her royal consort and his illustrious guest had entered the principal court of the palace, than she hastened, surrounded by her children, to bid them welcome; and as her unhappy parent descended from the coach supported on the arm of the King, Henriette threw herself upon her knees before her, and seizing her hands, pressed them convulsively to her heart, and bathed them with her tears.  Marie de Medicis, tutored as she had been in suffering, was scarcely less moved; and thus the meeting between the august mother and 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 mother of a prince; but Marie de Medicis possessed no claims on their forbearance, and they did not hesitate to attribute to her views and designs which she was too powerless to entertain.