daughter was most
affecting: Henriette had so long yearned for the companionship of her
kindred, while Marie de Medicis had, on her side, been for so great a
period cut off from all the ties of family affection, that as they wept
in each other's arms, the one was unable to articulate a welcome, and
the other to express her acknowledgments for the warm greeting which she
had experienced.

Immediately on her arrival in England, Charles I. awarded to the exiled
Queen a pension of a hundred pounds a day on the civil list; but her
advent had, nevertheless, occurred at an inauspicious moment for the
English sovereign, whose resources were crippled, and who abstained
from levying subsidies upon his subjects in order not to assemble a
Parliament; while he moreover dreaded that the presence of his royal
mother-in-law, with her numerous train of priests, would tend to
exasperate the spirit of the people, who were already greatly excited
against the Roman Catholics.

Nor were these his only causes of anxiety, as many of the French
malcontents who had fled their country in order to escape the enmity of
Richelieu had selected London as their place of refuge, relying upon the
friendship of Henriette (a circumstance which had increased the coldness
that already existed between the two Courts); and these at once rallied
round Marie de Medicis as their common centre. Among these illustrious
emigrants the most distinguished were the Duchesse de Chevreuse and the
Ducs de Soubise and de la Valette, all of whom were surrounded by a
considerable number of exiles of inferior rank; and as the Queen-mother
saw them gathered about her, she easily persuaded herself that their
voluntary absence from France was a convincing proof of the general
unpopularity of her own arch--enemy Richelieu. Her personal suite,
moreover, included no less than two hundred individuals; and thus the
palace of the Stuarts presented the anomalous spectacle of a French
Court, where the nobles of a hostile land, and the priests of a hostile
faith, held undisturbed authority, to the open dissatisfaction of the
sturdy citizens of London. Murmurs were rife on all sides; and the
Queen-mother was regarded as a harbinger of misfortune. Henriette
herself was obnoxious to the Puritans, but they had been to a certain
degree disarmed by her gentleness of demeanour, and the prudence and
policy of her conduct; she was, moreover, the wife of the sovereign, and
about to become the m