In June 1645, during the Battle of Naseby, parliamentary forces under Sir Thomas Fairfax captured the supply wagons that contained Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria’s private correspondence. In seizing more than 200 royal letters, parliament laid claim to a powerful weapon in the propaganda war against the King and Queen. Only a month later, parliament published thirty-seven of the letters along with fourteen pages of annotations as The King’s Cabinet Opened. For Charles’s enemies, this was just the ammunition they needed to destroy his already shaky reputation. The letters contained substantive information, including Charles and Henrietta Maria’s plans to bring French and Irish troops to England; his readiness to make peace with Irish rebels; his promise to remove penal measures against Catholics; and all of the King and Queen’s attempts to obtain money, soldiers, and ammunition from the King of Denmark, the Duke of Lorraine, and the Prince of Orange. However, the letters also inflamed parliamentary fears—already stoked by pro-parliamentary pamphlets—that Henrietta Maria operated as the power behind the throne.

While the English Civil Wars had a variety of causes, puritan fears of the malignant influence of Henrietta Maria figured prominently among them, and it proved a powerful rallying cry for Charles I’s opponents. Indeed, the annotations in The King’s Cabinet Opened constructed a damaging account of royal rule. The editors depicted Charles as a weak, indecisive king, led to ruin by the nefarious influence of his foreign, Catholic queen. The very first footnote establishes the parliamentary narrative: “The Kings Counsels are wholly governed by the Queen; though she be of the weaker sex, borne an Alien, bred in a contrary Religion, yet nothing great or small is transacted without her privity and consent.”Footnote 1 This image of Henrietta Maria as a dangerous influence persisted in scholarship on the Queen well into the twentieth century.

While parliament presented the Queen’s role as counsellor as a mark of subversion, queens of late medieval England had often played active political roles, modelling themselves after the Virgin Mary and presenting themselves as intercessors between the king and his subjects, as several of the chapters in this volume—especially Aidan Norrie’s on Jane Seymour—attest.Footnote 2 By the seventeenth century, however, changes in the status of the Virgin Mary caused by the Reformation had undercut a queen consort’s role as intercessor, and the memory of the violent masculinity of the Henrician court cast a long shadow over the queens consort to follow. In addition, nostalgia for Elizabeth I continued to offer an imagined alternative to the embattled Stuarts. In this context, Henrietta Maria’s performance of queenship left her vulnerable to attack. The presence of an openly Catholic, French queen re-opened old wounds from the Reformation, which proved detrimental to Charles and the monarchy. Protestant voices of parliamentary propagandists reveal how the revival of these Reformation-era narratives informed the public response to Henrietta Maria.

This chapter argues that Henrietta Maria’s attempt to fill the role once held by medieval queens—advising her husband and acting as intercessor for her people—fuelled puritan fears that England would return to Catholicism, or at least to a form of Protestantism that did not reflect their godly, reformist vision. Henrietta Maria intended to support the Stuart dynasty as well as English Catholics; instead, through her court and theatrical performances, her promotion of Catholicism, and her attempts to aid the royalist cause, she literalized Protestant fear of foreign, Catholic invasion and, in so doing, proved particularly dangerous to the Stuart throne.

The Birth of a Second Esther

On 26 November 1609, as the Bourbon dynasty welcomed Princess Henrietta Maria into the world, few would have foreseen the rocky future that lay ahead of her.Footnote 3 Henrietta Maria was born at the Louvre Palace in Paris, the fifth surviving child of Henry IV, King of France and Navarre, and Queen Marie de’ Medici. Tragedy would be a constant in Henrietta Maria’s life, starting even before she was old enough to know it. Less than a year after her birth, on 14 May 1610, Henrietta Maria’s father was assassinated by Catholic fanatic François Ravaillac. In the aftermath of his death, Marie de’ Medici attempted to seize power in a contested regency, which ended in 1617 when her son, Louis XIII, wrested power from her. Although mother and son reconciled in 1620, their power struggle heavily influenced Henrietta Maria’s views of politics. First, the struggle between mother and son left Henrietta Maria with divided loyalties, which tended to rest more with her mother’s faction than with France. Second, her mother offered an example of a queen consort who acted as a powerful political force.

