The Palace and Park by Phillips, Forbes, Latham, Owen, Scharf, and Shenton

[Born at Florence, 1573. Died at Cologne, 1642. Aged 69.] Daughter of Francis II., Grand Duke of Tuscany; wife of Henry IV. of France; and mother of Henrietta-Maria, the queen of Charles I. of England. She wedded Henry IV. after he had divorced his first wife, Margaret of Valois, and the alliance was not a happy one. Crowned the day before the assassination of her husband, at which some of her contemporaries more than suspected that she herself connived. But no proof of her guilt has been forthcoming. Regent during the minority of her son Louis XIII., she threw France into confusion by her misgovernment, prodigality, intrigues and wilfulness. The confusion ended in civil war. Resigning the regency when Louis XIII. attained his majority, she took up arms against her son; but reconciliation being made through the intervention of Richelieu, then Superintendent of her household, she introduced that great and wily man into the counsels of the king. Richelieu, appointed Prime-Minister, arrested his former mistress at Compeigne, and threw her friends into the Bastile. The sun of Mary had finally set; she became an outcast and a wanderer in Europe. Our own Charles I. found his mother-in-law an asylum; but he himself was soon in need of human charity, and the abased queen must needs creep to Cologne, where she lived in obscurity and died--as travellers are still shown--in a garret. A weak woman, with strong passions. Ambitious, jealous, irascible. In her character, as with all men and women--even the worst---there is one brighter spot for contemplation. She introduced into France an enlightened and a pure taste for art. There still exist some specimens of engraving by her hand. To her, Paris owes the Palace of the Luxembourg, and, for her, Rubens painted a gallery still possessed by France. [The companion statuette to 305A.]