within a few hours of her birth. She had scarcely lived at all and was just a baby to me; but Anne…she was my child…my little daughter…for three years I had loved and cared for her and now…she was dying.
She was too good for this world, I thought. I shall never forget those last moments at her bedside and in spite of everything that memory is one of the most tragic of my life. I can see her lovely little face, the gravity of it, the knowledge in the beautiful eyes that death was close.
“I cannot say my long prayer,” she said, meaning the Lord’s Prayer, “so I must say my short one.” She paused awhile to collect her breath. It was pitiful to watch her. “Lighten mine eyes, oh Lord,” she prayed, “lest I sleep the sleep of death.”
Then she closed her eyes and that was the end.
I flung myself down by her bed and gave myself up to bitter tears. Charles came to me and we sat together in silence for a long time. Then he took my hand and reminded me of the beautiful healthy family we had.
“We are singularly blessed,” he said, “not only in our children but most of all in each other.”
Then we clung together almost as though some premonition had come to us that we might not always be together and we must cherish what time was left to us.
After a while we talked of Anne, and Charles said he wanted to know the cause of her death, so he ordered that there should be a postmortem. He feared that death might have been due to some accident—perhaps a fall about which we had not been told. Our old friend, Sir Theodore Mayerne, presided over the examination which revealed that Anne had died of a suffocating catarrh with an inflammatory disposition of the lungs, accompanied by continual fever, difficulty in breathing and a constant cough.
The doctors said that she could not have lived long no matter what had been done for her.
This satisfied us in a way because we knew that we had not failed her.
We laid her to rest in Henry VII’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey and the memory of the sweet child lingered with us to sadden our days.
So grief-stricken had I been by the death of our little daughter that I had temporarily forgotten the troubles which were springing up all around us.
The Scots were giving us trouble as usual and Charles said that as he had no money there was nothing to be done but call another parliament. I was against it. When had parliaments ever done us any good? I assured Charles he could govern better without a parliament.
At least I was right about that, for no sooner was the Parliament installed—led by the odious Pym—than it acted in such a dastardly way that even I would not have thought it capable of.
I might have seen that those men were determined to destroy the King, and they were beginning to do this by robbing him of his most able supporters. They were accusing Strafford of criminal acts against the State. This was such arrant nonsense that it made me laugh them to scorn at first; but I was wrong. They were wily, powerful men, and they were well aware of what they were doing.
Poor Charles was beside himself with anxiety.
“They are accusing him of treason,” he cried. “Pym is instituting an enquiry into Strafford’s conduct in Ireland.”
“But that could only be to his credit!” I cried.
“They will say he was planning to bring over an Irish army to England to fight against the English.”
“That’s nonsense!”
“Of course it is nonsense but they are determined to bring him down. Don’t you see, they are in truth striking against me?”
I put my arms about him and kissed him tenderly. I assured him that we would overcome our enemies and save Strafford from their venom.
“We will prove them wrong,” I declared. “We will teach a lesson to those wicked men who are trying to work against their King.”
“My little love,” he said, “what should I do without you?”
I often thought of that and the irony of it. I know now that he would have done so much better without me. Who knows, he might even have been saved!
Impetuous, unworldly, without even the smallest understanding of the situation, I plunged in to save him. How much better it would have been for him if I had left him to his own devices! Dear Charles, he was the best man and husband in the world. But as a king—and I must be truthful now—he was weak. He was obsessed by the desire to do right and this gave his unscrupulous enemies power over him. Moreover be believed that whatever he did was right because he was King. But because of this determination to choose the right course he vacillated, not taking action when he should and then hastily plunging in and doing what was unwise.
I blush now to think of the months that followed. I had always been foolish; now I added recklessness to my folly. I loved Charles so dearly, so intensely. I was not a sensual woman; my love for him was protective, almost maternal. In different circumstances I could have been a happy and contented mother, but a queen does not have the same opportunities of being with her children as other women have. They are kept from her by a guard of nurses, governesses, rockers, servants of all sorts. Tradition placed them there and there they must be. I thought of Charles as one of my children, particularly during those days when, deprived of Strafford and fearful for him, he seemed so bewildered. I could have been perfectly happy living somewhere like Oatlands, walking with the children and Charles, listening to their chatter, watching over their meals. But that was not for me.
Now I saw my Charles in distress and I was going to do everything in my power to take the burden from him.
I tried to placate those stern men of the Parliament—those somberly clad gentlemen, many of them with the plain round hairstyle which I so hated. I wrote several letters addressed to the Parliament. I apologized for my chapel at Somerset House. I told them I would be very careful only to act as was necessary. I knew that the Pope’s envoy Rosetti was not approved by some of them and if it was their wish I would have him removed. If there was anything they wished me to do I should be glad to listen to it. I was groveling and that was against my nature; and my humiliation was increased because they ignored me.