Almost everything about the princess set her up for difficulties with her future kingdom. Had she been the daughter of a less powerful dynasty, she might have been better prepared to take on her role as Queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland. As Carolyn Harris notes, minor rulers trained their daughters in widely spoken languages and court ceremonies so that they could make advantageous matches. The fact that Henrietta Maria came from the formidable Bourbon dynasty actually proved a detriment, as powerful nations like France and Spain rarely prepared their princesses “for the specific customs of their future courts.”Footnote 4 The nobility spoke the international languages of French and Latin, and the more influential courts considered themselves models for less powerful dynasties.Footnote 5 Henrietta Maria thus spoke no English when she arrived on the shores of her new kingdom. More troubling, Henrietta Maria’s training was shaped by the Catholicism of the Carmelites and the dévot piety that reigned at the French court.Footnote 6 Had Henrietta Maria married into a Catholic royal or aristocratic house, her religious training would have been useful. For the Queen of a Protestant nation, however, devotion to Catholicism proved a liability. Of course, early in her life, few would have foreseen a marriage into the Stuart dynasty as her destiny.

As Harris points out, the French were preparing to marry Henrietta Maria into “one of the cadet branches of the French royal family to ensure its continued support for Louis XIII’s rule.”Footnote 7 Other Catholic options from among various Italian and Habsburg princes also provided potential matches for the princess. Charles and Henrietta Maria’s marriage, like the marriages of most European royalty, was a matter of complex political negotiation. As was often the case, Charles was not her only suitor, and Henrietta Maria was not the only candidate for his consort. James VI & I wanted an alliance with a Catholic nation to represent the power of his newly united realm and to further his dream of unifying Christendom. Negotiations had begun while Prince Henry, Charles’s elder brother, was still alive. Henry’s early death in 1612 thrust Charles into the midst of these negotiations, which would impact his future kingship. James desired a Spanish match for his son: he not only wanted to acquire the Spanish Infanta’s dowry but also hoped that the marriage would convince Spain to restore the Palatinate to his daughter, Elizabeth, and her husband, Frederick V.

Charles had initially been interested in the Infanta. Indeed, it was on the way to Paris to woo the Infanta that Charles saw Henrietta Maria for the first time. Despite Charles’s eventual romanticisation of his first glimpses of Henrietta Maria rehearsing her masque role as Iris, handmaiden to Juno, the young princess was not the focus of his visit. Instead, he and George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, slipped into the French court wearing wigs as disguises to see the Infanta’s sister, Anne of Austria, the wife of Louis XIII. Their trip to Spain ended in failure: the Infanta declared that she would rather enter a convent than marry a heretic, and the Spanish continued to delay the marriage even after the English agreed to a treaty highly favourable to the Spanish. The eyes of England then turned to the French princess.

History has painted Henrietta Maria as a nefarious influence on the King, but the truth of her relationship with Charles and her new nation proves more complicated. Henrietta Maria came to England as a fifteen-year-old girl with a nearly impossible mission placed upon her. In giving his approval for Henrietta Maria to marry Charles, her godfather, Pope Urban VIII, called on the young princess to be an Esther to her oppressed Catholic subjects. To help facilitate this role, Henrietta Maria underwent a course of study with Father Pierre de Bérulle, founder of the Oratorian Order.Footnote 8 She clearly took her mission seriously. In a letter to the Pope, dated 6 April 1625, Henrietta Maria assured the Holy Father that “nothing in the world” was as dear “as the safety of my conscience and the good of religion.”Footnote 9 Thus, the teenage Henrietta Maria arrived in England unable to speak the language, charged to act as intercessor for the oppressed Catholics, and embodying the fears of foreign, Catholic invasion that haunted English Protestants.

That there would be a division between husband and wife as well as queen and nation was clear at once. Indeed, the wedding ceremony itself revealed the disconnect between the Catholic bride and her Protestant husband. Charles de Lorraine, Duke of Chevreuse, acted as a proxy for Charles I in the royal wedding, which was celebrated on 11 May 1625 at the church door of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. After the marriage ceremony, Henrietta Maria and the French left Chevreuse and the English Protestants outside the doors of the cathedral as they entered the sanctuary to attend the wedding mass.Footnote 10 This separation served as a material reminder of the differences of faith that existed between the young Princess and the new King.

