Tea at Trianon: Queen Henrietta Maria As Saint Catherine of Alexandria

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, November 25, 2023

Queen Henrietta Maria As Saint Catherine of Alexandria

Henrietta Maria as St. Catherine by Van Dyck

It is St. Catherine's Day, the birthday of Henrietta of France, Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland, in 1609. It is the first time I have heard her hair described as "reddish-blonde." From Academia:

Another example is the painting of Queen Henrietta Maria, the French wife of the English King Charles I, by Sir Anthony Van Dyck (Figure 20). A Catholic queen who attempted to convert her Protestant husband, she is portrayed by Van Dyck as St. Catherine. She wears a simple, but elegant red dress and a green overcoat, pearls and crown on top of her reddish-blonde curls. To solidify the imagery, she holds the wheel of torture. This portrait is an outlier from the rest of the paintings surveyed for this paper (it was painted in 1639), but it illuminates the interesting notion that the royalty themselves desire to be seen with this parallel to a saint. Queen Henrietta Maria herself probably wanted to be portrayed as St. Catherine because the image it would evoke concerning herself and her beliefs would beneﬁt her personal goals. (Read more.)