Henrietta Maria: The Esther to Her Oppressed People

Abstract

This chapter uses Henrietta Maria’s court masques to trace the queen’s transformation from a young French princess in a foreign land to a powerful queen consort who pushed her agendas in a variety of personal, political and theatrical ways. The chapter examines the ways in which Henrietta Maria sought to carve out a space for Catholic worship in her new Protestant home. In particular, the chapter will consider Henrietta Maria’s religious and political interests and alliances as presented in three of her well-known masques Chloridia, The Temple of Love and Luminalia. In these masques, feminine beauty and chastity act in ways that foreground the female sacred as a source of authority and support the queen’s desire to restore Catholicism to England.

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On June 22, 1625, six years after the death of Anna, a new queen consort stepped foot on English soil for the first time. Henrietta Maria of France was a mere fifteen years old when she landed at Dover. ¹ Small in stature, Henrietta proved a girl of wit and charm even in her first moments on shore. However, despite her captivating qualities, Henrietta Maria, like her mother-in-law, would literalize misogynist fears of disruptive female power. Like Anna, Henrietta Maria would actively engage in just the types of political maneuvering that these misogynist voices had imagined a queen consort capable of attempting. Moreover, her open and passionate adherence to the Catholic faith and her active role in European politics made her, in the minds of many of her subjects, a far more dangerous threat than Queen Anna had ever been. Henrietta Maria came to England with a commission from her godfather the pope and a determination to reestablish the true faith. Indeed, people who saw her alight from the ship or who glimpsed her on the progress route could hardly have suspected that the young, slim French princess would one day be a formidable queen who would revitalize the English Catholic community, lead troops into battle to support her husband, and be remembered by history as one of the causes of the English civil war.

Henrietta Maria’s journey to England was not as eventful as her mother-in-law’s journey to Scotland as a young bride had been. Nonetheless, her early days no doubt required many of the same adjustments as those made by the former queen, who had entered Scotland as a foreign consort. When Henrietta Maria entered her new home, she came as a French, Catholic foreigner and, in the minds of many of the English people, as an enemy. The devout nature of Henrietta’s faith combined with the anti-Catholic sentiments at the court made her transition into the role of queen all the more problematic. Her godfather, Pope Urban VIII, knew the troubles facing Henrietta Maria, and, in her circumstances, he found hope for the English Catholics. In giving his approval for the fifteen-year-old Henrietta Maria to marry Charles, Urban VIII evoked precedent for a wife using her influence for the good of her people, calling on Henrietta Maria to be an Esther to her oppressed people. Her mother, Marie de Medici, reminded young Henrietta Maria that her first duty was to king “after God and Religion.” Before leaving Paris, Henrietta Maria had undergone a course of study with Father Berulle, the founder of the Oratorian Order. ² Her marriage was thus, in Erica Veever’s words, a “vocation,” and she was meant to proselytize her husband and new nation. Historical sources suggest that Henrietta Maria came to England ready to obey her godfather and her mother’s directives. While Henrietta did spend time dancing and play-acting, she also spent significant time in devotion. She openly practiced her faith, refused to participate in Anglican services, even the coronation of the king and the opening of Parliament; and she publicly prayed for English Catholic martyrs at Tyburn . However, while the English Catholics might have rejoiced at Henrietta Maria’s piety and prayed that her influence on her husband would allow her to be a second Esther, Protestants such as William Prynne greeted this possibility with great fear. For Prynne, writing in The Popish Royall Favourite, Henrietta evoked not the godly Esther, but 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. ³

Like the queen before her, Henrietta had limited options for political action—at least while she was a young bride. And, like her mother-in-law, she had to contend with royal favorites, in particular the very same George Villiers, now duke of Buckingham, whose influence had vexed the late queen. Despite this fact, the queen asserted her influence through performances—theatrical, political and religious—much as Anna had done. Although the subject matter of her theatrical performances was less subversive than those staged by Anna, the fact of the queen’s public performance of Catholicism and the active role that she took in the productions made them far more threatening. To the Protestant mind, Henrietta’s performances of piety were no better than her performances on stage. As Frances Dolan argues, to many of Henrietta Maria’s subjects, the queen’s “entertainments were indistinguishable from her devotions, both because of a long tradition of attacking Catholicism for its theatricality and because of practices that did indeed blur the distinction between liturgy and performance.” ⁴ This chapter uses Henrietta Maria’s court masques to trace the queen’s transformation from a young French princess in a foreign land to a powerful queen consort who pushed her agendas in a variety of personal, political and theatrical ways, always negotiating the power of queenship against the idea of patriarchal divine right monarchy, and always at risk of sliding into the very image of disorder for which the masques presented the queen as an antidote. In particular, the chapter will consider the development of Henrietta Maria’s religious and political interests and alliances as presented in three of her well-known masques: Chloridia , The Temple of Love and Luminalia . In these masques, feminine beauty and chastity act in ways that foreground the female sacred as a source of authority, a subversive idea that evoked Marian imagery even as it asserted royal authority.

