Well, when James died his son Charles became King. Charles was then twenty-five years old, and was still delicate and thin, and not very tall. His hair was long, parted in the middle, and falling on each side of his face to his collar. His little neat beard was cut to a point, and his eyes were very sad. He liked better to live quietly than to be a king.
Almost directly after his father's death he married a French Princess. She was young and gay, and if she had known she was going to marry the only King of England who was ever beheaded, I think she would have stayed in France. She was only just sixteen when she came to London, and all the strange faces and the strange language must have frightened her very much. Charles had never seen her before, and when they met he looked at her as if she was not quite so small as he had expected; and she laughed and showed him the heels of her shoes, which were quite flat, and said: 'Sir, I stand upon mine own feet. I have no helps of art. Thus high I am, and am neither higher nor lower.'
Henrietta Maria was dark, with black eyes and dark-brown hair, and was very quick and bright, and Charles loved her always to the end of his life.
After a time Henrietta was given Somerset House, a magnificent house in the Strand, for herself, and all her French attendants lived there with her. Perhaps Charles felt that the old palace at Whitehall was hardly fit for this bright little French woman, and perhaps it annoyed him to hear all the French people chattering about his own Court. Somerset House had been built by an uncle of Edward VI., the Duke of Somerset, who was such a greedy man that he had pulled down numbers of churches in order to take the stone of which they were built to make his own vast mansion. The Duke never lived there, for before it was finished he was imprisoned in the Tower, and then beheaded. When Henrietta was there the furniture was very magnificent and rich. We are told that one of the bed coverlets, of embroidered satin, was worth £1,000!
This Somerset House was pulled down when George III. was King, and another great house called by the same name was built instead. This one is still standing, and in it there are offices belonging to the Government. In one part are all the wills that people have left when they died, and if anyone wants to see a particular will he can go there and see it if he pays a shilling.