Creating Dynasty: The Early Years of Henrietta Maria and Charles I’s Marriage

Early in the marriage, the royal couple struggled to overcome several significant problems: the tensions caused by Henrietta’s entourage; Charles’s closeness to his court favourite, Buckingham; and the differences in religion exacerbated both by Henrietta Maria’s zeal and Charles’s failure to enforce the marriage treaty.Footnote 11 Charles quickly tired of the influence that the Queen’s large French retinue, particularly the priests, had on her. In July 1626, a year after Henrietta Maria’s arrival in England, he dismissed most of her attendants—including the majority of her priests. This move apparently pleased many, for Alessandro Antelminelli (also known as Amerigo Salvetti) reported in a letter from 13 August 1626 to the Duke of Tuscany that the people responded “with infinite satisfaction.”Footnote 12

While Charles might have blamed Henrietta Maria’s French attendants for their marital difficulties, a potentially greater threat existed in the form of the Duke of Buckingham. The last of James VI & I’s favourites, Buckingham was highly unpopular. To the young heir, however, he was a close friend, a confidant, and even his mentor. Buckingham held a great deal of power at court and he did not wish to cede any of that power to the new Queen, whom he saw as a rival for the King’s favour. He might have caused a significant rift between the royal couple, had it not been for the intervention of fate. On 23 August 1628, Buckingham’s influence ended abruptly when disaffected soldier John Felton stabbed him to death. The King’s affections then shifted to his wife.

While the influence of the French retinue and Buckingham threatened the royal marriage, nothing proved as troubling as Henrietta Maria’s Catholicism, which affected the couple’s private life as well as their public performance as sovereigns. Some of the problems in the King and Queen’s personal life stemmed from the seriousness with which Henrietta Maria took her devotions. As Bonnie Lander Johnson points out, a Protestant king such as Charles would have believed that “he had sovereign rights to the Queen’s most intimate space and person.”Footnote 13 Henrietta Maria’s Oratorian confessors, however, exhorted her to “rigidly observe Catholic practices of abstinence from sexual relations at certain days and seasons.”Footnote 14 Sir Dudley Carleton, the Secretary of State, claimed that the Queen’s priests told her that “today is such a saint, tomorrow is the feast of such a saint,” and because “your majesty has the rope, girdle or pacienza of such a blessed one, you must not let the king approach;” frustratingly, “she believed it all, and conversation with her husband was made difficult.”Footnote 15

The Queen’s religion also posed a political threat to Charles. Tension initially revolved around that most significant of public performances of royal authority: Charles’s coronation. In 1626, Henrietta Maria, acting in accordance with her conscience, refused to allow a Protestant minister to crown her. Her brother, Louis XIII, supported her decision, fearing that English Catholics may be disheartened to see their Queen “on her knees in front of a Protestant bishop, taking from him oaths and a diadem and the other ornaments of royalty.”Footnote 16 Louis, however, knowing the importance of coronation as a means of establishing legitimacy, suggested that the Queen might be crowned by the Bishop of Mende, instead of the Archbishop of Canterbury.Footnote 17 When no such compromise could be reached, Henrietta Maria refused to attend the coronation ceremony, even though a special curtained gallery had been prepared for her. Her refusal angered the King and drove another wedge between the couple. The Venetian ambassador’s report that the people “rejoice that she was not crowned” proved a disturbing portent of things to come.Footnote 18 Four days later, Henrietta Maria again performed her noncompliance, declining to attend the ceremonies attached to the opening of parliament.

Further, Henrietta Maria engaged in dangerous performances of solidarity with her fellow Catholics. Most notably, she may have made a pilgrimage through Hyde Park to the Tyburn gallows, the site at which many Catholics had been executed. According to one of the few surviving accounts of this pilgrimage, at 3 o’clock in the afternoon of 26 June 1626, Henrietta Maria walked with five of her servants from St. James’s Palace and “kneeld before Tyburn gallows and prayed the space of five minutes.”Footnote 19 The performance proved particularly subversive. First, Henry VIII had banned the act of pilgrimage in England in the 1530s. Moreover, enacting a pilgrimage to Tyburn could have been construed as treasonous. To the English Catholics, the men executed at Tyburn were martyrs, but to the state, they were traitors. The pilgrimage clearly incensed Charles, who blamed Henrietta Maria’s French retinue. In a letter sent to Buckingham on 12 July 1626, Charles branded the Queen’s attendants as the “cause and fomenters” of his wife’s ill humours and expressed his desire to be rid of them.Footnote 20 By the end of July, Charles had sent the majority of his wife’s entourage back to France.

