Why was Henrietta Maria, Charles I’s beautiful wife, so reviled?

On 15 June 1645, as Thomas Fairfax’s soldiers picked over the scattered debris on the Naseby battlefield, they made a sensational discovery. Amid the corpses and musket balls, dismembered limbs and severed swords there nestled a carrying case of personal letters and papers. It was nothing less than the king’s private correspondence. The cache included letters between Charles I and his queen, Henrietta Maria – his always opened ‘My deare harte’ – which discussed in detail the tactics and strategies of the war. Never ones to miss a PR opportunity, the Parliamentary high command ordered that a selection should be published with a guiding commentary. The first editorial note got straight to the point:

It is plain, here, first, that the Kings Counsels are wholly governed by the Queen… Though she be of the weaker sex, borne an alien, bred up in a contrary religion, yet nothing great or small is transacted without her privity and consent.

It was the start of a powerful narrative that cast the French-born queen as the king’s evil adviser.

That she might ever be characterised as a Stuart-era Lady Macbeth would have amazed the bevy of courtiers and hangers-on who had accompanied Henrietta Maria to England on her arrival as the wife of the English king 20 years earlier. Childlike in physique and just 15, she was mignon and looked, according to Leanda Lisle’s sympathetic biography, ‘like a 17th-century Audrey Hepburn’.

Naive and spoilt she might have been, but her lineage was mighty, her names those of her formidable parents, Henri IV of France – the erstwhile Henri of Navarre who had abandoned his Protestant faith to bag the crown of France – and Marie de Medici, the imperious daughter of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Both had lived through the turmoil of religious war in the aftermath of the schism of the Reformation.