Henrietta Maria, Charles I’s queen, is the most reviled consort to have worn the crown of Britain’s three kingdoms.
Condemned as that ‘Popish brat of France’, a ‘notorious whore’ and traitor, she remains in popular memory the wife who wore the breeches and turned her husband Catholic – so causing a civil war – and a cruel and bigoted mother.
Leanda de Lisle’s White King was hailed as “the definitive modern biography about Charles I” (Observer).
Here she considers Henrietta Maria’s point of view, unpicking the myths to reveal a very different queen. We meet a new bride who enjoyed annoying her uptight husband, a leader of fashion in clothes and cultural matters, an innovative builder and gardener and an advocate of the female voice in public affairs.
Her closest friends included Puritans as well as Catholics, and she led the anti-Spanish faction at court linked to the Protestant cause in the Thirty Years’ War. When civil war came, the strategic planning and fundraising of his ‘She Generalissimo’ proved crucial to Charles’s campaign.
The story takes us to courts across Europe, and looks at the fate of Henrietta Maria’s mother and sisters, who also faced civil wars.
Her estrangement from her son Henry is explained, and the image of the Restoration queen as an irrelevant crone is replaced with Henrietta Maria as an influential ‘phoenix queen’, presiding over a court with ‘more mirth’ even than that of the Merry Monarch, Charles II.
Henrietta Maria by Leanda de Lisle is published on 4 August, 2022.
Read Leanda’s portrait of the queen in Henrietta Maria: queen, warrior, politician, woman.
Frances Quinn has also written about her in Henrietta Maria, a forgotten queen?
And Leanda retells the events of Charles I’s last day in Killing a king: the execution of Charles I.
White King won the 2018 HWA Non-fiction Crown Award. Read our winner’s interview with Leanda de Lisle.
