These two studies offer useful analysis of Henrietta Maria's influence at the court of Charles I. One would expect from the titles of these volumes that Henrietta Maria and the English Civil Wars would have broad appeal, while Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria would be more narrow in focus. In fact, the inverse is true. Michelle Anne White embroiders with more color, care, and depth the narratives surrounding Charles I's queen consort, but the pattern of the tapestry itself is a familiar one. In Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria, Karen Britland offers a persuasive counternarrative to what she terms “the victor's vision” (14) in a nuanced, wide-ranging study that reevaluates Henrietta Maria in ways that political and social historians, literary scholars, and art and performance historians will appreciate.

The English Civil Wars is valuable for its careful research, but ultimately, White's narrative follows the trajectory one has come to expect of biographies of Henrietta Maria. Her project is “to investigate Henrietta Maria's actual and perceived role in the English Civil Wars” (9). She divides this project into two parts: “the reconstruction of ‘actual’ circumstances and realities” and “the reconstruction of perceptions, ideologies, and available knowledge” (6). At the center of her analysis, especially in the final three chapters, is an effort to place Henrietta Maria within the cultural context provided by the English news books of the mid-seventeenth century in order to understand the ways that the queen's actions were represented and appropriated.

White pays detailed attention to a wide range of primary sources, and her discoveries here are a strength of The English Civil Wars. Her archival sources include the manuscripts and letters in the Clarendon and Tanner manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, papers from the House of Lords Records Office, and, in the Public Records Office, the Foreign and Domestic State Papers, Baschet's Transcripts of the French Archives, the Roman Archives, and the Venetian Transcripts. She considers broadsheets, news books, and court records. Her care here will give a frisson of pleasure as she provides evidence she has recovered from petitions, marriage contracts, ambassadorial correspondence, and private papers. In a description of 1644–45 “parliamentary propaganda tactics,” she surveys print reports of Henrietta Maria's fund-raising activities in French nunneries, abbeys, friaries, and monasteries and culls her findings from The Court Mercurie, Mercurius Civicus, A Diary, or Exact Journal, Perfect Occurrences, Perfect Passages of Each Dayes Proceedings in Parliament, and Mercurius Britanicus (155 n. 19). White brings the rich archival detective work of the current generation of historians to a consideration of Henrietta Maria's times, and here she offers a solid contribution to the field.

The challenge of archival work is that it often explodes preconceived notions, but White's analysis suggests that she prefers those notions to the evidence she has uncovered. One could point to numerous examples throughout The English Civil Wars to illustrate this aspect of the text; I offer one here. Chapter 2, “The Influential Queen (1635–1642),” begins with a pair of references. The first is to the Venetian ambassador's observation, in 1636, that Henrietta Maria, in 1636, was “reluctant to interfere in matters of grave consequence, especially those which concern the interests of the state” (30). The second is to an order from Parliament, in 1641, that Charles cease taking advice from the queen in matters of religion (30). White frames her argument for the chapter with this pair of statements: “In six short years, [Henrietta Maria] had gone from expressing no interest in affairs of state to being perceived as having far too much” (30).

In the pages that follow immediately upon this assertion, she documents the ways in which Henrietta Maria, from her betrothal in 1624 through the early years of her marriage, served as an advocate for Catholics in England and viewed herself as Catholicism's Esther—the biblical queen who used her position as one of the wives of the Persian king to intercede on behalf of Persian Jews and prevent their destruction. She then relates details of the queen's successful advocacy for Catholics in 1635–36 and an increasingly Catholicized court—one that in 1636 allowed the temporary papal nuncio to gain permanent status and completed construction of a Catholic chapel at court. All of this information combines to provide a picture of someone actively engaged in English religious politics. While White considers new sources, her analysis falters—she knows how the story ends, so the narrative she constructs builds toward that closure, even though her research offers a different picture, one of a queen charged by the pope in 1624 to serve as Catholicism's intercessor and doing just that.

In Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria, Britland offers a thorough examination of English and French archives. Like White, she works against notions of Henrietta Maria as ineffectual and uninvolved in court politics, but this assessment is more wide ranging, in part because Britland moves between diplomatic and political sources, literary texts, and performance traditions and handles these varied sources with an adept knowledge of literary, political, and social history of the period. Sample chapter titles give a general sense of her project: “Sex and Dancing: Henrietta Maria's Wedding Ballets,” “Artenice: A New French Fashion at the English Court,” “Family Affairs: Henrietta Maria and Continental Politics in 1631,” “Marie de Médicis and the Last Masque,” and “‘Tyer’d, in her Banish’d dress’: Henrietta Maria in Exile.” While Britland centers her discussion upon the plays and masques, she considers the networks of influence in which the plays themselves worked, understands the generic conventions of performance as well as of literary composition, and calls upon iconic traditions in art as well as literature.

Britland probes the importance of Henrietta Maria's relationships with many members of English court circles and also with French court circles and her French family, especially her brother Louis XIII and her mother, Marie de Médicis. She argues: “As the daughter of a French queen regent and the wife and sister of monarchs, Henrietta Maria had an important role to play in both European culture and politics” (13). Britland uses performance records to evaluate the ways in which Henrietta Maria appropriated iconography and performed roles that carried religious and political implications for audiences in France and in England. Britland further asserts that in the early 1630s, “Henrietta Maria's court entertainments shadowed continental current affairs” and evaluates the ways that she was involved in “an international plot that sought to overthrow the chief ministers of both France and England” (14). She also evaluates Henrietta Maria's role as mediator between Marie de Médicis and Cardinal Richelieu.

Throughout the volume, most prominently in chapter 5, “Tempe Restored: Exile/Dispossession/Restitution,” Britland considers the importance of female voice. She reads the Tempe Restored “as production that had to negotiate a tricky political moment” in 1632 and suggests “its femino-centrism is linked more with the queen's religion than anything else” (91). Here, as elsewhere, Britland's work is indicative of some of the ways that studies of early modern women's lives and works have matured over the last twenty-five years. The fact that these two studies of Henrietta Maria emerged within such a short space of time reveals the growth of the field in ways that are quite heartening. Especially wonderful, though, is the treasure trove Britland offers here. It is a model interdisciplinary study, and its careful archival work, especially in continental archives, provides resources for much future work.