es, after four days' tedious
travelling, they reached Dover; but the spectacle of these impatient
foreigners so reluctantly quitting England, gesticulating their sorrows
or their quarrels, exposed them to the derision, and stirred up the
prejudices of the common people. As Madame George, whose vivacity is
always described as extravagantly French, was stepping into the boat,
one of the mob could not resist the satisfaction of flinging a stone at
her French cap; an English courtier, who was conducting her, instantly
quitted his charge, ran the fellow through the body, and quietly
returned to the boat. The man died on the spot; but no farther notice
appears to have been taken of the inconsiderate gallantry of this
English courtier.

But Charles did not show his kingly firmness only on this occasion: it
did not forsake him when the French Marshal Bassompierre was instantly
sent over to awe the king; Charles sternly offered the alternative of
war, rather than permit a French faction to trouble an English court.
Bassompierre makes a curious observation in a letter to the French
Bishop of Mende, he who had been just sent away from England; and which
serves as the most positive evidence of the firm refusal of Charles the
First. The French marshal, after stating the total failure of his
mission, exclaims, "See, sir, to what we are reduced! and imagine my
grief, that the Queen of Great Britain has the pain of viewing my
departure without being of any service to her; but if you consider that
I was sent here to _make a contract of marriage observed, and to
maintain the Catholic religion in a country from which they formerly
banished it to make a contract of marriage_, you will assist in excusing
me of this failure." The French marshal has also preserved the same
distinctive feature of the nation, as well as of the monarch, who,
surely to his honour as King of England, felt and acted on this occasion
as a true Briton. "I have found," says the Gaul, "humility among
Spaniards, civility and courtesy among the Swiss, in the embassies I had
the honour to perform for the king; but the English would not in the
least abate of their natural pride and arrogance. The king is so
resolute not to re-establish any French about the queen, his consort,
and was so stern (_rude_) in speaking to me, that it is impossible to
have been more so." In a word, the French marshal, with all his vaunts
and his threats, discovered that Charles the First was the