young girl, watching in the Chàteau of the Louvre in the city of Paris, was awaiting the greatest event which had yet come to disturb the tenor of her life; for, before the sun had set, she, Henrietta Maria of France, would be the betrothed wife of Charles, King of England.

It was a brilliant match for the little Princess, the youngest child of Henry IV, King of France, and of his wife Mary de' Medici of the great Florentine House: she owed it in part to the far-reaching policy of the father she had never known, and in part to the exertions of her mother and of a new favourite of that lady, M. de Richelieu. As she was only fifteen years old[1] she was, perhaps, too young to enter into the political aspect of the matter, but she was fully alive to the social and ceremonial advantages to which it would entitle her: a few years before she had gazed with envy at the honours prepared for her elder sister, Christine, the bride of Savoy: now she could afford to think of them almost with contempt, for, to her, the bride of proud England, far more splendid homage was about to be offered. Nor, though the bridegroom was absent and both betrothal and wedding would have to be by proxy, was he unknown. Henrietta had seen him when he was in Paris on the return journey of his romantic expedition to Spain, and she knew that he was a tall and proper man, handsome in face and royal in bearing, with a certain melancholy persuasiveness of address which not even a slight stammer could spoil. "I do not think he need have gone quite so far as Spain for a bride," she had said then, with the freedom of her tender years; even now, nearly a year later, she felt such an interest in her prospective bridegroom, that by the help of an old servant she borrowed his portrait from one of the English envoys who was accustomed to wear it round his neck, and, having carried it off to her private apartments, she gazed at it for the space of an hour, blushing the while at her own audacity.

Of Henrietta's childhood there is little to record; as one of her biographers sadly remarks, her troubles began before she could know them, for she was not a year old when her noble-hearted father perished by the knife of Ravaillac. Her early years were passed under the care of her mother, who, though she was solicitous for the child's health and education, and reared her with the state due to a daughter of France,[2] is said to have cared much less for her than for her elder sister Christine: a sister still older, the beautiful and high-minded Elizabeth, left her native country to become the unhappy wife of Philip IV of Spain, while Henrietta was still too young a child to retain much personal memory of her; but touching letters remain written from the desolate grandeur of Madrid to show how fondly Elizabeth's heart clung to the pretty child she had left in Paris, for whose portrait she begs, and to whom she sends little gifts such as some toys for the toilet of her dolls, "so that when you play you may remember me."[3] The two sisters never met again, and the Spanish princess who came to France in Elizabeth's stead was a poor exchange for her, even if Henrietta, who was possessed of a sparkling and somewhat biting wit, had not been fond of exercising it upon her brother's demure wife, with whom her mother was never on good terms.

That Henrietta's childhood was, in the main, healthy and happy, cannot be doubted. In person she resembled her father more than did either of her sisters, and she had inherited also his gay disposition. Her days were passed in one beautiful chàteau or another, either the Louvre or the Luxembourg, or S. Germain-en-Laye, with its beautiful forest and its terrace overlooking the Seine. Her governess was the kind and faithful Madame de Montglas, who had tended not only her, but her brothers and sisters from their earliest years; and if she failed in some degree to win her mother's heart, with others she was more fortunate. Christine left her when her years numbered but ten, but so strong was the tie of the common childhood of the sisters, that they corresponded warmly to the end of their lives. Her relations with her brothers were very affectionate, and the King, in particular, cherished her as his favourite sister, probably on account of her ready wit, a quality which, like many people who are dull themselves, he greatly admired. Finally, her charms invited a suitor while she was still almost a child, in the person of the Count of Soissons, a scion of the royal house, who may well have been as much enamoured of the dark, sparkling eyes which were the little Princess's chief beauty, as of her position as a daughter of France.

There is, however, one sentence in an old biography of Henrietta which shows her youth in another and a sadder aspect. Young as she was at the time of her marriage, it appears that already she had had to learn the difficult art of adjusting her conduct to the requirements of Court factions and family dissensions.[4] Her childhood was cast in the stormy times which followed the removal of the strong hand of Henry IV. Her mother, whose lead she followed in the main, was a foolish woman under the domination of unworthy favourites, until by good fortune she fell in with Richelieu. It would be impossible to give here even an outline of the history of the events which in 1617 drove Mary de Medici in disgrace from her son's Court. It must suffice to point out that until her return in triumph in 1621 her little daughter had some difficulty in reconciling the respective claims of her mother and her brother, and in preserving the favour of both.

It was not long after this return that negotiations for a matrimonial alliance with England were opened, and thereupon Henrietta became for the first time a person of political importance. Her mother learned to appreciate her wit and beauty, and Richelieu, whose reign was just beginning, looked upon her with interest as a co-operator in his schemes for the humiliation of the House of Austria and of the French Protestants, objects which he thought would be considerably furthered by the union of Henrietta with the heir of England.

In due time two envoys-extraordinary arrived from England to carry out the negotiations for the marriage. They were both very fine gentlemen, but the elder, the Earl of Carlisle, who was a Scotchman and an able diplomatist, on whom most of the real work of the mission fell, was in social matters quite outshone by his junior, the Lord Kensington, shortly to become Earl of Holland,[5] who was the handsomest man of his time and accounted so fascinating that he was the despair of jealous husbands. He was a great connoisseur in female beauty, and was smiled upon by Madame de Chevreuse, the most brilliant woman of the French Court; but he was kind enough to approve of Henrietta, and he sent home to the bridegroom-elect such glowing accounts of her beauty as roused that rather cold person to a fever of expectation. She was, he