The turbulent life of Henrietta Maria of France, Queen of England

Recently I read a splendid book "My Queen, My Love: A Novel of Henrietta Maria"
written by Elena Maria Vidal about Henrietta Maria of France. Who was she?
Who was this French princess who became Queen of England? 
So, time to make up another Royal History post.

Family

Henrietta Maria was born on 25 November 1609 in the Louvre
Palace in Paris. 

Her parents were Henry IV of France and Marie de' Medici. She
was thus a member of the House of Bourbon.

Of course Henriette Maria had other siblings. Among them were 
King Louis XIII of France and Elisabeth, who became Queen of Spain.

Henrietta Maria was trained, along with her sisters, in riding,
dancing, and singing, and took part in court plays.

Although tutored in reading and writing, she was not known for
her academic skills. 

As part of her religious training, the princess was heavily influenced
by the Carmelites at the French court. 

By 1622, Henrietta Maria was living in Paris with a household of some
200 staff, and marriage plans were being discussed.

 

Love and Marriage

Negotiations

Henrietta Maria first met her future husband in 1623 at a
court entertainment in Paris, when he was on his way to Spain
with the Duke of Buckingham to discuss a possible marriage with
Maria Anna of Spain. 

The proposal fell through when Philip IV of Spain demanded
Charles convert to the Catholic Church and live in Spain for a
year as pre-conditions for the marriage. 

As Philip was aware, such terms were unacceptable, and when
Charles returned to England in October, he and Buckingham
demanded King James declare war on Spain. 

Searching elsewhere for a bride, Charles sent his close friend
Henry Rich, 1st Earl of Holland, to Paris in 1624. A Francophile
and godson of Henry IV of France, Holland strongly favoured
a marriage with Henrietta Maria, the terms of which were
negotiated by James Hay, 1st Earl of Carlisle.

Marriage

A proxy marriage was held at Notre-Dame de Paris on 1 May 1625,
where Duke Claude of Chevreuse stood as proxy for Charles,
shortly after Charles succeeded as king, with the couple spending
their first night together at St Augustine's Abbey near Canterbury
on 13 June 1625. 

As a Roman Catholic, Henrietta Maria was unable to participate
in the Church of England ceremony on 2 February 1626 when
Charles was crowned in Westminster Abbey. A suggestion she be
crowned by Daniel de La Mothe-Houdancourt, the bishop of Mende
who accompanied her to England, was unacceptable, although she
was allowed to watch her husband's coronation at a discreet distance.

No popular Queen

This went down badly with the London crowds, while England's
pro-French policy gave way rapidly to a policy of supporting French
Huguenot uprisings, and then a disengagement from European politics,
as internal problems grew.

After an initially difficult period, she and Charles formed a close
partnership and were devoted to each other, but Henrietta Maria
never fully assimilated into English society. She did not speak
English before her marriage, and as late as the 1640s had
difficulty writing or speaking the language. 

Combined with her Catholicism, this made her unpopular among
English contemporaries who feared "Papist" subversion and
conspiracies such as the Gunpowder Plot. Henrietta Maria has
been criticised as being an "intrinsically apolitical, undereducated
and frivolous" figure during the 1630s; others have suggested that she
exercised a degree of personal power through a combination of her
piety, her femininity, and her sponsorship of the arts.

Before the civil war

Henrietta Maria remained sympathetic to her fellow Catholics, and in
1632 began construction of a new Catholic chapel at Somerset House.
The old chapel had been deeply unpopular amongst Protestants, and
there had been much talk amongst London apprentices of pulling
it down as an anti-Catholic gesture. Although modest externally,
Henrietta Maria's chapel was much more elaborate inside and
was opened in a particularly grand ceremony in 1636. This caused great
alarm amongst many in the Protestant community. Henrietta Maria's
religious activities appear to have focused on bringing a modern,
17th-century European form of Catholicism to England.

The result was an increasing intolerance of Henrietta Maria in
Protestant English society, gradually shifting towards hatred. 

In 1630, Alexander Leighton, a Scottish doctor, was flogged, branded
and mutilated for criticising Henrietta Maria in a pamphlet, before
being imprisoned for life. 

In the late 1630s, the lawyer William Prynne, popular in Puritan circles,
also had his ears cut off for writing that women actresses were
notorious whores, a clear insult to Henrietta Maria. 

London society would blame Henrietta Maria for the Irish Rebellion
of 1641, believed to be orchestrated by the Jesuits to whom she was
linked in the public imagination. 

Henrietta Maria herself was rarely seen in London, as Charles and
she had largely withdrawn from public society during the 1630s,
both because of their desire for privacy and because of the
cost of court pageants.

By 1641, an alliance of Parliamentarians under John Pym had
begun to place increasing pressure on Charles, himself embattled
after the failure of several wars. The Parliamentary faction achieved
the arrest and subsequent execution of the king's advisers,
Archbishop William Laud and Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford.
Pym then turned his attention to Henrietta Maria as a way of
placing further pressure on Charles. The Grand Remonstrance,
passed by Parliament at the end of 1641, for example, did not
mention the Queen by name, but it was clear to all that she was part of
the Roman Catholic conspiracy the remonstrance referred to and
condemned. Henrietta Maria's confidant Henry Jermyn, who had
himself converted to Catholicism in the 1630s, was forced to flee
to the Continent after the First Army Plot of 1641.

