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

Tuesday, November 25, 2025

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.)

More on St. Catherine, HERE.

Here is a recent review of Generalissima:

The book is a delight to read. Very detailed but constantly moving, just as Henriette-Marie was throughout the 1640s when her husband's monarchy was under attack by a number of separate Protestant factions in his Three Kingdoms (and she was hunted and exposed to shots fired by the Puritan Enemies numerous times). This may sound trite but I could hardly put the book down. Henriette-Marie (known in the US as "Mary" because that was what HER eponymous state of Maryland is called (long story), fille de France and Queen/Queen Dowager/Queen Mother of England, France and Scotland, shows the gumption, resolve and faithfulness one would expect of a child of King Henri IV, le Vert Galant de France, and his wife, Queen Marie de Medici, from the ducal/papal Medici Family. The author's careful depiction of the hatred the Puritans felt and acted on in their quest to destroy Henriette-Marie was riveting. Her conduct as the commander of troops and supplies on her way back to her husband from her trip the Netherlands to drop off her daughter Mary to the "tender care" of her rigidly Protestant husband's family was new knowledge for me and added a new dimension to my respect for Henriette-Marie.

Another delightful dimension to this historical novel is the portrait drawn of French Queen Marie de Medici. Mme. de Medici has had a rough after-life down here on Earth. The French Revolutionaries not only dragged her body out of the Basilica of St. Denis (along with the skeletons of several other kings and queens of France) but they horridly desecrated it back in the 1790s. That was only the start of her vilification. Since the Revolution, the Queen Mother Marie de Medicis has been painted in hateful colors, most notably in the 19th Century Three Musketeers, where she is as just as bad as Cardinal Richelieu while the more plebeian musketeers are the only good side in a three dimensional war in 1620s Paris. There clearly were struggles going on among those 3 factions, but they involve a very complicated set of interests, too big for this review, but I have always had an admiration for Marie de Medicis since first viewing the magnificent SALLE RUBENS at the West End of the Louvre's Grand Galerie. There is no question that Marie de Medicis had a big ego--imagine commissioning Peter Paul Rubens, one of the great painters of his day and of all time, to paint 21 separate paintings detailing one's own life--but the Vidal portrait of Mama Marie (who is present in England throughout a good deal of the first half of this book) also reveals a backbone of steel and a fierce love for her progeny. Rubens clearly cared for his subject because his family provided shelter for her after her exile from the French court due to Richelieu's better political skills. (Read more.)

My novels on Queen Henriette Maria are available, HERE and HERE.