Until the past twenty-odd years, Queen Henrietta Maria's cultural, political, and religious contributions have been largely ignored or denigrated. With nine essays by new and established scholars in the fields of history, art history, literature, and musicology, Erin Griffey's anthology builds on recent work that challenges such prejudices, expanding and sharpening our understanding of this queen's aesthetic, political, and even economic impact from her 1625 arrival in England on.
Griffey's short introduction makes a strong case for what can be gained by reconsidering Henrietta Maria from the disciplinary perspectives of art history and musicology in particular. Recent essay collections focusing on women in early modern English culture, including Henrietta Maria, typically privilege literature and drama, while art historians have tended to subsume Henrietta's patronage of visual art under that of her husband Charles I, whose fine taste is widely acknowledged. A closer study of extant records and correspondence, however, indicates that Henrietta's involvement in the visual arts was indeed active and direct.
The book's first four chapters jointly urge the interconnected nature of personal relationships and court politics—what in another context David Starkey has termed the “politics of intimacy”—and link literature with both (David Starkey, The English Court: From the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War [London, 1987], and “Representation through Intimacy,” in Symbols and Sentiments: Cross-Cultural Studies in Symbolism, ed. Ioan Lewis [London, 1977], 187–224). Diana Barnes argues that the 1638 English translation of Jacques du Bosque's letter collection The Secretary of Ladies deploys the cult of intimate friendship to model for English (female) readers not only the art of rhetoric—itself a political tool—but also a sovereign community of women united by specifically Catholic devotion. Malcolm Smuts, by contrast, emphasizes the range of confessional communities with which the queen made alliances. Extending earlier work on Henrietta Maria's “Puritan faction”—most notably Smuts's own seminal 1978 article (“The Puritan Followers of Henrietta Maria in the 1630s,” English Historical Review 93, no. 366 [1978]: 26–45)—this essay helps clarify her early rivalry with the Duke of Buckingham, the networks she subsequently brokered with Protestant magnates, and her pro-Spanish leanings from 1639 to 1641. Ultimately, Smuts claims, the divisive role that Henrietta Maria played in English politics resulted less from antipopery and her own commitment to Catholicism and more from the eventual disintegration of alliances that earlier had mediated across religious divides. By way of this argument, Smuts also defends the literary culture associated with this queen: seemingly artificial and decadent, its tropes of love and service provided a necessary language through which her informal yet highly politicized social networks might operate. Sarah Poynting's essay traces in significant detail both Henrietta Maria's personal relationship with Walter Montagu and the intersecting themes of royalty, governance, and women's moral power found in Montagu's privately performed 1633 pastoral for the queen, The Shepherds’ Paradise. Focusing on Henrietta Maria's engagement with professional theater in the two following years, Karen Britland argues that Henrietta Maria and Charles jointly fostered efforts to reform English drama through complementary patronage of professional troupes and that the queen's interest in professional drama during this period was also potentially useful to the French government.
The book's remaining five chapters more radically widen the lens through which the queen is studied, by focusing on her activities as a patron of music and art. Jessica Bell explores the influence of Marie de Medici's art patronage on her youngest daughter, analyzing the personal iconography of both women as seen in their portraits as well as the religious paintings Henrietta acquired and the private chapel she had built. The queen's chapel is also important to Jonathan Wainwright, who provisionally posits its musical repertoire and argues that cutting-edge developments from Italy, most notably stil nuovo, made their way to England, in part, through Henrietta Maria's musical establishment. If Wainwright is correct, his conclusions further support the notion that Marie de Medici proved an extremely important influence on her daughter, not just politically but also aesthetically. Three additional chapters engage Henrietta's activities as patron of the fine and decorative arts, including paintings, portraits, textiles, clothing, furniture, and jewelry. In an important essay, Caroline Hibbard presents impressively detailed research on the queen's financial records to conclude that the king's fine taste in luxury goods was in fact matched by that of the queen; that royal demand for luxury goods, including the queen's extravagant expenditures on textiles, jewels, and other materials for ephemeral entertainments, constituted a form of ad hoc patronage that helped drive London's luxury trade and the early modern economy more broadly; that attention to the queen's court reveals women entrepreneurs among the artisans and artists who provided for the court's “magnificence”; and that the economic advantage that accrued to such artisans and artists may help to explain in part the (otherwise puzzling) persistence of courtly display throughout this period. Reading Anthony van Dyck's state portraits in which the queen appears, most notably his double portrait of the king and the queen, Gudrun Raatschen concludes that Henrietta Maria's part in commissioning such paintings was likely greater than has been suggested. The collection's final essay, by Griffey, considers a range of painted, engraved, and stained glass original and copied portraits from just after Henrietta Maria's arrival in England through the late 1630s. Focusing on devotional jewelry and its absence, Griffey presents a queen capable of marshalling not only conspicuous consumption (jewelry acquisition and display) but also the fine arts (portraiture) for particular religious and political purposes.
As a whole, this volume insists on women's agency in international and domestic court politics. Ultimately, it seeks to expand the frame through which we study not only this particular queen but also other elite women of the early modern period.