Henrietta Maria encouraged Charles to take a firm line with Pym
and his colleagues. She was widely believed to have encouraged Charles
to arrest his Parliamentary enemies in January 1642, although no hard
proof of this exists. 

The Marquis de La Ferté-Imbault, the French ambassador, was keen
to avoid any damage to French prestige by an attack on the Queen,
but was equally unimpressed by Charles's record on relations with France.
He advised caution and reconciliation with Pym. The arrest was bungled,
and Pym and his colleagues escaped Charles's soldiers, possibly as a
result of a tip-off from Henrietta Maria's former friend Lucy Hay.
With the anti-royalist backlash now in full swing, Henrietta Maria and
Charles retreated from Whitehall to Hampton Court.

The situation was steadily moving towards open war, and in February
Henrietta Maria left for The Hague, both for her own safety and to
attempt to defuse public tensions about her Catholicism and her
closeness to the king. 

The Hague was the seat of Henrietta's prospective son-in-law,
William II of Orange, and the queen was to accompany the bride,
her 10-year-old daughter Mary, to her new home. Also, her widowed
sister-in-law Elizabeth, mother of the queen's old favourite,
Prince Rupert, had already been living in The Hague for some years.
The Hague was a major centre for banking and finance; the queen
intended to raise funds in aid of her husband there.

Civil war

At the beginning of 1643, Henrietta Maria attempted to return to
England. Part of the rashness of the following decisions were
partially due to the desire to rejoin Charles I in person, as his
recent decision-making and disregard of her advising caused
her to grow very concerned.

The first attempt to cross from The Hague was not an easy one;
battered by storms, her ship came close to sinking and was forced
to return to port. Henrietta Maria used the delay to convince
the Dutch to release a shipload of arms for the king, which
had been held at the request of Parliament. 

This second attempt was successful and she evaded the Parliamentarian
navy to land at Bridlington in Yorkshire with troops and arms.
The pursuing naval vessels then bombarded the town, forcing the
royal party to take cover in neighbouring fields; Henrietta Maria returned
under fire, however, to recover her pet dog Mitte which had been
forgotten by her staff.

Henrietta Maria paused for a period at York, where she was entertained
in some style by the Earl of Newcastle. She took the opportunity to
discuss the situation north of the border with Royalist Scots,
promoting the plans of Montrose and others for an uprising.

She also supported the Earl of Antrim's proposals to settle the rebellion
in Ireland and bring forces across the sea to support the king in England.

Henrietta Maria continued to argue vigorously for nothing less than a
total victory over Charles's enemies, countering proposals for a 

compromise. She rejected private messages from Pym and Hampden
asking her to use her influence over the king to create a peace treaty,
and was impeached by Parliament shortly afterwards. Meanwhile, Parliament
had voted to destroy her private chapel at Somerset House and arrest the
Capuchin friars who maintained it. In March, Henry Marten and
John Clotworthy forced their way into the chapel with troops and
destroyed the altarpiece by Rubens, smashed many of the statues
and made a bonfire of the queen's religious canvases, books and vestments.

Travelling south in the summer, she met Charles at Kineton, near Edgehill,
before travelling on to the royal capital in Oxford. The journey through
the contested Midlands was not an easy one, and Prince Rupert was sent
to Stratford-upon-Avon to escort her. 

Despite the difficulties of the journey, Henrietta Maria greatly enjoyed
herself, eating in the open air with her soldiers and meeting friends
along the way.She arrived in Oxford bringing fresh supplies to
great acclaim; poems were written in her honour, and Jermyn, her
chamberlain, was given a peerage by the king at her request.

Henrietta Maria spent the autumn and winter of 1643 in Oxford with
Charles, where she attempted, as best she could, to maintain the pleasant
court life that they had enjoyed before the war. The queen lived in the
Warden's lodgings in Merton College, adorned with the royal furniture
which had been brought up from London. 

By early 1644, however, the king's military situation had started to
deteriorate. Royalist forces in the north came under pressure,
and after the Royalist defeat at the battle of Alresford in March,
the royal capital at Oxford was less secure.

The queen was pregnant with Henrietta and the decision was taken
for her to withdraw safely west to Bath. Charles travelled as far as
Abingdon with her before returning to Oxford with his sons. It was the
last time the two saw each other.

Henrietta Maria eventually continued southwest beyond Bath to
Exeter, where she stopped, awaiting her imminent labour. Meanwhile,
however, the Parliamentarian generals the Earl of Essex and William
Waller had produced a plan to exploit the situation. Waller would
pursue and hold down the king and his forces, while Essex would s
trike south to Exeter with the aim of capturing Henrietta Maria and
thereby acquiring a valuable bargaining counter over Charles. 

