Henrietta Maria: Piety, Politics and Patronage (review)

There is currently a thriving industry in studies of Henrietta Maria's court. This volume is primarily devoted to aspects of her cultural interests, but many of the papers are reshapings of material the authors have put into print elsewhere. Indeed, Karen Britland's discussion of Henrietta's theatrical patronage reuses whole paragraphs from her earlier studies. Only Malcolm Smuts' chapter focuses on political aspects. He revisits his work on her Puritan followers in the light of his recent research in the French archives, which he suggests have been unduly neglected. Since the Stricklands worked there extensively, the records are not entirely unknown but well worth revisiting. Compressing the Byzantine intrigues of the French court into a few pages is probably an impossibility and matching it with the disruption of English politics following James I's death piles Pelion on Ossa. Whether it is possible to make a coherent account of what was happening from the calculated leaks and dissimulation in diplomatic correspondence on both sides of the channel may be doubted. Nevertheless, Smuts raises some interesting aspects of Henrietta Maria's attempts to influence the course of diplomacy, although her fraught relationship with Richelieu deserves further attention.

Literary scholars, like Sarah Poynting, continue the teasing out of the works that Henrietta put on at court, in this case the somewhat tedious pastoral, The Shepherd's Paradise. This can tell us about the political attitudes of the time, although her conclusions do not get us much further than what Kevin Sharpe suggested twenty years ago in Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I. Whether all interesting literary developments at the time can be linked to Henrietta's court is doubtful. Diana Barnes gives a persuasive analysis of the Secretary of Ladies, but the claim of a 'close parallel' with the court is assumed rather than argued.

Art history is a subject with nuances that elude the mere historian. Jessica Bell argues forcefully that Marie de Medici influenced her daughter's artistic preferences. Marie herself had encouraged Rubens to represent her as a virtual reincarnation of the Virgin. Elizabeth I had of course pre-empted this with the English image of the Virgin Queen and the widespread and long-established cult of the Virgin in Catholic countries made it an obvious parallel for a queen who was represented almost as a deity. That a mother was likely to be influential is hardly surprising, but the identification with the Virgin is fairly conventional. Whether there is any philosophical underpinning to these beliefs remains unclear.

The use of archival research into Henrietta's household accounts may not be cutting edge, but Caroline Hibbard makes an interesting use of them to suggest that the fine arts took second place to decorative arts and costume in the queen's expenditure. She touches on the division of responsibility between king and queen in the running of the court, but might have looked more closely at the queen's degree of independence. She stresses, however, the way in which the luxury trades 'helped to energize the early modern economy' (p. 137), understandably joining the camp that downplays the role of mass production in industrialisation in order to valorise the close examination of unique products. The most pleasurable chapter is that of Gudrun Raatschen who has been allowed to reproduce many of the van Dyck images of Henrietta Maria, and uses them to demonstrate the methods the painter used to produce these familiar portraits, and the purposes for which he used them. She shows that van Dyck stretched her proportions in order to meet an ideal, although he did not modify her features. Erin Griffey's own study of devotional jewellery in Henrietta's portraits gives a further opportunity for reproduction of images, here those by less well-known artists. Griffey makes the argument that, in 1632, Henrietta's image was Protestant in its...