Henrietta Maria’s story begins like many stories of queens consort. A young girl, Henrietta Maria was selected by her brother Louis XIII and Charles, who was nine years her senior, to be a peace-weaver, bringing unity between France and England. As was often the case, Charles was not the only marriage prospect, and she was not the only candidate for his consort. Indeed, her nation was not the only candidate for a peace treaty through marriage. In this particular case, James I wanted an alliance with a Catholic nation to testify to the power of his newly united realm and to further his dream of unifying Christendom. Negotiations had begun while Prince Henry was still alive, and the potential candidates included young women from Tuscany, France and Spain. James I thought of himself as a Solomon of his times, a peace-maker, who could unite Protestantism and Catholicism, and dynastic marriage provided one avenue through which this reconciliation could be achieved. The negotiations proved complicated, and the potential brides changed based on the whims of international political alliances. Prince Henry voiced the only reaction open to royal offspring in these negotiations, stating that he would play his part “which is to be in love with any of them.” ⁵

Henry’s early death left the responsibilities of kingship and of the dynastic match to young Charles. James I desired a Spanish match for his son. He hoped to acquire the Infanta’s dowry, but he also had more pressing political concerns. He hoped that the marriage would convince Spain to restore the Palatinate to his daughter Elizabeth and her husband. In November 1619, Elizabeth and Frederick had been crowned king and queen of Bohemia. Only a year later, Spain invaded the Palatinate, forcing the royal couple to flee to Protestant Holland. James wanted to aid his daughter and the cause of Protestantism. However, having no funding for such a significant military conflict, he hoped that a marriage between Charles and the Infanta might persuade the Spanish to restore the Palatinate. Although Charles originally favored this plan, he and Buckingham would eventually push for a French alliance.

Charles had initially been interested in the Spanish Infanta. Indeed, it was when he was on the way to Paris to woo the Infanta that Charles saw Henrietta Maria for the first time. Despite Charles’s eventual romanticization of his first glimpses of Henrietta Maria rehearsing her masque role as Iris, handmaiden to Juno, the young princess was not the focus of Charles’s visit. Indeed, he and Buckingham slipped into the French court wearing wigs as disguises in order to see the infanta’s sister, Anne of Austria, the wife of Louis XIII. At this point, young Henrietta Maria does not seem to have caught the prince’s eye. However, once Buckingham and Charles’s 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 favorable to the Spanish—the eyes of England turned to the petite French princess.

Although the fact that Charles saw the young Henrietta Maria dancing with her family allowed for the construction of a royal romance narrative, which suggested the preordained nature of the union, the reality of royal marriage negotiations was always political and economic with the fertile body of the young princess being only one of the assets under discussion. As I discuss in the introduction, the messiness of marriage negotiations and other aspects of the union had to be subordinated to the dynastic mythology. The fear that royal marriage might introduce a foreign threat into the heart of the dynasty remained a concern that simmered below the surface. Because of Henrietta Maria’s devout Catholicism, this fear, which began to simmer soon after her arrival in England, began to boil uncontrollably as time passed and the king and queen grew closer, while relations between Charles and Parliament began to disintegrate. As Frances Dolan aptly points out, “In the escalating attacks on Charles and his rule, the bed that is obsessively imagined and discursively searched is the marriage bed; the scandal discovered therein is his wife.” ⁶ Eventually, fear of the Catholic queen’s influence on her husband would help fuel civil war. At the beginning, however, performance and encomium could be mustered to cover over real concerns about the troubles that a foreign bride might bring.

George Marcelline’s Epithalamium Gallo-Britannicum provides an excellent example of the ways in which a panegyric can promote the mythology of a Providential union, while effectively reducing the queen to a place holder defined exclusively by her fertility. Marcelline’s celebration of the royal marriage begins with a frontispiece depicting the royal couple. The image evokes dynasty. King Charles and Henrietta Maria are pictured full length under an arch, their right hands joined. Above the arch sits the royal coat of arms and heraldry runs along both sides and the very top of the page. The picture is not so much about the young couple but about their place in the larger drama of dynasty. The queen is essential to the continuation of the line; however, her significance is biological, for she is interchangeable. As Laura Lunger Knoppers observes, while the image of Charles I is drawn from portraits of the king executed by David Mytens, the image of the queen painted is merely a placeholder, for the tall, light haired image of ‘queen’ and royal wife bears little resemblance to the “thin, petite, dark-haired, and fifteen-year-old Henrietta Maria.” ⁷ In other words, the artist presented the image of ‘queen,’ for to him that image proved as significant as the flesh and blood woman who actually embodied that role.

Absent from the iconography of celebration is the fact of France’s traditional role as enemy to the English. Unspoken too is the possibility that this young woman, whom Marcelline’s text presents as worthy to embrace the king, might actually prove to be a negative influence on him. Yet that would be precisely the type of language that would one day attend representations of the queen. Despite the royal couple’s careful performance of their wedded bliss and their royal heirs, at some point, Charles I’s dependence on his wife would be seen as a threat to dynasty. As Lunger Knoppers argues, and as I will unpack in the subsequent chapters, “the language of the domestic, particularly when gendered feminine and linked with queens and their wifely or even housewifely activities, destabilized the very dynasty it was meant to undergird” (ibid., 5). Although essential for the creation of dynasty, the royal bed, when occupied by a foreign princess, could be a frightening reminder of the nation’s vulnerability to the whims of their own king.

Though Henrietta Maria was but a young girl when she set foot on English shores, she already knew well the complexity of the role of consort. The assassination of Henrietta’s father on May 14, 1610, when she was less than a year old, had resulted in the contested regency of her mother, Marie de Medici. Henrietta Maria’s mother’s experience reveals the difficulties for a consort wielding power; Marie’s regency ended in 1619 when her son Louis XIII seized power from her in a bloody coup. Although mother and son had reconciled in 1620, Henrietta Maria had still seen the potential for power and conflict that existed for the queen consort.

Like most consorts, Henrietta Maria had to negotiate her own cultural experience with that of her new home. Upon her arrival in England, Henrietta Maria spoke no English, and throughout her reign, she made little effort to learn the language of her new home, a fact that must have continually reinforced her self-concept of ‘other.’ That there would be a division between husband and wife was clear from the very beginning. Indeed, the wedding ceremony itself revealed the separation between the Catholic bride and her Protestant husband. As was often the case in royal marriages, Charles sent a proxy to wed the young princess. Because of the sudden death of James I at the end of March, Buckingham, who had been scheduled to play the role of groom, instead ended up playing the role of chief mourner at the departed king’s funeral. Charles de Lorraine, duke of Chevreuse, took Buckingham’s place as proxy for Charles I in the royal wedding, which was celebrated on May 11, 1625, at the church door of Nôtre Dame. 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. ⁸ This separation served as a material reminder of the differences of faith that existed between the young princess and her new husband. The English could freely join the French in the banquets, balls and other celebrations that followed the wedding, but the wedding mass, the spiritual heart of the proceedings, served as a reminder of the gulf that young Henrietta Maria had been commissioned to bridge.

