Henrietta Maria

Henrietta Maria

The woman to whose life and environment the following pages are dedicated was called upon to play her part in one of the most difficult and perplexing periods of our history: she lived just on the edge of the modern world, when the Middle Ages, with their splendid simplicity of all-embracing ideals, had passed away, and when even the ideals of nationality and religious freedom which the Renaissance and the Reformation had brought were becoming modified by the stirring of a new spirit of liberty. The two countries which Henrietta Maria knew were throughout her lifetime making their future destiny: the France which cherished her youth and sheltered her age was becoming the greedy France of Louis XIV, with its splendid Court, its attempts at territorial growth, its downtrodden, suffering people; the England of her happy married life was growing in political self-consciousness and in a stern and repellent godliness which was to mould the character of the nation, and to educate it to become in the next century the builder-up of the greatest empire which the world has ever seen. Henrietta's life touches both England and France: by race, by education she was a Frenchwoman; by marriage she was an Englishwoman, and it is on English history that she has left the impress of her vivid personality; but the France which she never forgot coloured her thoughts throughout, and taught her in all probability those maxims of statecraft which she attempted to apply when the troubles of her life came upon her. [Pg xii] ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 38294
Author: Haynes, Henrietta
Release Date: Dec 13, 2011
Format: eBook
Language: English