Though she was thus absent from them in person, her heart was with
them all the time, and she was watching with great solicitude and
anxiety for any indications of a design on the part of her enemies to
come and take them away.

At last she received intelligence that an armed force was ordered to
assemble one night in the vicinity of Oatlands to seize her children,
under the pretext that the queen was herself forming plans for removing
them out of the country and taking them to France. Henrietta was a
lady of great spirit and energy, and this threatened danger to her
children aroused all her powers. She sent immediately to all the friends
about her on whom she could rely, and asked them to come, armed and
equipped, and with as many followers as they could muster, to the park
at Oatlands that night. There were also then in and near London a
number of officers of the army, absent from their posts on furlough.
She sent similar orders to these. All obeyed the summons with eager
alacrity. The queen mustered and armed her own household, too, down
to the lowest servants of the kitchen. By these means quite a little
army was collected in the park at Oatlands, the separate parties coming
in, one after another, in the evening and night. This guard patrolled
the grounds till morning, the queen herself animating them by her
presence and energy. The children, whom the excited mother was thus
guarding, like a lioness defending her young, were all the time within
the mansion, awaiting in infantile terror some dreadful calamity, they
scarcely knew what, which all this excitement seemed to portend.

The names and ages of the queen's children at this time were as follows:

Charles, prince of Wales, the subject of this story, eleven.