Bridging this gap would prove difficult. Early in the marriage, the royal couple, who would one day have a loving union, struggled to overcome significant problems including tensions caused by Henrietta’s large retinue; differences in religion exacerbated by Henrietta Maria’s zeal and Charles I’s failure to enforce the marriage treaty; and Charles’ closeness to his court favorite, Buckingham. In addition, Henrietta Maria’s struggles in the early days of her marriage stem from the difficulty of the task that had been set before her. ⁹ Her family, the pope, and much of Catholic Europe would have liked to see the queen lead her husband back to the Roman church. However, despite the queen’s personal devotion to her faith, these international players had placed their hopes on the shoulders of a very young and inexperienced girl. It should come as no surprise that her attempts at living out her commission often went awry, as we see in the oft-repeated story of Henrietta Maria and her ladies disrupting Protestant services. Historians often present this incident as an example of the queen’s childish and shallow nature. Examined closely, however, we can see the serious concerns that motivate Henrietta Maria’s seemingly frivolous actions.

To understand Henrietta Maria’s disruption of Protestant services, we must view this incident in terms of the wider context of the queen’s difficult first months in England. While assimilation into a foreign court would have been challenging anyway, Henrietta Maria’s assimilation proved particularly trying because of a severe outbreak of plague, which forced the royal family to move frequently from one location to the next. Constant movement made it difficult for the young queen to adapt to her surroundings, and separation from Charles left the queen, who spoke little English, in the uncomfortable position of exercising her will over subjects who had no desire to accommodate her religious needs. Such was the case on August 12, 1625, when Charles I, who had just dissolved Parliament, went hunting with Buckingham to Beaulieu while Henrietta Maria went to Tichfield on Southampton Water. Traditionally, when houses hosted the royal family, they would set up a chapel for the family’s use. As such, Henrietta Maria must have expected that she would be provided with a space in which to hear Mass. Instead, the queen’s request that a chapel be provided for her to hear Mass was ignored, and she was only presented with Protestant services. ¹⁰ In response to this slight, Henrietta Maria performed an act of resistance, talking and laughing as she and her maids passed through the chapel in the middle of the Anglican minister’s sermon. ¹¹ While Pauline Gregg’s assessment that Henrietta behaved “like a small child” does seem somewhat fair, we can see in Henrietta Maria’s actions the same types of subversive performance often employed by those who lack power and aim to gain voice through disruption. Although Henrietta Maria held the title of queen, at this point in her life, she had not yet grown into that role. She was still a young woman far from home among people whose language and religion were foreign to her. That she would convey her displeasure through subversive performance should come as no great surprise.

Because of her role as queen, however, Henrietta Maria could fashion herself in ways that moved beyond performances of resistance. On February 21, 1626, upon the royal couple’s return to London, Henrietta Maria presented her first English masque. That Henrietta Maria’s performed identity would be decidedly French proves clear from her decision to make her English stage debut in Racan’s L’Artenice , which had been performed at the French court seven years earlier. While some critics might consider  L’Artenice  a mere imitation of French theatre, Karen Britland argues that Henrietta Maria selects this entertainment because it represents her own mission to draw the English people back to the Catholic fold. In the masque, Henrietta Maria plays Artenice, who is pressured to marry Alcidor, a foreigner. Fortunately, Alcidor turns out to be a fellow countryman, a plot twist which Britland suggests stages Marie de Médici’s and Louis XIII’s hopes that Charles could be brought back to the faith of his ancestors—to discover his ‘true country.’ Britland argues that, in playing the role of Artenice, Henrietta Maria displays her own sense of mission—entering marriage as one would enter a convent.

Henrietta Maria’s staging of this masque comes in a time of mounting tension for the couple. Charles, seeing only the presence of the French as a problem, became convinced that his wife’s attendants were preventing the young princess from assimilating to her new home. He also believed that they “interposed a bad spirit” between him and his new bride. ¹² In a letter to Henrietta Maria’s mother and her brother, the French king, Charles declared that he could “no longer suffer those that I know to be cause and fomenters of these humours, to be about my wife any longer.” ¹³ The reason for Charles I’s feelings of discontent reached beyond the presence of French courtiers. Indeed, the problems drew directly from those divisions made obvious in the divided wedding ceremony. These divisions reached deep into the couple’s marriage, initially driving a wedge between the queen and her husband and ultimately driving a wedge between the queen and her people.

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.” ¹⁴ However, Henrietta Maria’s devotions reached into the most intimate parts of the marriage. Henrietta Maria’s Oratorian confessors exhorted her to “rigidly observe Catholic practices of abstinence from sexual relations at certain days and seasons.” ¹⁵ Sir Dudley Carleton observed that “today is such a saint, tomorrow is the feast of such a saint, your majesty has the rope, girdle or pacienza of such a blessed one, you must not let the king approach; she believed it all, and conversation with her husband was made difficult.” ¹⁶ Not surprisingly, Charles did not appreciate this interference, complaining that “the happy conversation that ought to pass between him and his dear wife, which is the principal comfort of marriage, hath not only been interrupted but wholly quenched or perverted.” ¹⁷ Undoubtedly, Henrietta Maria’s abstinence, which Charles must have viewed as a shirking of the royal duties, contributed to the tension between the newly married couple.

