Henrietta Maria

Piety, Politics and Patronage

Erin Griffey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351931007
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

Compiled by art historians, literary scholars, musicologists, and historians, this essay collection is an innovative and interdisciplinary study of Queen Henrietta Maria and her multi-faceted roles and responsibilities. Elements of the queen's popular biography - her European identity and devout Catholic faith - are only a part of the backdrop against which Henrietta Maria is re-considered. Drawing on the expertise of an international group of scholars from different disciplines, these essays explore and shed new light on the Queen's various roles: a patron of performing and visual arts with taste and influence comparable to her husband's, her salient political position between the French and English courts, and her political sentiments at the outbreak of the English Civil War. Through cutting-edge archival research that includes investigations into household accounts and personal correspondence, this collection ultimately presents a new assessment of female power and influence at the early modern court. What becomes strikingly evident is that Henrietta Maria had a distinct and profound influence on material and political culture that deserves the attention of art history, literature, theatre, and musicology scholars.

Chapter 1

Religion, European Politics and Henrietta Maria’s Circle, 1625–41

Malcolm Smuts

This chapter re-examines the story of Henrietta Maria’s ‘faction’ within the court of Charles I, incorporating new research in French and English archives.¹ In doing so, it attempts to connect a political narrative to wider aspects of cultural and religious history, in ways that illuminate the highly cosmopolitan character of seventeenth-century court societies and the consequent tendency for affairs in one country to become entangled with those in others. Court poets and artists of the 1630s crafted an image of Henrietta Maria as a symbol of chaste beauty, monogamous love and harmony. In the partisan political cultures of the 1640s she became by turns a cavalier heroine and malignant villain, the reputed patron of a Papist and libertine faction blamed for all the grievances Parliament’s supporters lodged against Charles I. We might interpret these images as rhetorical constructs that tell us more about seventeenth-century propaganda than about how politics really worked. But I will argue that we can tease out connections between the imagery that developed around Henrietta Maria and the way she conducted herself as a French Catholic queen within England’s Protestant court. Her story opens an illuminating window onto the complex relations between court culture, dynastic squabbles, secular political interests and religion in Britain and Europe during the era of the Thirty Years War. It shows why religion was so divisive but also why this divisiveness depended at least as much on specific connections between confessional alignments and secular politics as on religious belief in itself.

1

From the time of her arrival in Dover in 1625, aged 15, Henrietta Maria found her position complicated by divergent priorities rooted in the conditions of her marriage. Like all royal matches, hers had been concluded to serve the strategic objectives of two dynastic states. For the Stuarts, a French marriage represented a less attractive alternative to the preferred option of a Spanish Match, which they had pursued unsuccessfully from 1618 to 1623. The Spanish alliance had, in turn, become linked to James I’s efforts to broker a negotiated settlement of the Thirty Years War and the peaceful restitution of the lands of his son-in-law, Frederick V, Elector Palatine, which Catholic armies had overrun between 1620 and 1622. James’ negotiations with Spain limited the military assistance he could provide Frederick, much to the disgust of many Protestant Britons. To please Spain, James also eased restrictions on English Catholics, while suppressing critical Puritan sermons and pamphlets. Since these measures were disliked not only by a large segment of the English population, but by several of James’ own privy councillors, they had significant ramifications in domestic politics. They effectively scuttled what little hope remained of paying the king’s debts by a large parliamentary grant, thereby magnifying the importance of a large Spanish dowry. Within the royal court, they led to the eclipse of staunchly anti-Spanish figures, like the Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbot, and the rise of others with very different views, like Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, a nobleman sympathetic to Catholicism who had enjoyed a Spanish pension since 1614.² Prince Charles’ entourage changed as well, with the replacement of his Scottish secretary, Thomas Murray, who opposed the Match, by Francis Cottington, who had represented the English court in Madrid for much of the previous decade.³

