Henrietta Maria: Piety, Politics and Patronage, ed. Erin Griffey

Abstract

Erin Griffey's contributors reconsider the practices of Caroline queenship in the three realms of the book's title: religious faith, political and national affiliation, and artistic and cultural patronage. The editor concludes (and it would be hard to disagree) that religious faith was the determining factor behind the interconnected cultural and political activities of Henrietta Maria, Charles I's French Catholic consort, and the collection explores her political and dynastic affiliations, her patronage of theatre, craftsmen, artists and musicians, her self-representation and her religious practice. Building on the work of scholars such as Erica Veevers, Sophie Tomlinson, Karen Britland and Melinda Gough, this collection brings together historians, art historians, and scholars of drama, literature and music in an engaging blend of established and emerging scholars. As a French queen of England, Henrietta Maria's patronage and politics are obvious subjects for investigation from a transnational, European angle. This collection takes such an approach very seriously, with productive results. At the outset of his chapter exploring the Queen's domestic and international religious, familial and courtly alliances, Malcolm Smuts immediately sets the young Henrietta Maria's marriage and her factional negotiations against the context of the Thirty Years War. Essays by Jessica Bell on Marian imagery in the self-representation of Marie de Medici and Henrietta Maria, and by Griffey on the depiction of religious jewellery in the Queen's portraiture, unpick a maternal, religious and politicised thread of influence. Sarah Poynting identifies the writer Walter Montague as a pivotal international intermediary, moving between courts and scripting a theatrical production for his queen. Karen Britland examines the Queen's theatrical patronage and spectatorship, positioning Whitehall productions of Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess and Shakespeare's Richard III in the early 1630s against what she calls ‘a reformatory project’ which presented ‘a new moral standard both for dramatic productions and courtly behaviour’ (p. 64) which emerged from the households of both the King and Queen. Equally though, Britland argues, Henrietta Maria's keen sense of the political nature of such patronage is demonstrated by the support she offered the itinerant French playing company led to London by the actor Floridor in 1634–5 and the Queen's rejection in the same season of a travelling Spanish troupe. The collection concludes with Jonathan P. Wainwright's argument that ‘the most up-to-date Italian music by contemporaries of Monteverdi was performed at the queen's devotions’ (p. 199) at her chapel in Somerset House. In this way, the collection brings to light the European influences of this counter-reformation English queen.