Henrietta Maria’s Catholicism affected the couple’s private life as well as their public performance as sovereigns. Much of this early tension revolved around that most significant of public performances of royal authority—the coronation of the new monarch. In 1626, Henrietta Maria, acting in accordance with her conscience and her commission, refused to be crowned by a Protestant minister. Her brother, Louis XIII, supported her decision not to be crowned by a Protestant, 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.” ¹⁸ Louis, however, knew the importance of coronation as a means of establishing legitimacy, so he suggested that the queen might be crowned by the Bishop of Mende as opposed to the Archbishop of Canterbury. ¹⁹ When no such compromise could be reached, Henrietta responded by refusing 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 king and the queen. Not surprisingly, the English people also took the queen’s refusal to participate in such a significant ceremony as a severe slight and a sign of her unfitness for the office of queen. The Venetian ambassador’s report that the people “rejoice that she was not crowned” proved a disturbing portent of things to come. ²⁰ Four days later, Henrietta Maria once again performed her noncompliance, refusing to attend the ceremonies connected with the opening of Parliament.

Although the benefit of hindsight reveals the problems that would arise as a result of Henrietta Maria’s refusal to follow in her mother-in-law’s footsteps and perform herself as Protestant queen despite her differing confessional beliefs, Henrietta Maria can be forgiven for not knowing the deep fissures that were already beginning to form within her new home. Her task of performing her commission and living out her faith in a land that saw her beliefs as superstition and her fellow believers as dangers to the state required a great deal of political savvy that the young queen did not yet possess. Thus, we see the queen engaging in fairly dangerous performances of solidarity with her fellow Catholics. Chief among these examples is the accusation that she made pilgrimages through Hyde Park to the Tyburn gallows, the site at which many Catholics including Edmund Campion had been executed. According to Michelle Anne White, “among the manuscript sources at the British Library only one reference to such a pilgrimage could be found.” ²¹ According to this account, at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, on June 26, 1626, Henrietta Maria reportedly walked with five of her servants from St. James’ palace and “kneeld before Tyburn gallows and prayed the space of five minutes.” ²² This performance proved particularly subversive. First, the act of pilgrimage was banned in England in the 1530s. Further, enacting a pilgrimage to Tyburn could have been construed as treasonous. To the state, the men executed at Tyburn were traitors, but to the English Catholics and even some Protestants, they were martyrs. ²³

The fact of an English queen treating as martyrs those who had been executed as traitors by the state does not merely call into question the actions of the English monarch. Indeed, recontextualizing the men executed at Tyburn as saints as opposed to traitors directly undermines the English myth of providential history and rewrites it. Instead of being the persecuted remnant, the English state becomes the force of tyranny that assails God’s people and his true Church. Such a performance proves dangerously subversive. Protestants at court were already horrified to know that Mass was once again being said in the heart of the court and that priests were once again walking the halls of Whitehall dressed in their clerical robes. ²⁴ One can easily imagine their horror at the queen’s performance of piety at a site where Campion had been executed in 1581, and much more recently a man such as Jesuit priest Henry Garnett had been tortured and executed for his part in The Gunpowder Plot .

While it might be tempting to blame Henrietta Maria’s youthful zeal for the problems in the marriage, one must remember that the English Catholics faced real persecution at the hands of their government, and significant parts of the marriage treaty meant to address their suffering were simply being ignored. The Catholic Mass was illegal everywhere but at the queen’s court, and, despite all of the promises that James and Charles made to the French in the Escrit secret, English Catholics were still subject to persecution. ²⁵ As Whitaker points out, “Even some of Henrietta’s own servants were arrested and brought before the justices, charged with recusancy for refusing to attend Anglican services.” ²⁶ The French clergymen were “utterly disheartened, seeing their coreligionists “in fear of prison and of the hangman,” unable to “seek God but while trembling.” ²⁷ Seeing the suffering of her fellow Catholics, Henrietta Maria pushed for the end to the persecution. Unfortunately, Charles could do little in this regard. He needed Parliament to provide money for war efforts. The English had already spent large sums of money to prepare the fleet; however, they needed additional funds in order to set it on its mission. On August 4, 1625, Charles appealed to Parliament, who replied that no money would be given to him unless he enforced the anti-Catholic laws. Finding himself in a difficult position because of the secret agreement that he had made to Louis XIII, Charles I assured Parliament that the Escrit secret was merely a ploy to get the pope to offer a dispensation for the marriage. He had never planned to go along with it. Not surprisingly, Henrietta Maria responded to this betrayal with anger.

Henrietta Maria’s anger over this betrayal dovetailed with another significant blow to the queen. In July of 1626, a month before setting aside the terms of the marriage treaty and but a year after Henrietta Maria’s arrival in England, Charles dismissed most of her attendants including the majority of her priests. This move apparently pleased many for Henry Skrine reports in his manuscript that “it has thus been resolved that there shall be no more French about the Queen, a resolution which the people heard with infinite satisfaction.” ²⁸ No doubt in part because of pride and in part because of the importance of their mission, the French retinue did not leave without a struggle. The Bishop of Mende, who led Henrietta’s ecclesiastical retinue, “declared that he would not leave the country to which he had been assigned (almost as an ambassador) unless ordered to do so by the King of France” (ibid.). Charles’s response was equally vehement, after his threat to forcibly remove them did not work, the king sent the yeoman of the guard to the queen’s apartments and “threw them all out, locking the door behind them” (ibid.). This sudden removal of her attendants left the queen feeling powerless and deeply angry. ²⁹

While Charles might have blamed Henrietta Maria’s French attendants for the difficulties in their marriage, a potentially greater threat existed in the form of Anna of Denmark’s nemesis, George Villiers, the duke of Buckingham. Villiers, the last of James I’s favorites, had been highly unpopular; nonetheless, to the young heir, he was a close friend, confidant, and even mentor. Charles depended on the advice of the duke of Buckingham as he struggled against Parliament. Buckingham, for his part, saw in the young queen a potential rival for influence and attempted to exert control over her. The marriage might have taken the direction of James I and Anna’s marriage, with royal favorites causing rifts between the couple, had it not been for the intervention of fate. On August 23, 1628, Buckingham’s influence on Charles and on the royal marriage came to an abrupt end when John Felton stabbed Buckingham to death. At Buckingham’s death, the king’s affections shifted to his wife where they would remain for the rest of his life.