Henrietta Maria’s youthful zeal was not the only factor to blame for their marital problems. English Catholics faced real persecution at the hands of their government, and the parts of the marriage treaty that addressed their suffering were being ignored. The Catholic Mass was illegal everywhere but at the Queen’s court, and, despite the promises that James and Charles had made to the French in their secret marriage negotiations, English Catholics were still subject to persecution. Unfortunately, since Charles needed parliament to provide money for the war efforts, he could do little to assist his Catholic subjects. On 4 August 1625, the parliament told Charles that they would not give him the funding that he sought unless he enforced the anti-Catholic laws. The King thus found himself in the difficult position of having to convince parliament that the secret agreement he had made with Louis XIII was merely a ploy to convince the Pope to offer a dispensation for the marriage. This betrayal, along with Charles’s refusal to allow her to control her household, angered the Queen. In a July 1626 letter to Buckingham, Charles recounted how the Queen fell into a “passionate discourse” concerning “how miserable she was, in having no power to place servants.”Footnote 21 Henrietta Maria had reason for her distress. She had promised her brother, Louis XIII, and the Pope that, should she and Charles conceive, she would “not choose any but Catholics to nurse or educate the children.”Footnote 22 Charles’s refusal to allow her to make appointments threatened her ability to keep these promises.

Despite the problems that Henrietta Maria might have brought to Charles, she fulfilled her most significant dynastic duty in producing royal heirs. The couple’s relationship proved fruitful, producing nine children—three of whom died tragically young. In May 1629, Henrietta Maria gave birth to her first child, Charles, who lived for only two hours. On 29 May 1630, Henrietta Maria bore a male heir who would one day become Charles II. She would deliver six more children: Mary, later Princess of Orange (1631–1660); James, later James II & VII (1633–1701); Elizabeth (1635–1650); Anne, who died at age 3 (1637–1640); Catherine, who died shortly after she was baptized (1639); Henry, Duke of Gloucester (1640–1660); and Henriette Anne (1644–1670), future Duchess of Orléans. Henrietta Maria’s fecundity brought the promise of dynastic continuity, and artists would not fail to celebrate the couple as parents both to heirs and to the nation. Anthony van Dyck, for example, depicted the royal family in a series of portraits that aptly capture the idyllic nature of their household.Footnote 23

Performances of various kinds—from progresses to court entertainments—strengthened the dynasty and promoted royal agendas. Henrietta Maria excelled at theatrical performance, yet, like so much else in their reign, the royal couple’s attempt to bolster their dynasty also threatened to undermine it. Almost yearly from the winter of 1630–1631, the King and Queen presented masques to each other at Twelfth Night and Shrovetide. Staged by Inigo Jones, the masques reveal Henrietta Maria’s interest in Platonic love, French Catholic spirituality, and Marian devotion.Footnote 24 Despite these portrayals of a harmonious royal marriage, however, not all of the couple’s subjects were convinced. Indeed, many viewed the Queen as a dangerous force, threatening to tempt their King from truth; her appearances on stage only amplified their concerns about her morality.

Theatrical appearances and Catholic devotion merged in the puritan imagination, each suggesting sexual immorality and danger to the realm.Footnote 25 In January 1633, Henrietta Maria took to the stage in a court performance of Walter Montagu’s The Shepherds’ Paradise. The production proved particularly shocking because the Queen played a speaking role. In the same year, puritan pamphleteer William Prynne denounced actresses, as “notorious whores” in the index to Histriomastix, his thousand-page attack on the theatre.Footnote 26 While Prynne argued that the attack was not directed at the Queen, as he had started the work well before her performance, his defence failed to convince the Court of Star Chamber; his ears were cropped, and he was fined and imprisoned. Ten years later, in his 1643 pamphlet, The Popish Royall Favourite, Prynne attacked the Queen directly, this time centring his attack on her religion. Once again, Prynne focused on the Queen’s body and sexuality, presenting her as an evil seductress, and linking her to the destructive figures of Eve, the wives of Solomon, and Jezebel, women who seduced their husbands from the true faith and led them to ruin.Footnote 27

Henrietta Maria did not seduce Charles away from Protestantism, but she did begin to re-establish Catholicism at the Court. In September 1632, the Queen laid the foundation stone for the Somerset House chapel. In December 1634, Gregorio Panzani, the first official representative of the Pope since the reign of Mary I, arrived in England to negotiate a formal exchange of agents.Footnote 28 Henrietta Maria actively reinstated the Catholic community through the sponsorship of confraternities and the creation of her own version of female monasticism. In addition, Henrietta Maria and Scottish priest George Con’s success in proselytising female members of the court furthered anti-Catholic fears that women were more susceptible to the “old faith.” Conversions included women such as Olivia Porter, wife of Endymion Porter, a principal member of the Duke of Buckingham’s entourage; Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland, who publicly converted after twenty years of recusancy; and Anne, Countess of Newport, whose October 1637 conversion caused her husband to furiously complain to William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury. According to Edward, Viscount Conway, the Earl of Newport was so “fierce in complaining about his wife being made a Papist, that the matter was debated at the Council table.”Footnote 29

