the King.

Having mentioned Henrietta Maria, Shirley's Royal Mistress, the reader
will pardon a digression, which flows from tenderness, and is no more
than an expression of humanity. Her life-time in England was
embittered with a continued persecution; she lived to see the unhappy
death of her Lord; she witnessed her exiled sons, not only oppressed
with want, but obliged to quit France, at the remonstrance of
Cromwel's ambassador; she herself was loaded with poverty, and as
Voltaire observes, "was driven to the most calamitous situation that
ever poor lady was exposed to; she was obliged to sollicit Cromwel to
pay her an allowance, as Queen Dowager of England, which, no doubt,
she had a right to demand; but to demand it, nay worse, to be obliged
to beg it of a man who shed her Husband's blood upon a scaffold, is an
affliction, so excessively heightened, that few of the human race ever
bore one so severe."

After an active service under the marquis of Newcastle, and the King's
cause declining beyond hope of recovery, Shirley came again to London,
and in order to support himself and family, returned his former
occupation of teaching a school, in White Fryars, in which he was
pretty successful, and, as Wood says, 'educated many ingenious youths,
who, afterwards in various faculties, became eminent.' After the
Restoration, some of the plays our author had written in his leisure
moments, were represented with success, but there is no account
whether that giddy Monarch ever rewarded him for his loyalty, and
indeed it is more probable he did not, as he pursued the duke of
Lauderdale's maxim too closely, of making friends of his enemies, and
suffering his friends to shift for themselves, which infamous maxim
drew down dishonour on the administration and government of Charles