to open the despatches, would keep out of the way till Charles should have had reasonable time to enable him to escape, when he would repair to the States with his tardy information, and require, on the terms of the late treaty, that the king's person should be instantly seized. Charles had no choice but to follow his advice, and therefore instantly set off on his return to Brussels, where he was then on a visit.

Bruges, with the exception of a short stay at Fontarabia, whither he had proceeded to attend the Pyrennean treaty, continued to be the principal residence of Charles till his restoration to the throne. It was shortly after his return from the borders of Spain that he received the announcement of Cromwell's death. He was playing at tennis, when Sir Stephen Fox fell on his knees before him and acquainted him with the important tidings. Soon afterward, in order to be better prepared for any emergency, the king departed for Brussels.

Probably no one, bearing the title of king, was ever more frequently disappointed in his matrimonial projects than Charles. We have already seen him rejected by Cromwell as his son-in-law, and he afterward met with a similar refusal from Cardinal Mazarin, on his proposing for his niece Hortensia, the most beautiful woman and the richest heiress in France. The cardinal (who appears to have received the offer either through Abbot

Montague or Lord Jermyn) entertained at this period so little hopes of the king's restoration that he refused to listen to the project even for a moment. After the return of Charles to England, he endeavoured to renew the negotiation, offering a princely dowry with his beautiful niece; but it was now the king's turn to refuse, and the lady was rejected.

A match with the eldest daughter of the Duke of Orleans, which had been a darling object with Henrietta Maria, when her son was only Prince of Wales, proceeded to greater lengths. The lady, in right of her mother, the duke's first wife, was already in possession of the rich Duchy of Montpensier, and, as Charles was sadly in want of present means, the project was eagerly embraced. "The queen," says Clarendon, "was much inclined to it, and the king himself not averse." James the Second, in his Memoirs, gives a full account of the negotiation and of its subsequent failure. "His Majesty," he says, "had not been long in Paris before some private overtures, at least intimations, were made to him from some confidants of Mademoiselle, eldest daughter to the Duke of Orleans, concerning a marriage to be made betwixt them; which proposition was then readily embraced by him, and was likewise approved by the queen his mother. And it proceeded so far, that the king went every day to visit her, she at the same time giving him every reason to believe that it

would succeed.

But on the sudden he found her growing cooler, without knowing the occasion of it; so that he was obliged in prudence to forbear his frequent visits, till at length he came to understand the cause of this alteration in her behaviour, which, in effect, was this: Some, who either were or at least pretended to be her friends, put into her head the imagination of a marriage with the King of France; which they made her believe they might compass with great ease, considering the ill condition of his affairs at that time. The queen and cardinal, as they persuaded her, would be forced to consent to it for their own security, and to draw themselves out of their present difficulties. This thought, as unseasonable as it was, yet was so strongly imprinted on her mind, that it caused her wholly to break off with the King of England. By which means, reaching at what she could not get, she lost what was in her power to have had, and missed both of them." Mlle. de Montpensier, in her Memoirs, has herself initiated us into one of the reasons which induced her to reject Charles. "As I had an idea of marrying the emperor," she says, "I regarded the Prince of Wales but as an object of pity."

Another princess, by whom Charles seems to have been rejected in the days of his exile, was Henrietta, daughter of the Princess Dowager of Orange. To her mother we find him writing as follows: "I shall, in asking you a question, make