The rising number of converts at court was regarded as a separate faction, as Laud’s diary entry makes clear in his reference to the converts as “the Roman party.”Footnote 30 Henrietta Maria had acquired “so many special dispensations for recusant courtiers that at the end of 1637 Laud complained to the privy council.”Footnote 31 Adding further fuel to this increasingly volatile situation, in 1638, the Queen’s mother, Marie de’ Medici, came to the English court, where she stayed until the middle of 1641. Her presence in London only made matters worse for Charles, as it reminded the people of Henrietta Maria’s continental, Catholic roots. Perhaps more troubling, Marie’s arrival fed puritan fears that the Catholic enemy had actively entered their land.

The spectre of Catholicism proved very significant, especially as many puritans viewed the unfolding events of their day through the lens of a cosmic spiritual battle.Footnote 32 Presenting the conflict with Catholicism in terms of end-time prophecies attached a great deal of significance to any changes instituted by Archbishop Laud, including the installation of altar rails or the movement of the communion table to the place once held by the altar.Footnote 33 The fear of Catholic plots and incursions into England came to centre around the Queen, and concerns only intensified as the nation moved toward civil war.

The English Civil Wars

It is beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss the various causes of the English Civil War. Among the factors that spurred on the conflict, scholars cite extra taxation, specifically ‘ship money’; Charles’s long Personal Rule; and religious tensions, such as the fear of a return to Catholicism.Footnote 34 When combined with the reforms of Archbishop Laud, and the performances (both political and theatrical) of Henrietta Maria, these factors contributed to the catastrophic breach between the King and his people. Henrietta Maria’s observances of Catholic ritual raised the spectre of superstition and idolatry at the heart of the court, and her political activities suggested dangerous meddling in state affairs. In the context of Laud’s ecclesiastical reforms and Charles’s attempts to impose a prayer book on the Scots, the movements of the Queen then appear to be part of a vast conspiracy to draw the English people back into the fold of Rome.

The spring of 1641 began a period of great anxiety for the young Queen as her husband’s chief counsellor, Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, was tried by Parliament. Henrietta Maria attended Wentworth’s trial and probably met secretly with parliamentary representatives on his behalf.Footnote 35 Desiring to protect Strafford and bolster the power of the crown, the King and Queen and several of their courtiers, including Henrietta Maria’s counsellor Henry Jermyn, Earl of St Albans, became embroiled in conspiracies to bring troops to London to support the King. These so-called army plots included two separate plans aimed at bringing northern army forces to London to seize the Tower, free Strafford, and gain control of Parliament. When the plot was exposed on 5 May, MP John Pym used the announcement to drum up hatred of Strafford, probably sealing the counsellor’s fate. The Queen’s role in the plots exaggerated puritan fears that she posed a threat to the state. Riots erupted outside of the Queen’s apartment, and Father Robert Philip, the Queen’s confessor, wrote to Walter Montague that “The good King and Queen are left very naked; the Puritans if they durst, would pull the good Queen in pieces.”Footnote 36

Despite these trials, Henrietta Maria continued to play her dynastic role. She actively participated in marriage negotiations for her daughter, Princess Mary, to William, son of Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange. The Queen had hoped for a Spanish match, but, as is common for dynastic matches, multiple factors influenced the choice of the groom. The English settled on William because the United Provinces expressed a willingness to assist Charles in exchange for a marriage with his eldest daughter.Footnote 37 The young princess was only nine years old when the wedding ceremony was performed on 2 May 1641; because of her youth, the union remained unconsummated for several years. By the summer of 1641, the Queen’s support network began to unravel. Her confessor, Father Philip, was arrested; papal agent Rossetti left the country; Strafford was executed; and Marie de’ Medici returned to the Continent. When Charles left for Scotland to raise support, Henrietta Maria stepped into a position of considerable influence, as his counsellors reported to her weekly.

