Loyal in Love: Henrietta Maria, Queen of Charles I by Jean Plaidy

Author:Jean Plaidy
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307405616
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2007-10-22T23:00:00+00:00

After that I suffered such a tragedy that I forgot all my anxieties about everything else.

My little Anne fell ill. She had always been the delicate one and had been troubled by a cough from her birth, but after the arrival of my son, whom we christened Henry, she seemed to grow worse.

I was with her night and day toward the end and I prayed constantly that her life might be spared to me. She was three years old and although I had lost Catherine this was not the same. Catherine had died within a few hours of her birth. She had scarcely lived at all and was just a baby to me; but Anne…she was my child…my little daughter…for three years I had loved and cared for her and now…she was dying.

She was too good for this world, I thought. I shall never forget those last moments at her bedside and in spite of everything that memory is one of the most tragic of my life. I can see her lovely little face, the gravity of it, the knowledge in the beautiful eyes that death was close.

“I cannot say my long prayer,” she said, meaning the Lord’s Prayer, “so I must say my short one.” She paused awhile to collect her breath. It was pitiful to watch her. “Lighten mine eyes, oh Lord,” she prayed, “lest I sleep the sleep of death.”

Then she closed her eyes and that was the end.

I flung myself down by her bed and gave myself up to bitter tears. Charles came to me and we sat together in silence for a long time. Then he took my hand and reminded me of the beautiful healthy family we had.

“We are singularly blessed,” he said, “not only in our children but most of all in each other.”

Then we clung together almost as though some premonition had come to us that we might not always be together and we must cherish what time was left to us.

After a while we talked of Anne, and Charles said he wanted to know the cause of her death, so he ordered that there should be a postmortem. He feared that death might have been due to some accident—perhaps a fall about which we had not been told. Our old friend, Sir Theodore Mayerne, presided over the examination which revealed that Anne had died of a suffocating catarrh with an inflammatory disposition of the lungs, accompanied by continual fever, difficulty in breathing and a constant cough.

The doctors said that she could not have lived long no matter what had been done for her.

This satisfied us in a way because we knew that we had not failed her.

We laid her to rest in Henry VII’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey and the memory of the sweet child lingered with us to sadden our days.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.