By June, Essex's forces had reached Exeter. Henrietta Maria had had
another difficult childbirth, and the king had to personally appeal to
their usual physician, de Mayerne, to risk leaving London to attend
to her. 

The Queen was in considerable pain and distress, but decided that
the threat from Essex was too great; leaving baby Henrietta in
Exeter because of the risks of the journey, she stayed at Pendennis Castle,
then took to sea from Falmouth in a Dutch vessel for France on 14 July.
Despite coming under fire from a Parliamentarian ship, she instructed
her captain to sail on, reaching Brest in France and the protection
of her French family.

By the end of the year, Charles's position was getting weaker
and he desperately needed Henrietta Maria to raise additional funds
and troops from the continent.The campaigns of 1645 went poorly
for the Royalists, however, and the capture, and subsequent publishing,
of the correspondence between Henrietta Maria and Charles in 1645
following the Battle of Naseby proved hugely damaging to the royal cause. 

In two decisive engagements – the Battle of Naseby in June and the
Battle of Langport in July – the Parliamentarians effectively destroyed
Charles's armies. Finally, in May 1646 Charles sought shelter with a
Presbyterian Scottish army at Southwell in Nottinghamshire.

Exile

With the support of Anne of Austria and the French government,
Henrietta Maria settled in Paris. During 1646 there was talk of
Prince Charles joining Henrietta Maria in Paris; Henrietta Maria and
the King were keen, but the Prince was initially advised not to go, as
it would portray him as a Catholic friend of France. After the continued
failure of the Royalist efforts in England, he finally agreed
to join his mother in July 1646.

Henrietta Maria was increasingly depressed and anxious in France,
from where she attempted to convince Charles to accept a Presbyterian
government in England as a means of mobilising Scottish support for the
re-invasion of England and the defeat of Parliament. 

In December 1647, she was horrified when Charles rejected the
"Four Bills" offered to him by Parliament as a peace settlement.
Charles had secretly signed "The Engagement" with the Scots,
however, promising a Presbyterian government in England with the
exception of Charles's own household. It ended in 1648 with the
defeat of the Scots and Charles's capture by Parliamentary forces.

In France, meanwhile, a "hothouse" atmosphere had developed
amongst the royal court in exile at the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

King Charles I at his trial

A Widow

King Charles was executed by decree of Parliament in 1649; his
death left Henrietta Maria almost destitute and in shock, a situation
not helped by the French civil war of the Fronde.

Henrietta Maria increasingly focused on her faith and on her children,
especially Henrietta (whom she called "Minette"), James and Henry.

Henrietta Maria attempted to convert both James and Henry to
Catholicism, her attempts with Henry angering both Royalists
in exile and Charles II. Henriette, however, was brought up a
Catholic.

Return to England

Henrietta Maria returned to England following the Restoration in
October 1660 along with her daughter Henrietta. She did not
return to much public acclaim.

Henrietta Maria's return was partially prompted by a liaison between
her second son, James, Duke of York, and Anne Hyde, the daughter of
Edward Hyde, Charles II's chief minister. Anne was pregnant, and
James had proposed marrying her. Henrietta Maria was horrified;
she still disliked Edward Hyde, did not approve of the pregnant
Anne, and certainly did not want the courtier's daughter to marry
her son. However, Charles II agreed and despite her efforts the
couple were married.

That same September, Henrietta's third son, Henry Stuart, Duke of Gloucester,
died of smallpox in London at age 20. He had accompanied his brother
King Charles II to England in May and had participated in the King's
triumphal progress through London. More death was to follow:
on Christmas Eve, Henrietta's elder daughter Mary also died of smallpox
in London, leaving behind a 10-year-old son, the future
William III of England.

In 1661, Henrietta Maria returned to France and arranged for her
youngest daughter, Henrietta, to marry her first cousin,
Philippe I, Duke of Orléans, the only brother of Louis XIV. 

After her daughter's wedding, Henrietta Maria returned to
England in 1662 accompanied by her son Charles II and her
nephew Prince Rupert. She had intended to remain in England
for the rest of her life, but by 1665 was suffering badly from bronchitis,
which she blamed on the damp British weather. Henrietta Maria
travelled back to France the same year, taking residence at the
Hôtel de la Bazinière, the present Hôtel de Chimay in Paris. 

In August 1669, she saw the birth of her granddaughter
Anne Marie d'Orléans; Anne Marie was the maternal
grandmother of Louis XV, making Henrietta Maria an ancestor
of most of today's European royal families.

Death

 
Shortly afterwards, she died at the château de Colombes, near Paris, having
taken an excessive quantity of opiates as a painkiller on the advice of
Louis XIV's doctor, Antoine Vallot. She was buried in the French royal
necropolis at the Basilica of St Denis, with her heart being placed in a
silver casket and buried at her convent in Chaillot.

Book

👉 Do check the book My Queen, My Love: A novel about Henrietta Maria
written by Elena Maria Vidal. I read and reviewed this book via Booktasters.
Read my review on this link. 

Source pictures: Wikipedia