HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2023-10-16T11:57:05.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: “Henrietta Maria has been looked at far too much through the male gaze – it’s time for another perspective”
items: Henrietta Maria: Charles I’s warrior queen
items: Your guide to King Charles I, the deposed monarch who lost his head
items: Why Charles I had to die

“Henrietta Maria has been looked at far too much through the male gaze – it’s time for another perspective”
type: item
date: 2022-08-10T09:05:03.000Z
creator: Leanda de Lisle
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Stuart
subject: Historical people
description: Leanda de Lisle speaks to Emily Briffett about her new study of Charles I’s reviled queen Henrietta Maria – and reveals why she doesn’t deserve her rotten reputation
encoded: Your book tells the fascinating story of Henrietta Maria, challenging the myths surrounding her life. To begin with, can you please introduce her to us? Henrietta Maria was a Bourbon princess. She was the daughter of King Henry IV (“the Great”), a warrior king assassinated by a Catholic fanatic when she was just a baby. Her mother, Marie de Medici, ruled France as regent for many years. At the age of 15, Henrietta Maria married Charles I of England, Scotland and Ireland, later becoming the mother of Charles II and James II. Read more | Who were the Medici? An important aspect of Henrietta Maria to address is her legacy. How has the Stuart queen been seen through history? She is probably the most reviled consort to have ever worn the crown of the three kingdoms, but she was ultimately a victim of parliamentary propaganda of the period. In her lifetime she was described as the “popish brat of France” and a whore, and was said to have worn the britches in her marriage. Ever since, she’s been perceived as the original “bad woman”: Eve, the corrupter who seduced her husband into evil. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/08/GettyImages-1216141326webready-2fd4c10.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Portrait of Queen Henrietta Maria of France (1609-1669) queen consort of England, Scotland, and Ireland as the wife of King Charles I" title="Portrait of Queen Henrietta Maria of France (1609-1669) queen consort of England, Scotland, and Ireland as the wife of King Charles I (Photo by Photo 12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)" /> How did she come to be so hated? As the old adage goes, history is written by the victors – those who overthrew the house of Stuart in 1688. A myth then grew up that English Protestantism played a pivotal role in the creation of our democracy, and indeed our sense of nationhood. Therefore, being a Catholic, Henrietta Maria was associated with Charles’s authoritarianism and is wrongly assumed to have been, in …

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Henrietta Maria: Charles I’s warrior queen
type: item
date: 2021-08-17T05:05:00.000Z
creator: Leanda de Lisle
subject: Membership
subject: Stuart
subject: Period
subject: British queens
description: During her years as queen of England, Scotland and Ireland, Henrietta Maria attracted vicious Puritan abuse – and occasional volleys of cannon fire. Based on new archival research, Leanda de Lisle profiles a queen who sacrificed her reputation – and, very nearly, her life – fighting her husband’s cause in the Civil War
encoded: Sixteen warships hunted Henrietta Maria through a stormy North Sea. In February 1643, 40 years after Elizabeth I’s golden age, England was at war with itself. Charles I was fighting the forces of parliament and their navy wanted to capture his queen as she returned to England from a diplomatic mission in Holland. The bad weather cloaked her disembarkment on the Yorkshire coast – but Henrietta Maria was not yet safe. At 5am, parliament’s navy entered Bridlington Bay and fired on the cottage where Henrietta slept. “The balls were whistling upon me,” she told Charles. She grabbed her clothes, and dashed with her ladies to the shelter of a ditch, clutching her dog, Mitte. The shot, “singing around us in fine style”, killed a sergeant 20 paces away. His body lay “torn and mangled with their great shot” as they lay in the ditch, “the balls passing over our heads and sometimes covering us with dust”. It was two hours before the tide turned and parliament’s ships were forced back out to sea. No other princess of Europe had to face such dangers. But Henrietta Maria was every inch a daughter of the warrior, Henri IV of France – and not just in courage. She also “had infinite wit and a brilliant mind”, a French courtier recalled. Yet this is not how history remembers her. Henrietta Maria’s reputation is lost in the eye of a storm of sexist tropes. In the 17th century, women were judged creatures of emotion, not reason, and it often seems Henrietta Maria has never been allowed to grow up from her childhood to the mature political operator she became. But the voice of a very different character emerges in never before published letters, previously hidden in the closed archives of Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire and quoted here for the first time. It is the voice of a living woman, as she grows from a distressed child bride to a warrior queen. Child of the enemy When Henrietta Maria arrived in England in 1625 she was the first French princess to marry an English king since Marga…

