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Conniving Queen, Frivolous Wife, or Romantic Heroine? The Afterlife of Queen Henrietta Maria

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Remembering Queens and Kings of Early Modern England and France

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Abstract

In this chapter, I consider Henrietta Maria as she appears in academic studies, as well as in two works of historical fiction: Myself, My Enemy by Jean Plaidy, and Cavalier Queen by Fiona Mountain. These novels present the queen’s transgressive behavior—advocating for her Catholic faith, advising her husband, and leading the Royalist army into battle—in ways that contain the threat of the powerful woman. In addition, the reductive way these texts represent Henrietta Maria raises the question of how much license fiction writers should take with history, particularly in the case of historical figures such as queens consort whose life stories may be unknown to the majority of readers.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Hilary Mantel, “Royal Bodies.” London Review of Books. February 21, 2013. https://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n04/hilary-mantel/royal-bodies

  2. 2.

    Mantel, “Royal Bodies.”

  3. 3.

    Mantel, “Royal Bodies.”

  4. 4.

    Mantel, “Royal Bodies.”

  5. 5.

    Mantel, “Royal Bodies.”

  6. 6.

    In Chap. 8 of this book, Sarah Betts discusses representations of Henrietta Maria as romantic heroine. For representations of Henrietta Maria as frivolous wife and conniving queen, see Henrietta Haynes, Henrietta Maria (London: Methuen & Co, 1912); Carola Lenanton Oman, Henrietta Maria (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1936); C.V. Wedgewood, The King’s Peace 1637–1641 (London: C. Nicholls & Company, 1966); Quinton Bone, Queen of the Cavaliers (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1972); Elizabeth Hamilton, Henrietta Maria (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1979).

  7. 7.

    Susan Dunn-Hensley, Anna of Denmark and Henrietta Maria: Witches, Virgins, and Catholic Queens (Palgrave, 2017), 227.

  8. 8.

    Dunn-Hensley, Anna of Denmark.

  9. 9.

    J.L. Laynesmith, The Last Medieval Queens (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005).

  10. 10.

    See Linda Woodbridge and Edward I. Berry, True rites and maimed rites: ritual and anti-ritual in Shakespeare and his age (Univ of Illinois Pr, 1992).

  11. 11.

    Carolyn Harris, Queenship and Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 3–4.

  12. 12.

    Woodbridge, True rites, 8.

  13. 13.

    Woodbridge, True rites.

  14. 14.

    Woodbridge, True rites.

  15. 15.

    Harris, Queenship, 30.

  16. 16.

    See Chapter 3: “The Virgin Mary and Protestant Reformers” in Diarmaid MacCulloch, All Things Made New: The Reformation and Its Legacy (Oxford UP, 2016).

  17. 17.

    Bone, Henrietta; Hamilton, Henrietta.

  18. 18.

    Michelle White, Henrietta Maria and the English Civil Wars (Ashgate, 2006), 2–3

  19. 19.

    Haynes, Henrietta, xiv.

  20. 20.

    Haynes, Henrietta, xv.

  21. 21.

    Caroline Hibbard, “Translating Royalty: Henrietta Maria and the Transition from Princess to Queen.” Court Historian. 5.1 (2000): 15–28; Alison Plowden, Henrietta Maria: Charles I’s indomitable queen. (Sutton Publishing, 2001); Erica Veevers, Images of Love and Religion: Queen Henrietta Maria and Court Entertainments (Cambridge University Press, 1989); Karen Britland, Drama at the courts of Queen Henrietta Maria (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006); Laura Lunger Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (Cambridge University Press, 2011); White, Henrietta Maria, 2006.

  22. 22.

    While scholars such as Melinda Gough and Barbara Ravelhofer argue that Henrietta Maria played a key artistic role in the masques that she sponsored, scholars such as Axel Stähler continue to present the queen’s theatrical collaborators as the real creative force behind the masques. Gough, “‘Not As Myself’: The Queen’s Voice in Tempe Restored,” Modern Philology 101 (2003), 48–67; Ravelhofer, The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music (Oxford: Oxford UP 2009); and Stähler, “Inigo Jones’s Tempe Restored and Alessandro Piccolomini’s Della institution morale,” The Seventeenth Century 18 (2003), 180–210.