The coming of autumn brought no respite from Charles and Henrietta Maria’s troubles. In October 1641, Irish Catholics attacked Protestant settlers. The attacks were bloody, and tales of the murder of women and children horrified the English. Making matters complicated for the Stuarts, the Irish rebels called themselves “the Queen’s Army,” and some claimed they had royal authorization.Footnote 38 In the aftermath, pro-parliamentary pamphlets increasingly linked Henrietta Maria to the forces of discord and violence overtaking the three kingdoms. Two years later, The Parliament Scout would openly accuse the Queen of having had a hand in the murder of thousands of Protestants: “Shee hath countenanced and maintained that horrid and execrable Rebellion now on foot in Ireland, whereby many thousand Protestants have been barbarously murdered.”Footnote 39 Furthermore, she “traitorously and wickedly conspired with Popish Priests, to subvert the Protestant Religion, and to introduce Popery.”Footnote 40

Things worsened on 1 December 1641 when the English Parliament issued the King a list of grievances called the Grand Remonstrance. While Parliament had many complaints against Charles, the document heavily focused on Catholic conspiracies. As Caroline Hibbard argues, Parliament’s unprecedented decision to publish the Remonstrance “marked the beginning of a long pamphlet campaign that demonized the queen and discredited the king.”Footnote 41 These pamphlets frequently depicted Charles as a weak ruler, claiming that the foreign Catholic queen acted as the real power behind the throne. A pro-parliamentary tract from May 1642 articulates this fear of political inversion in language that suggests female sexual dominance: “some think shee has an absolute unlimitable power over the Kings sword and Scepter; which if it bee so, no end of our feares and calamities can be, no propositions can profit us, no Accommodation can secure us.”Footnote 42 In 1642, the Long Parliament’s condemnation cites among their grievances the Queen’s interference in the business of rule: “Her Majesty hath been admitted to intermeddle with the Great affairs of State; with the disposing [of] Places and Preferments, even of the highest Concernment in the Kingdome.”Footnote 43 The fear of Henrietta Maria’s malignant influence only continued to grow. In 1645, the Perfect Passages of Each Dayes Proceedings in Parliament, playing on the fact that Henrietta Maria was known in England as Queen Mary, argued that Protestants would “suffer greater tortures under Queen Mary the Second, than ever the Martyrs did under Queen Mary the First.”Footnote 44

The path to revolution moved swiftly from the beginning of January 1642. Indeed, as the King and Queen left London on 10 January 1642, they could not have known that Charles would not return to the city until the eve of his execution, and Henrietta Maria would not see London again until her son reigned as king. On 23 February 1642, Henrietta Maria departed for the Netherlands with Princess Mary, arriving at The Hague on 1 March. While Henrietta Maria’s journey was under the pretence of taking Princess Mary to her new husband, she in fact sought military and financial assistance for the King. As civil war began in August 1642, Henrietta worked from the Netherlands to support her husband, raising as much money as she could. Despite opposition from the Dutch and numerous setbacks, Henrietta Maria still achieved a considerable measure of success. By the end of 1642, she had sent Charles six shipments of soldiers, money, and munitions, four of which made it to England safely.Footnote 45 In January 1643, Henrietta Maria sailed to England with further supplies and troops to aid her husband’s cause––notwithstanding the stormy weather and the bombardments by parliamentary ships, which she endured both during and after the landing.

Many historians have tended to overlook Henrietta Maria’s contributions to the Royalist cause or to dismiss her efforts as superficial. After her return from Holland in February 1643, however, she led an army from Bridlington to Oxford, where she managed to reunite with her husband. On 22 February 1643, the Queen, along with an army of 1,000 men, landed at Bridlington, a small fishing port located between Hull and Scarborough—both of which were parliamentary strongholds. Around 5 a.m. on the morning after her arrival, she awoke to the sounds of cannon and gunshots as five parliamentary ships of war attacked her ammunition-boats in the harbour, while they were still waiting to be unloaded.Footnote 46 In a letter to Charles, Henrietta Maria described how one of the boats started firing upon her lodgings and, before she could get out of bed, “balls were whistling upon” her. She fled the house and sheltered in a ditch outside the village. While some scholars suggest this incident was not an attack on the Queen herself, pro-Royalist forces speaking to parliament denounced the action as an attempt in the “most barbarous manner to murder the Queen’s Majesty ... by making great shot at the house where she lodged for her repose after a long voyage.”Footnote 47

The story of the attack on Henrietta Maria, who had already survived a very difficult sea voyage to reach England, added to the Rroyalist image of the Queen as a valiant heroine. Henrietta Maria embraced this role; in her civil-war letters to Charles, she presented herself as a heroic female warrior, much like her Amazonian character in the last Caroline masque, Salmacida Spoila. The concept also extended beyond metaphor. As the Queen set out on horseback for York, she performed the role of military leader. On 4 June, she left York for Oxford with 3,000 foot soldiers, 2,000 cavalry, and 6 cannons.Footnote 48 Although Henry Jermyn was commander of the forces, Henrietta Maria still referred to herself as “Sa Majesté Généralissime.”