Their relationship proved fruitful producing nine children, three of whom died tragically young. In May 1629, Henrietta Maria gave birth to her first child, a son, who lived for only two hours. The loss of their first child and heir would have been difficult for the couple, and going through this trial would push 18-year-old Henrietta to see herself as a mature woman and a queen. When her mother, Queen Marie de Medici, “proposed sending her bishop from France to offer her counsel and support in her grief-ridden state she replied that she was no longer a child.” ³⁰ On May 29, 1630, Henrietta Maria gave birth to a male heir who would one day become Charles II. She would deliver six more children from then until 1644, including James, later James II and VII. Henrietta Maria’s fecundity brought the promise of dynastic continuity, and artists would not fail to celebrate the couple as parents to heirs and to the nation. Anthony Van Dyck, for example, depicted the royal family in a series of portraits that aptly captured the idyllic nature of the royal household. Henrietta Maria’s early masques would also center on the image of joyful marital fecundity. 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 , all of these masques reveal Henrietta Maria’s interest in a Platonic love, French Catholic spirituality, and Marian devotion. Despite the idyllic nature of these depictions of the royal life and marriage, however, not all of the couple’s subjects would have found these images comforting. Indeed, many of the Charles and Henrietta Maria’s subjects viewed the queen as a dangerous force, threatening to tempt their king from truth; the queen’s appearance on stage only amplified their concerns about her morality.

One might think that Henrietta Maria’s love for the king, her graceful beauty, and her fertility would have made her popular in the eyes of her people. However, as Michelle Anne White argues, Henrietta Maria was “entirely inept” at self-promotion. ³¹ Unlike Queen Elizabeth, who skillfully constructed an image of female rule, or Anna, who balanced her own representation of power with her husband’s image of divine-right monarchy, Henrietta Maria failed to project an image of female power that could connect with her subjects. The reasons for this distance vary—her failure to learn English, her refusal to participate in the coronation, and the infrequency of her public appearances—but the result is the same; Henrietta Maria appeared a remote, cold, Catholic figure, whose influence on the king could easily be construed as malignant.

White’s analysis is undoubtedly accurate; however, the problems with Henrietta Maria’s image extend beyond her failure at self-representation. Indeed, the very imagery that Charles I and Henrietta Maria used to present themselves to the people—as a married couple, as parents to the nation—carried with it the potential for varied and conflicting meaning. Charles I was father to his people; however, the influence that Henrietta Maria had on him threatened to domesticate him and, in doing so, threaten the monarchy. Beyond those concerns, however, the sexualized female body itself when closely aligned with power could create a destabilizing effect. As Knoppers points out, “the royal image contained gendered instability, as the queen consort and a highly sexualized, fertile marriage were inserted into the representation of male dynasty.” ³² While in her masques Henrietta Maria embodied the forces of harmony and goodness, to her people, Henrietta Maria might have more closely resembled the forces of chaos featured in the antimasque.

Chloridia : Fertility and Female Power

On February 22, 1631, six years after Charles and Henrietta Maria’s marriage and three years after the death of Buckingham, Henrietta Maria presented Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones ’s Chloridia , a masque celebrating fertility, femininity and the royal marriage. ³³ The masque centers on the Chloris, performed by the queen, whom Jupiter has proclaimed “goddess of flowers.” According to the text, Chloris will “be stellified on Earth” ³⁴ so that the Earth will “be adorn’d with stares, as well as the Heauen” (9). In the antimasque, Jonson contrasts these forces of fertility with representations of disorder, embodied by Cupid, who, offended that the other gods dismiss him as a child, has ventured to hell and brought Jealousy, Disdain, Fear and Dissimulation with him to the Earth. As if these characters were not enough to disrupt fertility and harmony, Jonson also presents a dwarf from Hell who raises storms of lightening, thunder, rain and snow. Each element of the storm performs a separate dance resembling “the French ballets à entrées.” ³⁵ The fury of the storm continues until Juno silences it, and the scene changes to the beautiful, fertile bower of Chloris.

One might be puzzled as to why Henrietta Maria, like her mother-in-law before her, would reject the role of Juno to play Chloris. Juno exerts more authority and, as wife of the chief god, makes more sense as a role for the queen consort. In The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses, Anna had rejected the role of Juno in order to play an independent warrior goddess; in Chloridia , Henrietta Maria rejects the queen of the goddesses to play a fertile, maternal presence—nature herself, spilling her bounty onto the land. Henrietta Maria’s decision to play a passive character connected to fertility as opposed to Juno, who exerts authority over the storms, might suggest that the king exercises a tighter control over Henrietta Maria’s masques than his father did over Anna’s. Karen Britland reminds us that, while Henrietta Maria sponsors Chloridia , she presents it as a compliment to Charles, and “it is the king and queen who decided on the new production, not the queen alone.” ³⁶ In addition, Britland argues that the very structure of the masque reinforces the “sense of paternalistic control,” for Jonson presents Jupiter “as the prime mover of the plot” (ibid.). Further, Jupiter’s decree transforms Chloris into Flora.