The greatest odium for these changes fell on the royal favourite, Buckingham, whose support for the Spanish alliance compounded resentment caused by his sudden rise to power and the riches James had heaped upon him and his family. The support of Spain and Hispanophiles on the Council provided Buckingham with his only shield, apart from the king’s affection, against the manoeuvres of court rivals and popular hatred. The French ambassador in London thought Buckingham so exposed that he had little choice but to attempt to destroy the political strength of ‘puritans’, who had become his irreconcilable enemies, by supporting a rival faction of Catholics and Spanish pensioners.⁴ And yet in 1623, after travelling to Madrid to negotiate the Match in person, Buckingham and Charles reversed their position by advocating a breach with Spain and war to restore the Palatinate. This decision alienated many of their former allies on the Council, but made possible an alliance with anti-Spanish groups that had recently been the duke’s bitter enemies.⁵ Unfortunately, Buckingham and Charles still had to reckon with James, who dreaded a general European war of religion and made it clear that he would contemplate war with Spain only if he had an alliance with Spain’s traditional Catholic enemy, France. Two Buckingham protégés – James Hay, Viscount Doncaster (later Earl of Carlisle), and Henry Rich, Lord Kensington (created Earl of Holland during the negotiations), were therefore dispatched to Paris to negotiate a match with Henrietta Maria, the youngest sister of Louis XIII.

The French politics surrounding the marriage were almost equally convoluted. Some figures in Paris, including the rising minister Richelieu, wanted an English alliance against Spain and saw Buckingham as a natural ally. They also hoped the marriage alliance would not only deter English support for Huguenot rebellions but win English help in suppressing Huguenot privateers, commanded by the Duc de Soubise. Buckingham agreed to help, arranging to lend Louis XIII eight large warships and at one point offering the use of the full British fleet’s might to scour the French coast.⁶ By contrast, a powerful dévot group sympathetic to Spain at the French court, backed by the queen mother, Marie de Médicis, supported the match primarily for religious reasons, seeing it as an opportunity to obtain more lenient treatment for English Catholics and a step toward England’s reconciliation with Rome.⁷ Before leaving Paris, Henrietta Maria was exhorted by her mother, her confessor and Pope Urban VIII to demonstrate her commitment to her faith and proselytize on its behalf. To obtain a papal dispensation and show that they had not sacrificed religion for political expediency, the French demanded the same concessions of toleration for English Catholics that Spain had obtained before its negotiations with the Stuart court broke down. Although the English agreed only in secret articles, the French believed they had obtained the suspension of penal laws and sought to use this victory to win credit in Rome and among English Catholics.⁸ But, as rumours of these concessions spread in England, they antagonized the very groups Charles and Buckingham needed to cultivate in order to win support for war against Spain.⁹

The adolescent princess therefore found herself thrust into the tricky position of fostering a military alliance with British Protestants, while simultaneously acting as a champion of Catholicism in London. Not surprisingly she failed to meet this challenge. The problem was not simply that her French household, which included Oratorian priests who saw themselves as Counter Reformation missionaries, persuaded her to engage in provocative actions, allegedly including taking her ladies on a pilgrimage to honour priests executed at Tyburn as martyrs.¹⁰ Although this behaviour certainly antagonized Protestants, including Charles, the fundamental difficulty was that Buckingham soon came to regard the marriage as a political liability that he needed to neutralize through punitive acts against Catholics.

A French manuscript collection not previously used by historians of England sheds fresh light on the story from the perspective of the queen’s entourage and the government in Paris. In late August 1625, the earls of Pembroke and Arundel privately told the queen’s almoner, Richelieu’s nephew the Bishop of Mende, that the leaders of the recently convened session of Parliament were determined to attack Buckingham by investigating his mishandling of funds appropriated for the royal fleet. A few days later Mende reported that Buckingham attempted to ‘appease the mutiny’ by meeting privately with parliamentary leaders and offering to ‘chase the French [out of England] and renew persecution of Catholics’.¹¹ The rejection of this offer merely strengthened the favourite’s conviction that the French marriage had damaged him politically, causing him to turn on the queen’s household with vindictive fury.¹² In an effort to appease Parliament, Buckingham and the king repudiated the secret articles of the marriage treaty – saying they had been granted merely to obtain a dispensation from the Pope, without any intention of being put into effect – and stepped up enforcement of the laws against recusancy.¹³

