The Loves of Charles II Read Online Free Page A

only one course open to her—flight to France. How she had wept, that emotional woman! She had cried to Anne: “I must leave this country. If the Parliament make me their prisoner, my husband will come to my aid; he will risk all for my sake. It is better that my miserable life should be risked than that he should be in peril through me. I have written to him telling him this; and by the time he receives my letter I hope to be in France. The Queen of France is my own sister-in-law, and she will not turn me away.”
    She was all emotion; her heart was ever ready to govern her head, and this, Anne knew, was in a large measure to be blamed for the King’s disasters; for, oddly enough, although the marriage of Charles and Henrietta Maria had begun stormily, they had quickly understood each other, and with understanding had come passionate affection. The Queen was passionate by nature; frivolous she seemed at times, yet how singlemindedly she could cling to a cause; and the cause to which she now gave her passionate energy was that of her husband.
    “Take care of my little one, Anne,” she had said. “Guard her with your life. If ill befall her, Anne Douglas, you shall suffer a thousand times more than she does.” Those black eyes had snapped with fury as she had railed against a fate which demanded she leave her child; they softened with love for the baby and gratitude to Anne Douglas, even while she threatened her. Then, having made these threats, she had taken Anne in her arms and kissed her. “I know you will take care of my child … Protestant though you are. And if you should ever see the light, foolish woman, and come to the true religion, you must instruct my daughter as I would have her instructed. Oh, but you are a Protestant, you say! And the King will have his children brought up in the religion of their own country! And I am a poor desolate mother who must give up her newborn babe to aProtestant! A Protestant!” She had become incoherent, for she had never bothered to learn the English language properly. Anne knelt to her and swore that, apart from her religion, she would serve the Queen and obey her in all things.
    Poor sad Henrietta Maria, who had come to England as a girl of sixteen, very lovely and determined to have her own way, was now an exile, parted from her husband and children. But with God’s help, there should be one child restored to her.
    To Exeter the King had come, for he had not received his wife’s letter and believed her to be still there in childbed; he had fought his way through the Parliamentary forces to reach her. It had been Anne’s unhappy task to tell him that he was too late. Her eyes filled with tears now as she remembered him—handsome, even with the stains of battle on him, noble of countenance as he always would be, for he was a man of ideals; and if there was a weakness in that face, it but endeared him to a woman such as Anne Douglas. He was too ready to listen to the wrong advice; he was weak when he should have been strong, and obstinate when to give way would have been wise. He believed too firmly in that Divine Right of Kings which had grown out of date since the reign of Henry VIII; he lacked the common touch of Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth, who had been able to adjust her rule to meet a more modern way of life. Weak though he might have been, a ruler unfit to rule, he was a man of handsome presence and of great personal charm; and it was moving to see his devotion to his family.
    With him to Exeter had come the young Prince of Wales, a boy of fourteen then, who had none of his father’s good looks, but already more than his father’s charm. He was rather shy and sweet-tempered. It had been moving to see him take the baby in his arms and marvel at the smallness of her.
    Anne wept afresh; she wept for the handsome King who was losing his kingdom, for the Prince, who would be heir to his father’s lost throne, for the baby—the youngest of a tragic