Harlots with Golden Tresses

 

This is a wonderful book, with Charles I’s queen as its focal point. In this respect it is quite a feminist take on a turbulent period in British history, the civil war seen from Henrietta Maria’s perspective. The book is also a treasure house of the arcane and a reminder that even the most powerful women of the time paid a price for their position—giving birth being a prime example.

Of course, the rich enjoyed some perks in that respect. You could for example pay for a freshly flayed skin of a black goat to wrap yourself in and thus slow down post-partum bleeding. And if you were a queen you enjoyed a state bed of red velvet embroidered with gold in a grand pavilion—the birthing room then had to be quite large to hold that, a separate ‘bed of travail’ for the actual labour and the ‘chair of travail’ for the pushing out. It also had to be large enough to hold all the courtiers ushered in to see the newborn child. I’m sure there’s a Reality TV programme in there somewhere.

On the 22^nd September 1601, Marie de Medici sat in her ‘chair of travail’ with a small audience to witness the state event. She sought to maintain her dignity by remaining silent during the painful event whilst her husband Henry IV begged her to scream for fear her throat would swell and then burst. “When the child was born, Marie fainted and she was still lying on the floor when the proud father ushered in 200 courtiers to celebrate. ‘Don’t be angry,’ Henry told the horrified midwife: ‘This child belongs to everyone.’"

The child who belonged to everyone was the future Louis XIII who, at just two days old, had small incisions made into his mouth because his sucking reflex was deemed insufficiently strong – in the opinion of royal doctors. It left the future king with a lolling tongue and a stammer.

 Henrietta Maria was the last of the royal children. Born in November 1609, she never knew her father who was assassinated just six months later. His assassin was suitably punished.

 “The execution took place on 27 May in the Place de Greve where Ravaillac was tortured again before being slowly torn apart by horses. Even this did not satisfy the crowd. The remnants of flesh and bone were stamped on by the Parisians, stabbed at and eaten, then a bonfire was lit beneath Marie’s window to burn the scraps.”

The proxy wedding between fifteen-year-old Henrietta and twenty-four-year-old Charles had a bumpy start. The naïve Henrietta with orders from the Church to aid the cause of Catholicism, found herself in a violently anti papist country and was subjected to the insolence and sly manoeuvres of Charles’ best friend, the powerful Duke of Buckingham. Despite all this the marriage flourished even as the country floundered into Civil War. 

The hatred and bigotry of the time is masterfully described, two particular examples coming to mind.

Henry Marten, no puritan but a ‘great lover of pretty girls’ had a personal axe to grind against the king who had called him a ‘whore master.’ His companion, Sir John Clotworthy, was a violent Presbyterian, on one occasion murdering a hundred Irish prisoners in cold blood.

 

In 1643, with differing motives and accompanied by soldiers, they now set out to destroy Henrietta Maria’s private chapel in Somerset House. 

Clotworthy took particular offence at a Rubens crucifix in a gilt frame. Grabbing a halberd, ‘he struck Christ’s face in contempt with such offensive words it would be shocking to repeat them,’ (A French witness) He next attacked the Virgin Mary’s face, then directed his fury on the crucified Christ, ripping the painting to shreds. Next an enormous ceiling painting of the Assumption was destroyed. The vandalism was mirrored across London and later the country. 

The altarpiece in Henry VII’s chapel in Westminster Abbey was similarly smashed, including a carving of the dead Christ designed by one of Michelangelo’s pupils. It was, in the words of the grieving Venetian ambassador: ‘one of the finest ornamentations of this city, admired by all foreigners for its antiquity and the perfection of the beautiful marble carvings.’ The vandalism of the self-righteous is a recurring theme throughout history.

The book, too, is a useful corrective to films such as Cromwell, which show him and his ‘Ironsides’ as essentially heroic. Seen from Henrietta’s eyes, reality has a different slant. A case in point, rarely mentioned in popular histories, is the fate of the Royalist ‘camp followers’ after the King’s defeat at Naseby. Cromwell’s cavalry slaughtered and mutilated these women. Four hundred or more were killed, others had their noses and mouths slit, marking them forever with the ‘whore’s mask’. The atrocity was celebrated in the Parliamentary press as just desserts for these popish ‘harlots with golden tresses.’

And yet Henrietta Maria survived, fighting heroically against all the odds for her husband and then her children after Charles was beheaded. Following the Restoration, when her eldest son became Charles II, Henrietta returned to the country she had come to love. It’s not surprising perhaps her appearance had changed. Samuel Pepys described her as ‘a very little plain old woman and nothing more in her presences or garb than any ordinary woman.’ She was though extra-ordinary.