Henriette guessed that the beautiful Mademoiselle was being unkind to her brother. “Go away!” she said. “Minette does not like you.”
Mademoiselle answered: “I know she is young, but she should be taught how to conduct herself. She should be beaten for that.”
Henriette, recognizing the word “beaten,” put her arms about her brother and buried her face against him.
“No one shall hurt you, Minette,” he told her. “No one shall hurt you while your brother Charles is here.”
Mademoiselle laughed, and rising, commanded Rupert to lead her away.
“We will leave the boy to play with his sister,” she said; “for after all, he is but a boy and still concerned, I doubt not, with childish things.”
And when they were alone, Minette and her brother were soon gay again, and she loved him dearly.
Each day they were together; each day he talked to her, and although she did not always understand what he said, she knew that he loved her as she loved him.
It had not occurred to her that life could change, until one day he came to her and sadly kissed her. “Minette,” he said, “we shall always love one an-other—you and I.” And the next day he did not come.
Angrily she demanded to know where he was. He had gone away, they told her.
She fretted; she would not eat; she so much longed for him.
Her mother warmly embraced her. “My dearest child, you are very young, but there are things you have to learn. Your father is fighting wicked men, and your brother must go to help him. Then, when they have beaten those wicked men, we shall all go home, and you will not only have one brother, but three—as well as a dear sister.”
“Don’t want three brothers,” sobbed Henriette. “Minette wants Charles.”
And all through the days which followed she was a sad little figure in the palace of Saint-Germain.
If any asked her what ailed her she would say: “Want Charles.” And each day she knelt on the window seat watching for him to come again; she waited, so it seemed to her, for years; but she never forgot him.
In the palace of the Louvre, the Princess Henriette lay in her bed. Her mother sat beside the bed, and about her shoulders were three cloaks, and her hands were protected by thick gloves. It was bitter January weather, and outside the Louvre, in the narrow streets of Paris, Frenchmen were fighting Frenchmen in that civil war which had been called the War of the Fronde.
Little Henriette, who was but four years old, shivered with the cold; her mother shivered also—but not only from cold. As her friend, Madame de Motteville, had said to her: “This year a terrible star reigns for kings and queens.”
Henrietta Maria was not thinking so much of the bloodcurdling shrieks which again and again reached her from the streets; her thoughts were across the Channel in her husband’s country, for he was now the prisoner of the Parliament, and awaiting trial. She had begged to be allowed to see him, but this had been denied her. If she came to England, she was told, it would be to stand on trial with him, for the Parliament considered her as guilty as her husband of High Treason.
What was happening in England? She knew little for no messengers could reach her, France having its own civil war with which to contend. She was alternately full of self-reproach and indignation towards others. She accused herself of ruining not only her own life but that of her husband and children; then she would rail against the wicked Cromwell and his Parliamentarians who had brought such suffering to her family.
And here she was—Queen of England—without food and warmth in this vast palace, alone with her child, the child’s governess, Père Cyprien and a few servants who were all suffering now as she and her daughter suffered.
Three of her children were prisoners in the hands of the Parliament—James, Elizabeth and Henry. Mary, she thanked God, had been safely married and out of England before the trouble grew beyond control; and Mary at the Court of Holland provided a refuge for her brother Charles and any of those who managed to escape thither. The family relied on Mary in these hard times.
When she had first come to France much honor had been given to Henrietta Maria; but little by little she had shed her pomp, her plate and jewels; her foremost thought had been to send all she possessed to her husband in England. If she was frivolous, if she had been in a large measure responsible for his downfall, at least she was wholehearted in her passionate desire to help him. Only now that she was separated from him did she realize the extent of her love for that good and noble man, the best of husbands and fathers, even if he were not the wisest of kings. And now what assistance could she hope for from her royal relatives of France? They had been forced to leave Paris; the little King, in charge of his mother, the Queen-Regent, had slipped away from Paris to Saint-Germain where they stayed during the siege of Paris. Mademoiselle de Montpensier had decided to place herself on the side of the Frondeurs, which was typical of her; trust Mademoiselle to call attention to herself in some way!
It was an evil star indeed which shone on kings and queens during that year. Henrietta Maria had in vain warned her sister-in-law. Had she herself not suffered so much because she had once believed as Anne believed, behaved as Anne behaved? It was hard to learn that their countries were moving forward, that new ideas had brought a new outlook. The Stuarts would have been as autocratic as the Tudors, but they did not understand the people, and that understanding had been at the very root of the popularity achieved by those great Tudor sovereigns, Henry VIII and Elizabeth. The common people denied the Divine Right of Kings to govern; there were some who remembered the revolt of the barons in an earlier century. The people wished to go back to those conditions when a king’s power was limited. How easy it was to see mistakes when one looked back, and to say: “Had I done this, that would not have happened. Had we not made mistakes, Charles I and Henrietta Maria would be reigning in England now, living happily together.”
And so it was with Anne of Austria, the Queen-Mother of France. The situation was tragically similar. Mazarin and the Queen-Regent had imposed crushing taxes on the people, and the people would have them know that the age when kings and queens could believe they ruled by Divine Right was over. France was divided. Anne, frivolous, as Henrietta Maria had been, and as unrealistic, had laughed in the face of Paul de Gondi, the Coadjuteur of Paris; she had encouraged her friends to laugh at him because he was something of a dandy, and that accorded ill with the soutane he wore as a man of the Church. Paul de Gondi was a strong man; he had declared he would be master of Paris and he had prepared himself to bring about that state of affairs.
It was last July, in the heat of summer, when, below that apartment in which the Queen of England and her daughter now shivered, Parisians had barricaded the streets. Great barrels, filled with earth and held in place by chains, were placed at the entrances of narrow streets. Citizens were detailed to guard these streets. This was reminiscent, and indeed inspired by the “Night of the Barricades” of the previous century.
The War of the Fronde had started. It was typical of Parisian humor that the war should be so named. A law had recently been passed prohibiting young boys from gathering in the streets of Paris and attacking each other with the fronde (a sling for stones) then so popular. These games of stone-slinging had on more than one occasion proved fatal and there had been public concern. So it was that, during the heated discussions in the Parliament concerning the taxes about to be imposed by the hated Cardinal Mazarin, the favorite of the Queen-Regent, the President of the Parliament had begged the assembly to consider the terms which Mazarin was proposing. The President’s son—he was de Bachaumont and known throughout Paris as a bel esprit—had said that when his turn came to speak he would “frondera bien l’opinions de son père.” This bon mot was taken up and repeated; and Frondeur was adopted as the name of those who would criticize and “sling” rebellion against the Court party.