Dress was a powerful means for displaying magnificence at the early modern court. In its intrinsic material value, meticulous craftsmanship and brilliant surface effects, the richly dressed body signalled social status, cultural discernment and gendered virtue, and could be marshalled to political ends.1 Given the low survival rate of garments, historians have traditionally looked to artworks, especially portraits, for evidence about clothing styles. Analysis of documentary sources, including inventories, wardrobe accounts and New Year's gift rolls, have also provided a wealth of evidence about dress and its central role in court display and diplomacy. In the cases of Henry VIII (1491–1547), Elizabeth I (1533–1603) and Anna of Denmark (1574–1619), the accounts have been read alongside the clothing depicted in portraits, with close correlations.2 But for Henrietta Maria (1609–1669), the French queen consort who married Charles I (1600–1649) in 1625 and created a sensation at court — sartorially, politically and confessionally — there has been limited engagement with the archival sources related to her dress after she arrived in England.3Essentially, the discussion of Henrietta Maria's dress at the English court has focused on how it is pictured in Anthony van Dyck's (1599–1641) portraits.4 Emilie Gordenker has argued that Van Dyck depicts Henrietta Maria in ‘English style’ dress rather than more formal French fashions.5 She explains that this ‘typical English costume’ is characterized by a bodice-petticoat combination without a gown.6 The absence of a gown is certainly evident in most of Van Dyck's portraits of the Queen. Indeed, what Gordenker and others have stressed is the relative simplicity of the dress in Van Dyck's English portraits, especially the ones from the late 1630s. Such portraits invoke William Sanderson's (1586–1676) claim in his treatise on painting, Graphice (1658), that Van Dyck was ‘The first Painter that e’re put Ladies dress into a careless Romance’.7 It has not previously been noted that Sanderson was a well-placed source about dress at the Queen's court; his wife, Bridget (d. 1682), whom he married in 1626, was the Queen's long-serving and generously remunerated laundress.8 Notwithstanding scholarly acceptance that Van Dyck generalized elements of dress, the conclusion has been that this is ‘usually firmly based on real costume’.9 Yet there has been very little analysis of the documentary evidence of what Henrietta Maria's actual dress was.Evidence — in the form of boxes of accounts — can be found in the National Archives at Kew relating to the Queen's dress from 1627 to 1639, those ‘halcyon days’ before the outbreak of the English Civil War.10 These accounts complicate the view that Henrietta Maria consistently wore specifically English dress, as they refer to a wide range of garments — including many gowns throughout the 1630s — as well as ensembles described as ‘French’ and ‘Italian’. While these wardrobe accounts have been cited by a small group of scholars, there has been no systematic study of the Queen's dress.11 This article provides the foundation for such a study. Given that the accounts are complex, extensive and cover a lengthy period, the intention is to provide a taste of their richness and significance. After a summary of the accounts, the article examines networks of supply and production, including details of major suppliers and artificers; practical aspects of fitting, mending and delivering clothing; gift-giving; and garment types. The focus is on the textual evidence of the accounts rather than the relationship between the accounts and the pictorial record or surviving garments. (Read more.)
From Atlas Obscura:
Around midday on July 4, 1643, in the countryside just north of Birmingham, Queen Henrietta Maria was in her battle tent. Outside, shells exploded. Musket balls* zoomed past. Anxiously, the Queen of England waited. Taking Burton-Upon-Trent, a strategic town with a river crossing connecting northern and southern England, was her army’s first real challenge. Defeat was not an option. But the fighting had already raged for five hours—how much longer would it take to deliver a victory? Three hours later, the queen got her answer. Her royalist army had finally broken through the town’s defenses. Victory was secured.
Eighteen years earlier, the queen had arrived on English shores as a 15-year-old French bride. And now, at 34, she was a warrior queen. The queen would jokingly call herself “she-majesty generalissima.” Lines from a contemporary poem, its author unknown, portrayed her as not just defeating but unmanning Parliament’s forces, literally: “Tis here a woman leads; but one would swear, the armies did consist of women there.” Her skill garnered wide respect from diplomatic elites; the Venetian ambassador observed, “Without [the queen’s] encouragement and aid the king would never have put himself into a position to resist.” During the English Civil War, Queen Henrietta Maria was, it seems, all that stood between King Charles’s sure defeat at the hands of Parliament. (Read more.)
From Gov.uk:
Considering the lack of detailed history (until more recent works) regarding her involvement in the Civil War, Henrietta Maria was certainly a divisive figure to contemporaries. Even pre-Civil War, Henrietta Maria, being a French Catholic, was not a popular figure in England. However, her unpopularity reached new heights in 1642, as she was now seen as a meddling French Catholic, who had undue influence on the King.
Certainly, Parliamentary propaganda was quick to show her as such. It played particularly on the people's fear of a restoration of Catholicism. This was a constant source of mistrust and suspicion, with Henrietta Maria being accused – throughout the duration of the War- of being involved in a wider 'papist conspiracy'. This was not helped by the Irish rebels in 1641 calling themselves the 'Queen's Army' and claiming to be acting upon Royal orders. By 1644, a Parliamentary pamphlet ‘Great Eclipse of the Sun’ (held at the British Library), saw Parliament still claiming that
‘ …the King was eclipsed by the Queen, and she perswaded him that the Darknesse was Light and that it was better to be a Papist, then a Protestant…’.
Although Charles remained protestant, Henrietta Maria nonetheless sought catholic help in raising troops and money to defend her husband's cause. She turned to her native France for money and Ireland for troops. In a letter unveiled in the King's Cabinet Opened in 1644, Charles wrote to his wife that:
'I give thee power to promise in my name…that I will take away all penal laws against the Roman Catholics in England…I… trust in thee as if thou wert a Protestant…'
Though the extent of her influence over Charles is debateable, Henrietta Maria's own Catholicism was a genuine source of contention between the two sides, causing a greater division than there may have been otherwise. (Read more.)
My novel on Henrietta Maria, HERE.