Britland’s assessment of the patriarchal nature of the text is certainly correct. However, we need not see that fact as closing off the possibility for female agency. As Erica Veevers argues, Chloridia is “built on a structure of complementary opposites personifying the masculine and feminine principles of the universe.” ³⁷ The masculine is the “dominant and commanding power” but “the feminine brings to it the beauty and variety which belong to the universal order…” (ibid.). We could, therefore, argue that, in this entertainment, Henrietta Maria uses the masque form to celebrate those aspects of power most closely associated with the consort—notably fertility and mediation. Perhaps, one should not be surprised that the queen, who had just recently given birth to an heir, would link herself to that most common of fertility symbols—the flower. As a new mother to the future king, Charles II, Henrietta Maria would have been aware of the importance of her role as bearer of the heir and, with him, the future of the dynasty. Although Henrietta Maria’s embodiment of Chloris, with its insistent focus on fertility, does not suggest the subversive power of Anna’s performances, Henrietta Maria does assume for herself a type of generative power necessary for the continuation of dynasty.

The connection between the royal body and the state makes the role of Chloris more than a mere elaboration of the queen’s youth, beauty and fertility. In this representational framework, Chloris represents generative fertility figured as an antidote to the forces that threaten to overthrow social order. However, the plot of the masque does not have to be read simply as an endorsement of the queen’s fertility. Chloris’s Bower offers serenity and peace, and, at the end of the masque, the text moves toward reconciliation as Cupid begs pardon for his faults. The masque could reasonably have ended on this note; however, it takes a rather inexplicable turn as a hill rises out of the earth and Fame and her attendants appear. This shift in the final portion of the masque suggests that the play does not merely inhabit the sylvan world of gardens and flowers.

Jonson’s shift from the world of the garden to the world of Fame and her attendants (Poesy, History, Architecture and Sculpture) occurs so abruptly that Allan H. Gilbert writes in confusion: “What… have Fame, Poesy, History, Architecture and Sculpture to do with Chloris the goddess of flowers?” ³⁸ While Gilbert’s response does reduces the realm of the fertile and the domestic to a passive decoration, suggesting that there is little of cultural significance in the natural and the fertile, we can still appreciate his concerns. The focus of the masque does seem to shift fairly inexplicably. However, it is this very incongruity between the first and second parts of the masque that suggests a reading of Jonson’s text that extends beyond the domestic to realm of the political.

Veevers argues that the masque celebrates the reconciliation of the king and queen, and that may be the case, for, by this point, the king and queen’s relationship had moved from a cold political arrangement to a companionate union. However, while Veevers reads the reconciliations of the masque in terms of the domestic, Karen Britland reads them in terms of the political. In Chloridia ’s focus on the harmonious connection between Heaven and Earth, Britland reads an alliance between the French and the English courts. As Britland points out, the “performance of Chloridia came shortly after England had signed a treaty of peace with France at Susa, thus ending the war that had begun with the duke of Buckingham’s support of the La Rochelle Huguenots in 1627.” ³⁹ In the masque, Chloris mediates between Heaven and Earth just as Henrietta Maria mediates between her husband and her brother. A combination of Veevers’ and Britland’s readings of the masque suggests the possibilities inherent in the text, for the king and queen’s reconciliation makes them a powerful political and cultural force, and allows the queen to engage in the international political scene as a mediator for her husband.

This image of the queen building a dynasty through her fertility and reconciling nations through her mediating role would seem to carry little of the social disruption characterized by Anna’s masques, which frequently push boundaries and threaten to propel the queen into the realm of the destabilizing women of the antimasques. However, although it would be difficult to conflate Chloris and the hellish characters of the antimasque, we, nonetheless, can see ways in which Chloris can be read as a potentially disruptive character. Indeed, the insistent focus on Chloris’ fertility foregrounds her sexuality, evoking thoughts of nature goddesses and the uncontrollable power of nature and of female sexuality. Further, the enclosed garden motif and the imagery of sacred fertility might evoke Marian imagery. In either case, the queen’s attempts at self-fashioning carry with them the potential for alternative subversive readings.

Temple of Love and Luminalia

If Chloridia , staged in February of 1631, reveals a queen maturing in her role, then The Temple of Love , staged a mere four years later in February of 1635, reveals a queen at the height of her powers. To Henrietta Maria, this time must have seemed like the beginning of a triumph for Catholicism. The queen had laid the foundation stone for the Somerset House chapel in 1632, and the building was well underway by 1635. In addition, Gregorio Panzani, the first official representative of the pope, arrived in England in December 1634, “negotiating the formal exchange of agents,” ⁴⁰ and, as Veevers reminds us, “The Temple of Love was the first official court function after his arrival, and an appropriate occasion for the Queen to impress on him the part she was playing in advancing her religion” (ibid.). Indeed, one cannot help but see Henrietta Maria’s agenda on full display in this lavish performance.

The increasingly contradictory goals of promoting the Stuart monarchy and restoring Catholicism appear at the very center of this masque written by William Davenant and performed three separate times in 1635. In the masque, Henrietta Maria’s character, Indamora, queen of Narlsinga, establishes a Neoplatonic cult of chastity and a temple of Chaste Love in the island of Britain. Allegorical possibilities are ripe. In the argument portion of the masque, Davenant tells us that Divine Poesie has been sent by Fate to “to signifie the time prefix’d was come, when by the influence of her beauty… the Temple of Chast Love should be re-established in this Island.” We must not allow the superficial focus on the queen’s beauty to cause us to miss the importance of what Davenant is saying. The time has come when, by the influence of the queen, the temple and cult that she espouses shall be reestablished in England. The following section of the argument presses this reading further.

