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HENRIETTA MARIA OF FRANCE. 453 withstanding the threat of Olivarez, "that if the pope ever granted a dispensation for the match with France, the king of Spain would march to Rome with an army, and sack it," the ambassador and his message were well received by the queen. In fact, the princess herself appears to have been favorably impressed by the report of his "gallantry" during the incognito visit of the prince ; since she not. only intimated that "if he went to Spain for a wife, he might have had one nearer hand, and saved himself a great part of the labor" ; but we find her at the outset of the negotiation "perusing his picture a whole hour together," which she had ingeniously contrived to obtain from Lord Kensington, and testifying the greatest delight when the letter containing the proposal itself was submitted to her. The joy of Henrietta at the prospect of becoming Queen of England might, however, have been dampened had she looked back to the last alliance of the kind. This was no other than that of Margaret of Anjou, the queen of Henry the Sixth, whose misfortunes had so operated on the minds of French princesses, that though the English princes had made various offers, no marriage for two centuries had been ventured upon. Henrietta's was doomed to be still more disastrous. After much delay, caused by the reluctance of the pope to grant a dispensation for a union which he foresaw would be infelicitous, and by the death of James the First, thirty public and three private marriage articles were agreed upon, after the model of the Spanish contract. By the nineteenth of these articles, the education of the royal offspring, until their thir- teenth year, was strictly reserved to the queen. The ceremony took place "on a theater erected in front of Notre Dame," May 21, 1625, the Due de Chevreuse acting as the representa- tive of Charles, who had already dispatched Buckingham to conduct his bride to England. Her arrival there was, how- ever, delayed some little time, ostensibly by a sudden and severe indisposition of the queen-mother at Amiens — a procrastination which gave rise to various surmises. The pope, on the one hand, is represented to have enjoined a penance ; Buckingham, on the other, to have arranged an opportunity, of which it is certain he availed himself, for a farewell interview with Anne of Austria, the idol of his insane devotion at Paris. Charles, who had meanwhile waited at Dover, removed to Canterbury, whence, on Monday, June 24, he was hastily summoned to receive the queen, who had arrived late the evening before. "The king rode from Canterbury, and came to Dover after