  23. 23.

    Sophie Tomlinson, Women on Stage in the Stuart Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge UP 2006), 3.

  24. 24.

    See Michelle Dobbie, “Political Intrigue and Early Modern Diplomacy,” Lives and Letters 2 (2010), 1–16.

  25. 25.

    Jean Plaidy, Myself My Enemy, (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1983), 91.

  26. 26.

    Plaidy, Myself My Enemy.

  27. 27.

    Harris, Queenship, 2.

  28. 28.

    Plaidy, Myself, 109.

  29. 29.

    Plaidy, Myself, 115.

  30. 30.

    Plaidy, Myself, 201.

  31. 31.

    Plaidy, Myself.

  32. 32.

    Plaidy, Myself, 201 and 231.

  33. 33.

    Mountain refers to the queen as Henrietta.

  34. 34.

    Fiona Mountain, Cavalier Queen (Arrow Books, 2011), 17, 27, and 73.

  35. 35.

    Mountain, Cavalier Queen, 198.

  36. 36.

    Mountain, Cavalier Queen, 325.

  37. 37.

    Mountain, Cavalier Queen, 83.

  38. 38.

    Mountain, Cavalier Queen.

  39. 39.

    Mountain, Cavalier Queen, 85.

  40. 40.

    Mountain, Cavalier Queen, 318.

  41. 41.

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

  42. 42.

    Mountain, Cavalier, 356–357.

  43. 43.

    Gregg, King Charles I, 55.

  44. 44.

    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.

  45. 45.

    Plaidy, Myself, 96.

  46. 46.

    Plaidy, Myself, 165.

  47. 47.

    Plaidy, Myself.

  48. 48.

    White, Henrietta, 25.

  49. 49.

    White, Henrietta.

  50. 50.

    Plaidy, Myself, 110.

  51. 51.

    Plaidy, Myself.

  52. 52.

    Plaidy, Myself.

  53. 53.

    Mountain, Cavalier, 170.

  54. 54.

    Mountain, Cavalier.

  55. 55.

    Mountain, Cavalier, 216–217.

  56. 56.

    Plaidy, Myself, 201.

  57. 57.

    Plaidy, Myself.

  58. 58.

    Mountain, Cavalier, 3.

  59. 59.

    Pamela Regis, A Natural History of the Romance Novel (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2007): xi.

  60. 60.

    Julia Novak, “Feminist to Postfeminist” in Angelaki 22, no. 1 (2017): 224.

  61. 61.

    Mountain, Cavalier, 38.

  62. 62.

    Mountain, Cavalier, 19.

  63. 63.

    Katie Whitaker, A Royal Passion: The Turbulent Marriage of King Charles I of England and Henrietta Maria of France. (W.W. Norton and Company, 2010): xvii.

  64. 64.

    Whitaker, A Royal Passion.

  65. 65.

    Mountain, Cavalier, 268.

  66. 66.

    Mountain, Cavalier.

  67. 67.

    Mountain, Cavalier, 363.

  68. 68.

    Mountain, Cavalier, 457–458.

  69. 69.

    Mountain, Cavalier, 457.

  70. 70.

    William Robinson, History, Fiction, and the Tudors: Sex, Politics, Power, and Artistic License in the Showtime Television Series (Palgrave, 2016): 7.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

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  1. Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL, USA

    Susan Dunn-Hensley

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  1. New College of the Humanities, London, UK

    Estelle Paranque

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Dunn-Hensley, S. (2019). Conniving Queen, Frivolous Wife, or Romantic Heroine? The Afterlife of Queen Henrietta Maria. In: Paranque, E. (eds) Remembering Queens and Kings of Early Modern England and France. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22344-1_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22344-1_15

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-22344-1

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