the most bitter terms for what she
designated both as a breach of faith and as an act of tyranny, she
summoned the Bishop of Mende, the French Ambassador, to the palace, and
instructed him to apprise the King her brother of the insult with which
she was threatened.

The prelate approved her resistance: and loudly declared that neither
the individuals composing her household, nor the ecclesiastics who were
attached to it, should leave England without an order to that effect
from their own sovereign; and he forthwith despatched couriers to Paris,
to inform the Court of the position of the English Queen; to which Louis
replied by insisting that the persons who had accompanied his royal
sister to her new kingdom should be permitted to remain about her; in
default of which concession he should thenceforward hold himself
aggrieved, and become the irreconcilable enemy of the British
Government.

The Duke of Buckingham nevertheless persisted in his resolution, and the
foreign attendants of Henriette were compelled to return to France, to
the excessive indignation of Marie de Medicis, who refused to see in the
extreme munificence of Charles towards the exiled household any
extenuation of the affront which had been put upon her favourite
daughter; while Henriette on her part, far from endeavouring to adapt
herself to circumstances, and to yield with dignified submission to a
privation which it was no longer in her power to avert, gave way to all
the petulance of a spoiled girl, and overwhelmed the minister with
reproaches and even threats. So unmeasured, indeed, were her invectives
that at length, when she had on one occasion exhausted alike the temper
and the endurance of Buckingham, he so far forgot the respect due to her
rank and to her sex, as well as his own chivalry as a noble, as to
retort with an impetuosity little inferior to her own that she had
better not proceed too far, "for that in England queens had sometimes
lost their heads;" a display of insolence which Henriette never forgot
nor forgave, and which was immediately communicated to the French Court.

Time, far from lessening the animosity of the young Queen towards the
favourite, or the consequent schism between herself and the King,
appeared rather to increase both; and Richelieu, after having for a
while contemplated a war with England conjointly with Philip of Spain,
ultimately abandoned the idea as dangerous and doubtful to the interests
of France. M. de Bl