to doubt was grossly exaggerated by the religious bigots of the time, associated Charles’s Queen, Henrietta Maria, with Hyde Park. The early years of his French marriage were certainly not happy, the meddling household of the Queen’s French attendants and Catholic priests being responsible for the luckless monarch’s domestic broils. His fierce hatred of their interference obtains expression in a letter to Buckingham, by virtue of which the lot were “sent packing.” It is addressed to his “faithful, constant, loving friend Steenie”:
“I command you to send all the French away to-morrow out of the towne, if you can by fair meanes (but stike not long in disputing), otherwise force them away, dryving them away lyke so manie wilde beasts, until ye have shipped them, and so the devil goe with them. Let me heare no answer, but of the performance of my command.”
Whatever his subsequent weakness, Charles I. was at least in early years of kingship a forceful letter-writer.
Shortly before this missive was dispatched, the King had been moved to intolerable anger by the accounts presented to him of the infamous treatment of his Queen by her Popish entourage. In the early summer of 1626, Henrietta had asked to spend a certain time in retirement and devotion. After a quiet day passed in the services of her church at the chapel in St. James’s Park, she turned into Hyde Park, directing her walk towards Tyburn, whether by intention or not remains unknown. In any case, it was quite probable that, especially impressed by her religious seclusion, she bethought herself of those who, not so many years before, had suffered as martyrs on that gruesome spot for the very religion she held so dear. She knelt to pray for them, and perhaps for strength to bear her own weary lot.
A week or two passed before the tale of her surreptitious visit to Tyburn reached the King. He was told that the Queen had been made to walk thither barefoot as a penance, and to offer up prayers for traitors who had ended their days on Tyburn gallows.
Whitelock’s Chronicle gives the Protestant version of the affair:
“Distastes and jealousies were raised about the Government of the Queen’s Family; wherein the King held himself traduced by some of her French servants, who said that the King had nothing to do with them, he being an Heretick.
“The Queen was brought to insist upon it, as part of the Articles, that she should name all her servants, and some unkindness arose upon it. The King was also distasted, that her Priests made the Queen to walk to Tyburn on Penance.
“Upon these Passages the King dismist, and sent back into France all the Queen’s French Retinue, acquainting the French King with it, and excusing it to him; but it was ill resented in France, and by them held contrary to the Articles of Marriage.”
That this was the account generally accredited and sedulously fostered by the anti-Romish party in the State, is further shown by a letter preserved in the Harleian MSS., written by Mr. John Pory, a well-known public man, who had been a Member of Parliament in 1610. After relating the dismissal of the servants and priests, he says:
“No longer agon then upon St. James his day last, those hippocritical dogges made the pore Queen to walke afoot (some add barefoot) from her house at St. James to the gallowes at Tyborne, thereby to honor the Saint of the day in visiting that holy place, where so many Martyrs (forsooth) had shed their blood in defense of the Catholic cause. Had they not also made her to dable in the durte in a foul morning from Somersett House to St. James, her Luciferian Confessor riding allong by her in his Coach! Yea, they have made her to go barefoot, to spin, to eat her meat out of tryne dishes (wooden dishes), to waite at the table and serve her servants, with many other ridiculous and absurd penances.”
There is a picture of the Queen’s penance, of which a reproduction is here given. The Queen is seen kneeling by the triangular scaffold, whither she has been accompanied by her Father Confessor—presumably a Cardinal—in his coach and six.
Of the “triple tree” itself, its origin and use, there is much to be said in later chapters on Tyburn.
Strangely enough, when, in 1628, Charles I. raised the jointure of Henrietta Maria to £28,000, one of the manors assigned to her to produce the additional £6000 was that of Hyde.
As already said, the Park first became under Charles I. the fashionable society rendezvous. Its greatest attraction, maybe, was the racing in the Ring. The occasions, when organised meetings took place, were special scenes of gaiety, and were evidently thought important events, as even among the State Papers there is preserved the agreement for a race that took place there. Though admitting the public so freely, and himself mixing among them, Charles still looked upon the Royal Park as a personal possession, and exercised his full authority within it. It was on one of these occasions that the King, seeing a licentious Berkshire squire among the company, peremptorily ordered him out of its confines, speaking of him to the courtiers as an “ugly rascal.” This expression the squire overheard. He went away quietly; but vowed vengeance, and gradually embittered the whole of his county against the King. He had, indeed, his revenge, for writ large on Charles I.’s death-warrant was the name of the “ugly rascal.”
In the tumultuous years with which the reign closed, Hyde Park saw other scenes. There the Parliamentary troops mustered in stern array; there Essex lay waiting with a small force the threatened attack on London by King Charles, who was expected to march from Oxford to seize the capital. There came band after band of sturdy patriots to join the Roundhead army, and General Lambert added his men to those of his chief. Raw recruits were drilled into the celebrated train-bands, and in Hyde Park Cromwell reviewed his invincible Ironsides, his own particular force whom he had especially trained to meet the cavalry attacks of Prince Rupert.
In 1642 the inhabitants of the City of London made a large fortress with four bastions south-east of Hyde Park, on the ground now occupied by Hamilton Place. It was from part of this erection, which was called “Oliver’s Mount,” that Mount Street, Park Lane, takes its name.
The following year, as the civil strife was still waging fierce and hot between Royalists and Roundheads, three forts were constructed on Tyburn Road. It is quaint to think of impromptu fortresses built by an alarmed populace near Lancaster Gate and Oxford Street. The Perfect Diurnal, an invaluable record of the time, states that the anxiety of the citizens was such that thousands of men, women, servants, and children, many members of the Council of the City, well-known public men, and the trained bands from the Camp, together with feltmakers, shoemakers, and other tradesmen, all worked their best in throwing up these fortifications outside the City.
Samuel Butler, in his Hudibras, refers to this:
“Women, who were our first apostles,
Without whose aid w’ had all been lost else;
Women, that left no stone unturned
In which the Cause might be concern’d:
Brought in their children’s spoons and whistles,
To purchase swords, carbines, and pistols;
Their husbands, cullies, and sweethearts,
To take the saints’ and church’s parts;
Drew several gifted brethren in,
That for the Bishops would have been,
And fixed them constant to the Party,
With motives powerful and hearty:
Their husbands robb’d, and made hard shifts,
T’ administer unto their gifts
All they could rap, and rend, and pilfer,
To scraps and ends of gold and silver;
What have they done, or what left undone,
That might advance the Cause at London?
March’d rank and file, with drum and ensign,
T’ entrench the city for defence in;
Rais’d rampires with their own soft hands,
To put the enemy