By this speech Henrietta Maria expressed, undoubtedly without realizing all its grandeur, the idea which had suggested her marriage and been prominent in France during the whole negotiations.  It was the policy of Henry IV. that Henry IV.’s daughter was bringing to a triumphant issue.  The marriage between Henrietta Maria and Charles I., negotiated and concluded by Cardinal Richelieu, was the open declaration of the fact that the style of Protestant or Catholic was not the supreme law of policy in Christian Europe, and that the interests of nations should not remain subservient to the religious faith of the reigning or governing personages.

Unhappily the policy of Henry IV., carried on by Cardinal Richelieu, found no Queen Elizabeth any longer on the throne of England to comprehend it and maintain it.  Charles I., tossed about between the haughty caprices of his favorite Buckingham and the religious or political passions of his people, did not long remain attached to the great idea which had predominated in the alliance of the two crowns.  Proud and timid, imperious and awkward, all at the same time, he did not succeed, in the first instance, in gaining the affections of his young wife, and early infractions of the treaty of marriage; the dismissal of all the queen’s French servants, hostilities between the merchant navies of the two nations, had for some time been paving the way for open war, when the Duke of Buckingham, in the hope of winning back to him the House of Commons (June, 1626), madly attempted the expedition against the Island of Re.  What was the success of it, as well as of the two attempts that followed it, has already been shown.

Three years later, on the 24th of April, 1629, the King of England concluded peace with France without making any stipulation in favor of the Reformers whom hope of aid from him had drawn into rebellion.  “I declare,” says the Duke of Rohan, “that I would have suffered any sort of extremity rather than be false to the many sacred oaths we had given him not to listen to any treaty without him, who had many times assured us that he would never make peace without including us in it.”  The English accepted the peace “as the king had desired, not wanting the King of Great Britain to meddle with his rebellious Huguenot subjects any more than he would want to meddle with his Catholic subjects if they were to rebel against him.” [Memoires de Richelieu, t. iv. p. 421.] The subjects of Charles I. were soon to rebel against him:  and France kept her word and did not interfere.

The Hollanders, with more prudence and ability than distinguished Buckingham and Charles I., had done better service to the Protestant cause without ever becoming entangled in the quarrels that divided France; natural enemies as they were of Spain and the house of Austria, they readily seconded Richelieu in the struggle he maintained against them; besides, the United Provinces were as yet poor, and the cardinal