The next day, notwithstanding this audacity, Buckingham was permitted to see the Queen again, but in the presence of the assembled Court. It is probable that Anne wished what occurred not to transpire, and that this audience might be one of policy. But the precaution, if such it was, did not avail to save Anne from the most injurious suspicions. Buckingham, after taking leave, proceeded to England, bearing in his mind a resolution to return to France at the earliest occasion. Anne and the queen-mother, after some little delay, repaired to Fontainebleau to rejoin the King. Soon afterwards, Louis was informed of all that had occurred. The circumstances were even aggravated to the disadvantage of the unhappy young queen. Several of her attendants were discharged. Putangue, her equerry, was banished; her physician and others shared the same fate. One of Anne’s Spanish ladies, Donna Estefania, had the courage to express her disgust at this severity. “I think,” she said, addressing Le Père Sequirent, the King’s confessor, “that so much malignity visited upon this lady is not a good sign; it does not look well.”[221]
Buckingham, meantime, journeyed towards England, his heart full of the hope of returning at some future day to behold the object of his mad passion. Yet he had every motive of tenderness and consideration towards his duchess, whose fondest hopes were constantly, during absence, fixed upon her faithless husband. Balthazar Gerbier, who, from his situation in the Duke’s household, had ample opportunities of witnessing her devotion to the Duke, terms her, when writing to Buckingham, during his sojourn in Spain, “your incomparable Penelope, who constantly, in this sea of trouble, has demonstrated the greatness of her constancy, comforting herself with the hope of seeing her sun return above this horizon, beautiful and shining as it set.”[222] Her anxiety during his former embassy had been such as to injure her health, or, as she touchingly expressed it, “merely melancholy was the cause of her sickness.” Nor was that sorrow unmingled with doubt of her husband’s constancy. Buckingham, with his natural candour and fearlessness, perhaps, too, wanting the moral sense of shame for such transgressions, appears, from a passage in one of the Duchess’s letters, to have confessed to her some of his infidelities during his Spanish journey, and to have expressed great contrition for them. Fears had, at that time, been entertained of his wife’s health; and consumption was the disease apprehended. The Duke was on that occasion stung to the heart by the dread of losing his “poor Kate,” as she termed herself. Reflecting on his reckless gallantries with shame, he appears to have considered the illness of his wife as a judgment upon him, and intimated to her that should she die, he should think it too hard a blow, even for one so sinful as himself.[223] The reply made to him by his gentle wife ought to have ensured everlasting gratitude and constancy, were it in the nature of man to be bound by such ties to woman. “And where you say,” writes this devoted woman, “it is too great a punishment for a greater offender than you hope you are, dear heart, how severe God had been pleased to have dealt with me, it had been for my sins, and not yours, for truly you are so good a man that, but for one sin, you are not so great an offender, only your loving women so well. But I hope God has forgiven you, and I am sure you will not commit the like again, and God has laid a great affliction on me by this grievous absence; and I trust God will send me life, and Moll too, that you shall enjoy us both; for I am sure,” she adds, "God will bless us both, for your sake; and I cannot express the infinite affection I bear you; but, for God’s sake, believe me, that there was never woman loved man as I do you."