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Your guide to King Charles I, the deposed monarch who lost his head
type: item
date: 2021-08-12T06:06:42.000Z
creator: Leanda de Lisle
subject: Period
subject: Stuart
description: What was Charles I like as king? How did his actions contribute to Civil War? And why was he executed? Leanda de Lisle answers key questions on the Stuart monarch, who was brutally deposed and later charged as a public enemy…
encoded: The future Charles I was born in Scotland on 19 November 1600 to King James VI of Scotland and Anne of Denmark. It was a day of Gothic horror and royal triumph, beginning with the decomposing bodies of two Scottish noblemen being gibbeted and quartered at the Market Cross in Edinburgh. The two bodies in question belonged to two noble brothers – 22-year-old John Ruthven, 3rd Earl of Gowrie, and his 20-year-old brother, Alexander – who had been killed during what James believed was a kidnap attempt against him made in league with ‘fiery’ ministers of the Scottish kirk (or ‘church’). They had feared (with reason) that James was poised to impose Crown-appointed bishops over the kirk’s Calvinist councils – known as presbyteries –which would place them under tight royal control. As the second surviving son of James VI (and I of England, from 1603), Charles did not become heir apparent until the death of his elder brother Henry in 1612. The heads of the Ruthven brothers would still be on view in Edinburgh when Charles became king aged 24, on 27 March 1625. This clash between Calvinism and the king’s belief in his right to rule Church and state would come to dominate Charles’s reign. Charles I: key dates and facts Born: 19 November 1600, Fife, Scotland Died: Age 48, 13 January 1649, Whitehall, London, England Parents: Charles was the second surviving son of King James VI of Scotland and I of England, and Anne of Denmark Spouse: Henrietta Maria, sister of the French king, Louis XIII Known for: King of England, Scotland and Ireland from 1625–49, Charles I is remembered for his belief in the divine right of kings (the idea that a monarch’s authority is bestowed by God). His clash with parliament resulted in the Civil Wars, the conflict between Royalists and Parliamentarians that wracked the British Isles in the middle of the 17th century. Found guilty of treason by parliament, Charles I was executed by beheading in 1649. His rule was followed the Protectorate, during which Oli…

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Why Charles I had to die
type: item
date: 2021-01-30T07:05:00.000Z
creator: Leanda de Lisle
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Stuart
subject: Death
description: When Charles I was put on trial in January 1649, ordering his execution was unthinkable for many of his enemies. Yet, within a matter of days, those same enemies had sent him to the scaffold. Leanda de Lisle chronicles the brinkmanship, the bloodletting and the plots that persuaded parliament that it had no choice but to kill a king
encoded: The Painted Chamber in the Palace of Westminster was a wonder of the 13th century. But the faded images were now obscured by tapestries; the medieval world barely intruded into the new on 8 January 1649, when men in military buff coats or plain Puritan suits sat at trestle tables and debated the fate of their king. Two days earlier a high court had been established that would for the first time try a king of England. Six years into a series of civil wars between forces loyal to the king and their parliamentary enemies, this was justified on the practical grounds of preventing Charles I from raising further “commotions, rebellions and invasions”. It was also a matter of principle: that the king should have no impunity from the law. The 135 judges who had been appointed by the House of Commons were mostly army officers and radical MPs. Fifty-three attended this meeting, including the leading parliamentarian general Thomas Fairfax and his subordinate Oliver Cromwell. Charles was to be charged with having “a wicked design totally to subvert the ancient and fundamental laws and liberties of this nation, and, in their place, to introduce an arbitrary and tyrannical government”: crimes, it was declared, that deserved “exemplary and condign punishment” – in other words, death. There was no certainty of outcome. Executing the king risked provoking foreign reprisals, or a popular rising. On the other hand, if Charles accepted the legality of the tribunal, he would be accepting that he had no veto over the Commons’ decisions. He could be returned to the throne subject to parliament, “a sword always over his head… [and]… grown grey in the documents of misfortune”. Yet, as Cromwell reportedly warned, if the king refused to plead, then, in order to confirm the supreme power of the Commons, they would have to “cut off his head with the crown on it”. The wrong Protestant How had it come to this? The answer can be traced back to the 1550s when Britain had two Catholic queens. To jus…

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