On Display: Henrietta Maria and the Materials of Magnificence at the Stuart Court by Erin Griffey (review)

This deeply researched and beautifully produced book differs from most arthistorical discussions of monarchs in paying attention not only to paintings and other images but the whole range of material display that surrounded Charles I’s consort, Henrietta Maria, at various stages of her life. Not that Griffey neglects images: to the contrary she thoroughly examines painted and engraved portraits of her subject from childhood until her final years, carefully charting changes in iconography and suggesting meaningful comparisons to images of other contemporary monarchs. She also makes a strong case for this queen’s significance as a patron of the arts and architecture, from her early interest in the painters Jan van Belkamp and Orazion Gentileschi to her rebuilding of Somerset House in the 1660s. But the book also exploits an unusually full series of inventories reproduced as appendices at the end, along with other evidence to reconstruct the décor of Henrietta Maria’s palaces and many details about her wardrobe, her investment in jewelry and luxury furnishings, and the arrangement of pictures and other objects in her chapels and privy lodgings. As Griffey rightly argues, it was the total impact of this opulence, rather than paintings and engravings in isolation, that projected an image of the Queen to contemporaries. In addition to making a substantial contribution to the growing body of secondary literature on Henrietta Maria, On Display is the most complete and rigorous study yet published of the material culture of a major baroque court.

Much of the book is organized around “passages” of the queen’s life, involving both physical crossings of the sea and a transition from one state to another. The earliest of these involved her marriage to Charles I in 1625 and voyage to England. Griffey analyzes the magnificent proxy wedding in Paris and Henrietta Maria’s progress to the French coast and then Dover and London, as well as the contents of her trousseau, valued at £30,000, which emphasized the queen’s identity as a Bourbon princess and devout Catholic. Three chapters deal with Henrietta Maria’s subsequent years in England, one devoted to her first four years and two to her role as a royal mother in the 1630s. Woven into the discussion is an account of the queen’s investments in her chapels and increasingly assertive efforts to proselytize on behalf of her faith.

A final substantial section of the book deals with Henrietta Maria’s departure for the continent at the outset of the Civil War, her court in exile in France, her return to England at the Restoration, the rebuilding of Somerset House to designs by the architect Hugh May under her auspices, and her final retirement to a quasimonastic existence at Colombes and Chaillot, near Paris. Griffey provides an excellent discussion of the queen’s iconography as a pious royal widow, while showing that she continued to live in considerable luxury as she simultaneously advertised her Catholic piety.

Griffey repeatedly demonstrates the many ways that Henrietta Maria advertised her Catholic piety through material objects and suggests that this would have antagonized English Protestants. While this is undoubtedly true up to a point, Henrietta Maria worked quite closely with committed Protestants at court through most of the 1630s, often in pursuit of an anti-Spanish alliance. The degree to which her Catholicism provoked negative reactions depended not only on displays of piety but contingent political circumstances. But of course this was not Griffey’s subject and her book makes a highly valuable contribution.