The machinations of evil magicians forced Divine Poesie to hide the temple in “mists and clouds.” The magicians, who are the enemies of Chaste Love, sought to use the temple for their own unchaste ends, and, according to the text, through their influence, “many Noble Knights and Ladies had been tempted and misled.” While Henrietta Maria may not have intended for the hiding of the true Temple to evoke events of the Protestant Reformation in a direct allegorical fashion, we cannot help but see in the masque’s description of a true faith, which has been forced into hiding in the realm of “mists and clouds,” a parallel to English Catholicism. Certainly, references to hidden faith must have brought to mind English Catholics who had been forced to practice their faith secretly, hiding their beliefs even as they hid their priests. Further, the idea of “mists and clouds” evokes the spiritual realm, but it might also evoke the realm of memory. Court audiences could certainly have drawn such a meaning from the plot and language of the text, particularly considering Indamora’s active role in revealing the true temple. The masque centers on the magicians’ attempts to seduce a group of noble Persian youths. Fortunately, Divine Poesie warns the youths to wait for the appearance of the queen, “at whose sight they, being inspired with chaste flames, might be permitted by their faithful observance and legitimate affections to enter and enjoy the privileges of that sacred temple.’” ⁴¹ The queen ultimately thwarts all attempts to seduce the faithful by revealing the Temple of Love , designed by the very same Inigo Jones who was designing the queen’s chapel, now well on the way to completion.

One need not take liberties with the text to read it in terms of Catholicism, which, like the temple, had been hidden; reformers had led the faithful away from the truth and Henrietta Maria will reveal her temple/chapel and her distinct form of worship to the English people. In so doing, she will save the true faith. Bonnie Landers Johnson argues that, in The Temple of Love , Henrietta Maria is not merely celebrated as the head of a monastic community, but as the embodiment of the Church itself: as the chaste and mystical bride of Christ.” ⁴² While Charles is the king of his people’s hearts, it is Henrietta Maria who reveals to him and his people the true temple, and as Landers Johnson reminds us, that temple is distinguished from the false church by its chastity (ibid.).

The opening song describes Indamora using imagery that evokes the Virgin Mary:

Verse

Verse AS chearefull as the Mornings light, Comes Indamora from above, To guide those Lovers that want sight, To see and know what they should love.

⁴³

On a literal level, Davenant depicts Indamora as a guide who shows the lovers what they should love. The more allegorical reading simmers just below the surface. Imagery of morning light evokes Mary. In addition, the narrative of blindness becoming sight carries heavy Biblical significance. Indeed, Christ is often referred to as “light,” and his ministry involved the restoration of sight to those who were blind physically and spiritually. The song says that those who seek spiritual sight will find a guide in Henrietta Maria, who will show them which church they should love.

In the next stanza, the song pushes this Marian imagery even further, while also evoking the ministry of Christ. In stanza one, Henrietta Maria can bring sight to the spiritually blind. In this stanza, she can heal the afflicted:

Verse

Verse Her beames into each breast will steale, And search what ev’ry Heart doth meane, The sadly wounded shee will heale, And make the fouly tainted cleane.

⁴⁴

These lines suggest that Henrietta Maria has the power to look into people’s hearts and to heal both physically and spiritually. She can heal wounds, but she can also make the foul, or the sinful, clean. Thus, her role becomes one of the bearer of grace and forgiveness. This role suggests a supernatural element that cannot be domesticated through the attribution of her power to beauty-particularly since in a Neoplatonic framework, physical beauty would suggest the purity of the soul.

The masque would be pushing into the realm of heresy if it asserted that Indamora/Henrietta Maria could perform these acts through her own power. Indeed, she can only perform the role of healer and bearer of grace because she is a vessel of God and because of her connection with the restored Temple of Love . As such, some of these miraculous elements could be attributed to the restored Catholic Church, an extremely problematic notion in a masque designed to celebrate the Stuart monarchy. In the masque and in the world that it mirrors, Henrietta Maria’s desire to restore the Catholic Church runs in a collision course with the masque’s celebration of absolutism. This nearly irreconcilable tension plays out as a struggle between idea of the king as “Monarch of men’s hearts,” appointed by Fate to reign, and the idea that the Catholic Church is the true moral authority on earth. Even prior to the Reformation, monarchs had struggled against the power of the Roman Church. In a post-Reformation context, if Henrietta Maria were to perform the role of Indamora in the real world, doing so would mean bringing back a religion that would label the king a heretic and place the pope in authority over him. Thus, Henrietta Maria’s entertainments negotiated a minefield, advocating for the restoration of the Catholic Church without undermining the Stuart’s divine-right authoritarian rule.

Perhaps to address this concern, Davenant clearly states that the cult of Neoplatonic love does not spring from foreign soil. At first, Davenant’s masque places Henrietta Maria’s character and her cult at a remove from early modern England. Indamora reigns in India, a plot device that would safely place the queen and her cult in the realm of the exotic. Davenant, however, does not maintain this distance. We quickly learn that the “Neoplatonic cult of Indamora” will begin “In a dull Northerne Ile, they call Britaine.” Recentering the cult on the English court welcomes allegorized interpretations. The lines that follow suggest a particularized reading of the true faith, emitting from Henrietta Maria’s distinct form of devotion, forged by the Counter-Reformation France but developed among the Catholic remnant in England. This Neoplatonic cult would not, therefore, be intended to evoke the full force of Continental Catholicism. Indeed, the lines of dialogue make clear that the first place this sect should be planted was Britain and that it would spread out from there. References to Spaniards and Italians, which humorously suggest that they will be unable to be persuaded out of the use of their bodies, appear to be included for comic relief; in fact, however, they serve to make a careful distinction between Henrietta Maria’s particular form of devotion and international Catholicism. The masque and Henrietta Maria’s policy thus seem intent on reconciling these competing desires through the construction of a particularly English observance of Catholicism.