According to Michelle White, accounts of Henrietta Maria’s war efforts tend to underestimate her contributions. However, as White observes, “when we consider the dramatic change in royalist fortunes that followed almost immediately after her arrival, how can we not—in part—attribute it to her and her troops?”Footnote 49 Despite the successes that Henrietta Maria helped to bring about, her presence at the helm of an army caused deep consternation among pro-Parliament forces, many of whom referred to her soldiers as a “Popish Army.” In May, A Continuation of Certain Speciall and Remarkable Passages presented her troops as a threat to the land and to the true church: the Queen “hath brought over forraign forces, set up her standard in the north, and doth daily raise and maintaine forces of armed men in this kingdom against the Parliament, and thereby a great army of Papists are raised in the North to destroy Parliament and the Protestant Religion.”Footnote 50 Parliamentary pamphlets depicted the conflict as a holy war and, in accordance with this belief, parliament struck its own deeply personal blows to the Queen and her faith. In March 1643, her Capuchin chaplains were detained and deported, and, unable to attack the Queen directly, pro-Parliament agents instead ransacked her chapel at Somerset House.Footnote 51 In May, leaders of the House of Commons took their attacks even further, drawing up articles of impeachment for high treason against her.

On 13 July 1643, Henrietta Maria and Charles reunited at Oxford in what was a high point for the couple. Unfortunately, this period of relative ease was to be short-lived. In March 1644, Henrietta Maria was six months pregnant and suffering from a serious illness, which hampered her ability to participate in the war effort. Despite her desire to stay with her husband and the army, Henrietta Maria bowed to Charles’s urging and moved to a less volatile place for the impending birth. On 17 April, Charles escorted her to Abingdon on her journey to Exeter; it was the last time they saw one another. Henrietta Maria reached Exeter on 1 May, and on 16 June, she gave birth to her daughter, Henriette, before becoming extremely ill.

On 14 July 1644, Henrietta Maria departed for France. Even from exile, she continued to send letters of advice to the King. We can glean important information about Henrietta Maria’s political strategies and personal concerns from these letters, as well as from correspondence written between 1642 and 1643.Footnote 52 Henrietta Maria wrote some of the letters with the understanding that her enemies in parliament would see them, revealing her attempts to seize control of the narrative surrounding the conflict between royalists and supporters of parliament.Footnote 53 In addition, Henrietta Maria’s letters reveal her suspicion of the English people and her belief that, as God’s anointed, Charles should act in a manner befitting a king. She continually returned to this one key idea: Charles is God’s chosen ruler, and he must therefore wield his power. This assertion is based on her firm belief in divine right, and on the fact that she does not actually trust her subjects to maintain goodwill. For example, in one letter, she advises him to use the charity of the people of Yorkshire while he has it, for “at the beginning, people can do things, about which, in the end, they grow cool, and then they can no longer be done.”Footnote 54

Some of the letters also express a desire for peace, but only if Charles holds the power. In one written in 1643, Henrietta Maria asserted that, “if you make peace, and disband your army, before there is an end of this perpetual parliament, I am absolutely resolved to go into France, not being willing to fall again into the hands of those people, being well assured, that if the power remain with them, that it will not be well for me in England.”Footnote 55 She does not desire a peace that will leave Charles and herself without the power to which she believes them due and without protection for their persons and their family. This letter appears in The King’s Cabinet Opened, and the parliamentary annotations illustrate how Henrietta Maria’s opponents shaped her reputation. The annotation attributes her words to her evil character: “Here is a rare piece of serpentine subtlety in a woman. She pretends peace, and that very instant, propounds such a motion, which if seconded by her husband, must overthrow all hope of peace; and that is, the dissolving of this present Parliament, here termed in rancor, perpetual.”Footnote 56 The editor dismisses Henrietta Maria’s legitimate concerns for her safety, and instead focuses only on her desire for power. Yet, considering what happened to Charles in 1649, Henrietta Maria’s concerns seem quite prudent.

Although the stunning successes of the New Model Army ultimately forced the King to surrender to the Scots in May 1646, it was the spectre of a king made effeminate by his wife that would linger through the war and into the Second English Civil War. On 6 January 1649, the Rump Parliament established a high court to try the King. On 27 January, Charles was sentenced to death, and on 30 January, he was beheaded. History offers many reasons for this tragic end for the second Stuart King. However, one cannot underestimate the impact that fear of the King’s powerful, Catholic wife had on the Parliamentary forces who took up arms against their sovereign.

