Page:The Queens of England.djvu/495

ANNE OF DENMARK. 447 Theobalds to wait there the event." In other words, he never visited his son on his death-bed. Nor was this all ; he forbade the wearing of court-mourning; and had the indecency, within three days after the death, to direct Sir Thomas Edmondes, at Paris, to continue to negotiate poor Henry's marriage- treaty, only substituting the name of Charles. It requires great charity to believe that James disapproved of the crime imputed to Somerset, even though himself no party to it. The queen, on the other hand, is 'said to have shed bitter tears ; but to have found relief in the preparations and mas- quings that soon after began, for celebrating the marriage of her daughter with the Count Palatine of Bohemia. Elizabeth and Charles were now her only children. Two daughters had been born to her since her arrival in England (on the 7th April, 1605, and the 22nd June 1606) ; but both, after being christ- ened, respectively, Mary and Sophia, had died in infancy. With this exception, and a suspected but very innocent flirta- tion with the young Lord Herbert of Cherbury, her life pre- sents few things more that are noticeable. Its general tenor of business and entertainment has been very fully presented to the reader. To offer more details would be to run the same circle of court occupation, conversation, and amusement. She had an illness soon after her daughter's marriage in 161 3, and went to the waters at Bath. But she is next and speedily heard of, assisting at one of Campion's masques at Caversham, the seat of Lord Knollys ; "vouchsafing to make herself the head of the revels and graciously adorning the place with her per- sonal dancing." Perhaps the only festivity in her reign that she would not as willingly and graciously have adorned was the septuagenarian old Howard of Effingham's marriage with his young wife of nineteen. She had a spite against the lady ; and, in a letter which is no bad specimen of her liveliness, laughed at the king for his meddling to bring about such a wedding. . "I humbly desire your majesty to tell me how I should keep this secret, that have already told it, and shall tell it to as many as I speak with. If I were a poet I would make a song of it, and sing it to the tune of Three fools well met." Rarely were the latter years of her life, however, ruffled by even such differences as these with her husband. The new favorite himself she would seem to have tolerated, and lived on kindly terms with. Archbishop Abbott tells us, indeed, that it was she who had introduced Villiers to James, though