By this narrative of secret history, Charles the First does not appear so weak a slave to his queen as our writers echo from each other; and those who make Henrietta so important a personage in the cabinet, appear to have been imperfectly acquainted with her real talents.  Charles, indeed, was deeply enamoured of the queen, for he was inclined to strong personal attachments;[217] and “the temperance of his youth, by which he had lived so free from personal vice,” as May, the parliamentary historian expresses it, even the gay levity of Buckingham seems never, in approaching the king, to have violated.  Charles admired in Henrietta all those personal graces which he himself wanted; her vivacity in conversation enlivened his own seriousness, and her gay volubility the defective utterance of his own; while the versatility of her manners relieved his own formal habits.  Doubtless the queen exercised the same power over this monarch which vivacious females are privileged by nature to possess over their husbands; she was often listened to, and her suggestions were sometimes approved; but the fixed and systematic principles of the character and the government of this monarch must not be imputed to the intrigues of a mere lively and volatile woman; we must trace them to a higher source; to his own inherited conceptions of the regal rights, if we would seek for truth, and read the history of human nature in the history of Charles the First.

Long after this article was published, the subject has been more critically developed in my “Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles the First.”

THE MINISTER—­THE CARDINAL DUKE OF RICHELIEU.

Richelieu was the greatest of statesmen, if he who maintains himself by the greatest power is necessarily the greatest minister.  He was called “the King of the King.”  After having long tormented himself and France, he left a great name and a great empire—­both alike the victims of splendid ambition!  Neither this great minister nor this great nation tasted of happiness under his mighty administration.  He had, indeed, a heartlessness in his conduct which obstructed by no relentings those remorseless decisions which made him terrible.  But, while he trode down the princes of the blood and the nobles, and drove his patroness, the queen-mother, into a miserable exile, and contrived that the king should fear and hate his brother, and all the cardinal-duke chose, Richelieu was grinding the face of the poor by exorbitant taxation, and converted every town in France into a garrison; it was said of him, that he never liked to be in any place where he was not the strongest.  “The commissioners of the exchequer and the commanders of the army believe themselves called to a golden harvest; and in the interim the cardinal is charged with the sins of all the world, and is even afraid of his life.”  Thus Grotius speaks, in one of his letters, of the miserable situation