A Queen in Mourning: Life after the Regicide

Henrietta Maria was devastated to learn of her husband’s execution. In a letter written to her son, Charles, she lamented, “I should have had the consolation of accompanying him to prison and to the horrors of death, and our spirits, so united in life, would have mutually rejoiced to pass united to another life.”Footnote 57 Hibbard argues that the queen “never really recovered” from his death.Footnote 58 Henrietta Maria was thirty-nine at the time of Charles’s execution, and, although her life after his death appears less frequently in historical accounts, she lived for another twenty years––long enough to develop a relationship with her daughter-in-law, Catherine of Braganza (wife of the future Charles II). After Charles’s death, Henrietta Maria spent much of her time before the Restoration trying to place her son on the throne, caring for and planning the marriage of her youngest daughter, Henriette, and supporting her beloved Catholic Church. Finally, on 23 April 1660, Henrietta Maria saw her hopes fulfilled as Charles II was restored to the English throne. She visited England in November 1660 and, in August 1662, she returned to London for a longer time, settling back into Somerset House with much of the same household that had been with her before the war, as well as a new complement of Capuchin chaplains. She remained in the city for three years, during which time she continued to develop her relationship with her daughter-in-law. Upon meeting Catherine, Henrietta Maria, who perhaps saw in her son’s foreign, Catholic wife the image of her younger self, instructed the Queen to “lay aside all compliments and ceremony, for that she should never have come to England again except for the pleasure of seeing her, to love her as a daughter, and serve her as a Queen.”Footnote 59

While Samuel Pepys referred to Henrietta Maria’s court as full of “laughing and mirth,” not everyone was pleased to see her return.Footnote 60 In September 1660, for example, Edward Bilton, a labourer from Yorkshire, proclaimed her to be “a traytour” and “the cause of all of this mischief.” He declared that if Henrietta Maria should return, she would breed sects and schisms and “if anyone would rise, hee would bee the second man to venter [sic] both life and estate to keepe her forth.”Footnote 61 Bilton’s anger captures the sentiment of many who worried that Henrietta Maria’s presence at court would be divisive. Her return saw the restoration of Somerset House, undoubtedly an affront to Protestants still smarting from the devastation of the Civil War. Certainly, the spectre of the Capuchins presiding over numerous crowded masses and the revival of the Confraternity of the RosaryFootnote 62 must have worried some Protestants, and it was perhaps such concerns that eventually fuelled false rumours of a Jesuit invasion in 1678–1681, known as “The Popish Plot.” Although people such as Pepys admired Henrietta Maria’s new construction at Somerset House, calling it “most stately and nobly furnished,” others “directed hostile attention to her chapel activities” and, in a disturbing parallel to the 1630s, “placards calling for the ‘extirpation of popery’ were posted at her palace.”Footnote 63

Henrietta Maria might have once again harboured hope for a return to Catholicism. She did not live to see those hopes ultimately dashed by the Glorious Revolution. Indeed, Henrietta Maria’s time in England proved short. The English climate continued to complicate her health problems, which might have been bronchitis or a recurrence of tuberculosis. In spring 1665, she sailed for France, leaving the Capuchins behind with the goal of continued Catholic proselytising. Henrietta Maria spent her remaining years in France. After a long illness, she died on 10 September 1669, probably of an opiate prescribed by a doctor. Henrietta Maria’s body was buried in the French royal necropolis at the Basilica of St. Denis. According to her instructions, her heart was removed at her death and buried in the chapel of her convent at Chaillot.

Years of venomous parliamentary attacks on the Queen throughout the 1640s left lasting scars on her reputation. Despite her efforts to present herself as a force of peace and order in the kingdom, many continued to repeat the narrative of Henrietta Maria as an unruly, subversive Catholic woman whose devotion to an idolatrous faith had led the King and his subjects into a brutal conflict. Over the next few decades, continued religious turmoil guaranteed that her legacy was inextricably caught up in popular and political criticisms of the Catholic Church. The so-called Glorious Revolution did more than influence England’s religious future: it also re-wrote England’s past through the lens of a clear victory over ‘popery’ and from the perspective of a triumphant Protestant narrative. This narrative did not present Henrietta Maria as a complicated woman trying to balance the demands of her faith with the needs of her dynasty. It did not consider the advice that she gave her husband in terms of its actual merit, but instead dismissed it as meddling. In the narrative created by her enemies and passed down through history, Henrietta Maria only played the role of a dangerous consort who led her husband to destruction and the nation to a bloody civil war.