Buckingham had also begun sparring with the queen and the French government as he attempted to insert his own female relatives and the wives of his clients into her bedchamber. The French initially agreed to consider admitting the duke’s Catholic mother-in-law and wife but firmly resisted the intrusion of his Protestant sister, Susan, Countess of Denbigh. In retaliation Buckingham provoked a quarrel with one of the queen’s French attendants and accused Mende of fomenting court intrigues against him.¹⁴ ‘We have no worse enemy’, Mende concluded.¹⁵ Henrietta Maria dispatched one of her servants to Paris to report on the worsening situation and seek fresh instructions. But at virtually the same moment, Richelieu wrote to a ministerial colleague about the need to send an ambassador to London quickly, to give Buckingham secret offers of assistance ‘both from the King [of France] and the Queen of England’ before Charles dissolved Parliament. A few days later Louis XIII himself wrote to Mende that ‘one of the principle affairs is to consider by what means one can oblige the Duke.’¹⁶ The divergent goals that different groups in the French court hoped to promote through Henrietta Maria’s marriage had collided, putting her in an impossible position.¹⁷

For another year, Buckingham and Charles continued their attacks on the queen’s Catholic household, while she tried to fight back, in part by forming alliances with the duke’s English enemies. As England’s relations with France worsened markedly during the winter and Buckingham threatened to go to war in support of the Huguenots,¹⁸ the French government gradually became more supportive of her efforts to weaken the duke. In December of 1625, John Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, secretly passed information to Mende about English assistance to Soubise and advised him on diplomatic strategy.¹⁹ The following month, the French ambassador in London, Blainville, reported that ‘some Englishmen’ had begun investigating Buckingham’s mistreatment of the queen and her household, with the intention of compiling ‘mémoires contre lui’.²⁰ Although he does not say so, the queen and her servants probably cooperated with these efforts. When a parliament convened in March and showed itself sympathetic to France and hostile to Buckingham, Blainville suggested that the queen should assist its leaders, specifically by cooperating with ‘the Earl of Arundel [and] the houses of Lennox and Pembroke’, which had joined forces to bring down the duke. These English aristocrats, in turn, wanted to confer with the French government on how to conduct their campaign.²¹ A few days later the Earl and Countess of Arundel and the Countess of Lennox provoked Charles by permitting a marriage between their children without his knowledge or consent. The queen tried to intercede on their behalf but succeeded only in further aggravating her husband. Although he initially showed only mild annoyance over the marriage, Blainville reported, after the queen’s intercession the king ordered Arundel imprisoned in the Tower and the two countesses confined to house arrest.²² This suggests that the ostensible reason for Arundel’s punishment may have mattered less to Charles than his growing awareness that two great aristocratic dynasties and his own wife had joined forces against his favourite. Mende had meanwhile gone to Paris to receive secret verbal instructions.²³ In working with Buckingham’s enemies to encourage his impeachment, Henrietta Maria and her household were therefore almost certainly pursuing the policy of Richelieu and Louis XIII.²⁴ Her behaviour must have reinforced the conviction Charles and Buckingham had already formed that the French wanted to erect a ‘cabal’ in England, much as Spain had done a few y...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Religion, European Politics and Henrietta Maria’s Circle, 1625–41
• 2 The Secretary of Ladies and Feminine Friendship at the Court of Henrietta Maria
• 3 Queen Henrietta Maria’s Theatrical Patronage
• 4 ‘The Rare and Excellent Partes of Mr. Walter Montague’: Henrietta Maria and her Playwright
• 5 The Three Marys: The Virgin; Marie de Médicis; and Henrietta Maria
• 6 ‘By Our Direction and For Our Use’: The Queen’s Patronage of Artists and Artisans seen through her Household Accounts
• 7 Merely Ornamental? Van Dyck’s Portraits of Henrietta Maria
• 8 Devotional Jewellery in Portraits of Henrietta Maria
• 9 Sounds of Piety and Devotion: Music in the Queen’s Chapel
• Select Bibliography
• Index