Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/441

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a.d. 1662
CHARLES'S CONDUCT TO THE QUEEN.
427

to Portugal, she could not even go out of that palace without his permission; and in fact, he so effectually worked upon her terrors, backed by the savage threats of the king, that he ultimately broke her spirit, and taught her to acquiesce in an example of profligacy, which at once scandalised and corrupted the morals of the age. Charles, when Catherine repeated her determination to return to Portugal, told her rudely that she must first see whether her mother would receive her, and that he would send her Portuguese servants to ascertain that point; and he at once discharged all her attendants. Thus left abandoned in a foreign country, the miserable queen told the chancellor that she had to struggle with greater difficulties than any woman of her condition before; but that pattern minister only showed her that it was the more necessary to submit, and, continues Clarendon himself:—"In all this the king preserved his point; the lady came to court, was lodged there, was every day in the queen's presence, and the king in continual conference with her, whilst the queen sate untaken notice of; and if her majesty rose at the indignity and retired into her chamber, it may be one or two attended her; but all the company remained in the room she left, and too often said those things aloud which nobody ought to have whispered. She alone was left out in all jollities, and not suffered to have any part of those pleasant applications and caresses which she saw made abroad to everybody else; a universal mirth in all company but in hers, and in all places but in her chamber, her own servants showing more respect and more diligence to the person of the lady than towards their own mistress, who, they found, could do them less good. All these mortifications were too heavy to be borne, so that at last, when it was least expected or suspected, the queen of a sudden let herself fell first to conversation, and then to familiarity, and even in the same instant to a confidence with the lady; was merry with her in public, talked kindly of her, and in private used nobody more friendly."

Ejection of Nonconformists on St. Bartholomew's Day

She was subdued to her yoke; and this was the treatment of an English king to a princess who brought him three hundred and fifty thousand pounds dowry, the settlement of Tangier, which might in any reign of sense and policy have been made a commanding station in the Mediterranean, and Bombay, our first settlement in India, the nucleus of our present magnificent Indian empire.

Whilst these revolting scenes had been passing in the palace, the fives of more patriots were brought into question without. Vane and Lambert were put upon their trial before the Court of King's Bench on the 2nd of June. The prominent actors in the drama of the late revolution had both in their different ways done immense damage to royalty; and though the convention parliament had requested Charles to leave them in impunity, notwithstanding that they were not included in the bill of indemnity, and Charles had assented, the cavaliers could not rest satisfied without their blood. Lambert had been one of Cromwell's ablest generals, one of his major-generals, and to the last he had done his best to maintain the cause of the commonwealth by his sword, and had attempted to prevent the march of Monk at the very time that he was planning the return of the