Henrietta Maria: Warrior Queen

The Queen Consort had an evolving relationship with King Charles I. By Leanda de Lisle.

Sixteen warships hunted Henrietta Maria through a stormy north-sea. In February 1643, forty years after Elizabeth I’s Golden Age, England was at war with itself. Charles I was fighting parliament and their navy wanted to capture his queen. The bad weather cloaked her disembarkation on the Yorkshire coast – but Henrietta Maria was not yet safe.

At five a.m parliament’s navy entered Bridlington Bay and fired on the cottage where she slept. ‘ The balls were whistling upon me’, she told Charles. She grabbed her clothes, and dashed with her ladies to the shelter of a ditch, clutching her dog, Mitte. The shot, ‘singing around us in fine style’, killed a sergeant twenty paces away. His body lay ‘torn and mangled with their great shot’ as they lay in the ditch, ‘the balls passing over our heads and sometimes covering us with dust’.  It was two hours before the tide turned and the ships were forced back out to sea.

No other spoilt princess of Europe had to face such dangers. But Henrietta Maria was every inch a daughter of the warrior, Henri IV of France – and not just in courage.  She also ‘had infinite wit and a brilliant mind’ a French courtier recalled. Yet this is not how history remembers her. Henrietta Maria’s reputation is lost in the eye of a storm of sexist tropes.