Melanie Clegg - The Life of Henrietta Anne: Daughter of Charles I

Daughter of Charles I

Melanie Clegg

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by

Pen & Sword History

an imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

47 Church Street

Barnsley

South Yorkshire

S70 2AS

Copyright Melanie Clegg 2017

ISBN 978 1 47389 311 5

eISBN 978 1 47389 313 9

Mobi ISBN 978 1 47389 312 2

The right of Melanie Clegg to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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T his book has been a true labour of love for me and I hope that it will be as much of a treat to read as it has been to research and write. Henrietta Anne Stuart, youngest daughter of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, was reputedly one of the most charming, charismatic and bewitchingly delightful women of her time, adored by (almost) all who knew her and deeply respected not just for her sweet nature and gift for friendship but also for her keen intelligence and formidable political acumen. Even though nearly three hundred and fifty years have passed since her death in 1670, she still continues to enchant and fascinate historians and writers today as much as she delighted her contemporaries and it has been a rare pleasure to become better acquainted with her over the past twelve months.

Although writing is an essentially solitary business, I couldnt have completed this book without the seemingly endless support and encouragement of my blogs readers as well as my amazing friends, who have had to endure more than their fair share of cancelled plans, drunken rantings and self-pitying Facebook posts as the books deadline rapidly approached. They have all been wonderful and I thank them from the bottom of my heart. I also promise not to make as much of a fuss when the next deadline begins to loom.

As always, writing a book is a group effort and Id really like to thank Kate Bohdanowicz for her sterling work at the very start of this project, Lauren Burton of Pen and Sword Books for all of her help, encouragement and kindness when personal calamity made finishing the book rather more of an uphill task than it needed to be and Carol Trow for making the often hideous editing process much less painless than usual and for being the very first person to read the finished article. I just hope that everyone else who reads it agrees with your assessment! Id also really like to thank the wonderful Desmond Shawe-Taylor and Karen Lawson of the Royal Collection for granting me permission to use the illustrations in this book. I am so very grateful to you all.

Above all though, I would like to thank the very lovely Simon Hayden, to whom this book is dedicated, for being the most excellent, accommodating, helpful and uncomplaining companion that any writer could ever wish to have and for all the endless and usually sadly forgotten and untouched cups of tea that he provided while I was working on this book.

16251643

Seventeenth century visitors fortunate enough to be admitted to the magnificent state apartments of Whitehall Palace would have been hard pressed not to stop and admire, if only for a few minutes, the huge portrait of King Charles I, his French wife Henrietta Maria and their two eldest children, Charles, Prince of Wales and Mary, Princess Royal that hung in one of the vast reception rooms. This spectacular work, known as The Greate Peece, was the first portrait commissioned from Anthony van Dyck after he accepted the position of Royal Painter in 1632 and it remains one of the finest examples of his virtuoso talent. The thirty-two-year-old King Charles, dressed in his court finery and with the blue Order of the Garter ribbon around his neck looks sternly, even reprovingly, at the viewer, while his young wife, dressed in an amazing confection of buttercup yellow satin trimmed with blue silk ribbon bows and the finest lace, gazes lovingly across at him, their infant daughter in her arms. Their eldest son, Charles, who was just two years old and still dressed in skirts, stands proudly at his fathers knee, anxiously playing with his own fingers as he solemnly scrutinises anyone impertinent enough to stop and stare, while at his feet one of the royal pet spaniels gambols and makes a bid for attention. Its a charming depiction of a happy family, albeit one surrounded by the trappings of majesty but although one immediately knows that one is in the presence of royalty, as the state crown, sceptre and orb sitting ignored at the Kings elbow confirm, there is no stately otherness on display here but rather affection, trust and familial warmth of a nature never before seen in royal portraiture.

However, all was clearly not well in the world of Van Dycks painting, as evidenced by the overcast and bleak sky behind the royal family. In the distance, the viewer can just make out the shadowy towers of Parliament House and Westminster Hall looming over the Thames while overhead, the storm threatens to break. This dismal background gives the painting, which would otherwise be a riot of rich colours and sensuously detailed fabrics, an air of foreboding, which of course seems all the more poignant today when we know that just seventeen years after posing for Van Dyck, King Charles would stand trial for his life in Westminster Hall while the family that he was so proud of would find themselves scattered all across Europe, lost to him forever. In 1632 though, when the painting was first commissioned, no one could ever possibly have imagined just how this most happy of royal marriages would eventually end, although the seeds of rebellion had already quietly been sown as early as 1629 when Charles peremptorily dissolved his parliament and imprisoned several members for questioning his policies. He then began to rule without parliamentary interference, a period known variously as the Personal Rule or the Eleven Years Tyranny depending on your loyalties, causing a deep rift between himself and his political opponents, who became increasingly and then overwhelmingly numerous over the next decade.

Although the royal couple were now a picture of marital felicity, things had not always gone so smoothly between them they had heartily disliked each other for the first few years of their marriage, their quarrels exacerbated by Charles devotion to his Master of the Horse, the Duke of Buckingham and Henrietta Marias insistence upon publicly participating in Roman Catholic rites and her refusal to participate in the Protestant ceremony of Charles coronation or part with the French household that had accompanied her from Paris. Although he was nine years older than his impetuous and hot headed little wife, who was just fifteen when they married in 1625, Charles behaved with just as much immaturity, allowing himself to be drawn into childish quarrels on an almost daily basis and behaving with excessive severity, particularly in the matter of the French household, because he lacked the emotional maturity or wisdom to negotiate with her as a more experienced and confident man might have done. Driven to despair, Henrietta Maria wrote to her brother Louis XIII and mother Marie de Medici, begging them to let her return home to France but to no avail her presence in England was necessary to maintain at least the appearance of an Anglo-French alliance even if her husbands favourite, Buckingham, threatened this delicate status quo with his support of the Huguenots at La Rochelle in 1627.