Henrietta Maria: Generalissima, Queen Consort and Terror of Parliament

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Following the passing of Queen Elizabeth II, Britain now has a queen-consort for the first time in overseventy years, whose role attracts considerable interest and political controversy. Attitudes towards thequeen-consort are deeply rooted in gendered perceptions about women's authority and right to power aswell as suspicions about the potential sexual influence wielded by a wife over her husband. Historically,queen-consorts have become focal points for public debate, criticism, and social, political and economicunrest. My project will revise our historical understanding of queen-consorts by examining the case studyof Queen Henrietta Maria, wife of King Charles I. My MA thesis, a comparative analysis of Henrietta Mariaand Marie Antoinette, determined that revolutionary ideology and enlightenment philosophy createdincreasingly misogynistic societal expectations for women, impacting on female agency. Exploring theexperiences of Henrietta Maria as queen-consort to an unpopular king, Henrietta Maria played strongpolitical and military roles in the British Civil Wars alongside noble contemporaries like MargaretCavendish and lady Mary Bankes, yet her significance in this respect has often been overlooked.Currently the two main studies on Henrietta Maria focused on a traditional biographical approach, (Bone,1972; Pearce, 2018) but they fail to contextualise Henrietta by placing her into the wider narrative ofearly modern revolution. More general studies, such as that of Hufton on female peasantry, contextualisewomen in the revolutionary period more successfully but usually focus only on the experiences of lowerto middle class people, ignoring the nobility such as Henrietta Maria (Hufton, 1971). My proposed thesiswill address this gap by:Bringing the experiences of Henrietta Maria to the forefront of Civil War historiography.Examining the roles of queen-consorts and the impact of revolutionary ideology on gender7 / 23expectations and women's societal functions.Establishing the political and administrative impact of Henrietta Maria's queenship, her military andpolitical strength throughout the Civil Wars, and determining the extent to which Parliament saw her as alegitimate threat.Evaluating to what extent Henrietta Maria's immense unpopularity was influenced by her roles asqueen-consort and shifts in contemporary gender expectations.To address these research questions, this interdisciplinary project will employ a range of methodologies.The source base consists largely of letters penned by the queen consort and will draw upon theepistolary approach set out by Daybell and Hobby. They have established a convincing framework forutilising the writing patterns, grammar, and format of letters from the period (Daybell, 2010; Hobby,1989). The other written sources; parliamentary papers, pamphlets and treaties, require a moretraditional, qualitative approach combined with a thorough understanding of the idiosyncrasies attachedto each genre. As space and patronage were key elements of Henrietta Maria's courtly display of power,an art/architectural history approach must also be employed. This will involve looking not only at floorplans of the royal palaces in which Henrietta Maria resided (the Louvre and Hampton Court) but also atthe fortifications she utilised in the civil war in order to better understand her role as a general.