Henrietta Maria’s next masque, Luminalia , or The Festival of Light, performed in 1638, appears on the surface to have little to no meaning beyond spectacle, in particular elaborate lighting effects. Veevers, however, suggests that the masque can be read as a celebration of the Virgin Mary at a time when the cause of court Catholicism seemed to be more and more triumphant. In addition to high profile conversions, including Walter Montagu, Sir Kenelm Digb, and Lady Newport, the queen kept two chapels open and George Conn kept another in his house. As Veevers reminds us, the idea of a festival of light had contemporary religious significance. The Feast of Purification, or Candlemas, which had a strong connection to the Virgin Mary, was celebrated on February 2 and Luminalia was performed on February 6, “just four days after the Catholics at court would have seen Candlemas celebrated in the Queen’s chapel.” ⁴⁵ As Candelmas was celebrated with the burning of many candles, the connection between the rite and the performance would have been hard to miss (ibid.). Veevers points out further that the evocation of Candelmas would have had a particular significance because of the Puritan objection to Catholic ceremonies. Thus, in performing this masque, alive as it is with the imagery of holy days and Marian devotion, Henrietta Maria offered her vision of a restored Catholic tradition.

To an observer of Henrietta Maria’s royal court performances, the queen must have seemed to be at the height of her powers, staging opulent entertainments that pushed her royal agenda even as Catholic worship returned to the English court. To anyone watching the lovely queen performing on the elaborate stages designed by Inigo Jones , these days seemed to promise triumph for the queen. Forces of discontent were beginning to rise, however, and unlike the representations of disorder presented in the antimasques, these adversaries could not be chased away by the mere presence of the queen and her divine beauty. Indeed, as we shall see in the following two chapters, Henrietta Maria’s triumphs in restoring some semblance of the old faith to the court held seeds that, when brought to fruition, would help bring about her downfall and the downfall of the monarchy. In the following chapter, I will examine Henrietta Maria’s articulation of a Catholic Utopia and the Protestant response to it. In Chap. 7, I will examine Henrietta Maria and Charles I’s last masque, Salmacida Spolia (1640), a dramatic response to the tensions that threatened their very realm.

Notes

• 1. Henrietta Maria was born at the Louvre Palace in Paris in November 1609. She was the fifth surviving child and youngest daughter of Henri IV, king of France and Navarre (1553–1610), and his second wife, Marie de Medici (1573–1642), daughter of Francesco I, grand duke of Tuscany, and his wife, Archduchess Johanna of Austria.

• 2. Roger Lockyer, The Early Stuarts: A Political History of England, 1603–1642 (Addison-Wesley Longman, 1999), 297.

• 3. William Prynne, The Popish Royall Favourite (London: Imprinted for M. Spark, 1643).

• 4. Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Cornell University Press, 1999), 99–100.

• 5. Pauline Gregg, King Charles I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 27.

• 6. Dolan, Whores of Babylon, 97.

• 7. Laura Lunger Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 18.

• 8. Caroline Hibbard, “Translating Royalty: Henrietta Maria and the Transition from Princess to Queen,” Court Historian 5, no. 1 (2000): 17.

• 9. Henrietta Maria’s early schooling had (however unintentionally) offered her some preparation for this role, for she “was carefully shaped by the Carmelites in the dévot piety that reigned at the French court, an aesthetic and moral code that she would translate to the English scene.” Caroline Hibbard, “Henrietta Maria,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: 2004).

• 10. Gregg, King Charles I, 55.

• 11. For a sociological overview of theories of resistance, see Jocelyn Hollander and Rachel Einwohner, “Conceptualizing Resistance” in Sociological Forum 19, no. 4 (2004): 533–554.

• 12. Michelle Anne White, Henrietta Maria and the English Civil Wars (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 12.

• 13. Ibid.

• 14. Bonnie Lander Johnson, Chastity in Early Stuart Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 111.

• 15. Hibbard, “Henrietta Maria.”

• 16. White, Henrietta Maria, 24.

• 17. Katie Whitaker, A Royal Passion: The Turbulent Marriage of King Charles I of England and Henrietta Maria of France (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010), 81.

• 18. Ibid., 74.

• 19. White, Henrietta Maria, 21.

• 20. Whitaker, A Royal Passion, 75.

• 21. White, Henrietta Maria, 25.

• 22. Ibid.

• 23. For more on the impact of Campion’s martyrdom, see Arthur Marotti, Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England, (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), chap. 1.

• 24. Whitaker, A Royal Passion, 63.

• 25. A private agreement, the Escrit secret, which never came to fruition due to Parliament, promised the suspension of penal laws against Catholics.

• 26. Whitaker, A Royal Passion, 62.

• 27. Ibid.

• 28. White, Henrietta Maria, 12.

• 29. Although she lost much of her support system and despite all of Charles’ bluster, Henrietta Maria was not left entirely alone as she was allowed to retain her a nurse, a cook, a baker, a painter, a tailor, a priest, and a lady-in-waiting named Madame Vantelet. White, 13.

• 30. Ibid., 15.

• 31. Ibid., 20.

• 32. Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity, 7.

• 33. As with most of the masques of the Caroline period, Chloridia formed part of a pair of masques, one presented by the king, the other presented by the queen. The King’s masque, Love’s triumph Through Callipolis had been performed on January 9, 1631.

• 34. Ben Jonson, Chloridia, in Ben Jonson’s Plays and Masques: Texts of the Plays and Masques, Jonson on His Work, Contemporary Readers on Jonson, Criticism, ed. Robert Martin Adams (New York: Norton, 1979), 8.

• 35. Karen Britland, Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 33.

• 36. Ibid.,75.

• 37. Erica Veevers, Images of Love and Religion: Queen Henrietta Maria and Court Entertainments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 176.

• 38. Allan H Gilbert, The Symbolic Persons in the Masques of Ben Jonson (Durham: Duke University Press, 1948), 22–24.

• 39. Britland, Drama at the Courts, 80.

• 40. Veevers, Images of Love and Religion, 135.

• 41. II. 1–29.

• 42. Johnson, Chastity in Early Stuart Literature and Culture, 124.

• 43. Stanza 1.

• 44. Stanza 2.

• 45. Veevers, Images of Love and Religion, 143.