Many efforts were made for his release, the most efficacious by the Queen
of France. It should have been the Dowager Marie de Medicis, in memory of
her hot flame for him when he was a youth; but though she may have
initiated the appeal, she died before his release, which he seems to have
owed to Anne of Austria's good services. Freedom meant banishment, but this
sentence he did not take very seriously. In these years he was continually
going and coming between France and England, now warned by Parliament, now
tolerated, now banished, again daring return, and escaping from the net. "I
can compare him to nothing but to a great fish that we catch and let go
again; but still he will come to the bait," said Selden of him in his
_Table-Talk_.
Exile in Paris provided fresh opportunity for scientific study, though his
connection with the English Catholic malcontents, and his services to the
Queen Henrietta Maria, who now made him her Chancellor, absorbed much of
his time. When the Cause needed him, the Cavalier broke away from
philosophy; and in 1645 he set out for Rome, at the bidding of the Queen,
to beg money for her schemes.
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