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Unlike her predecessor, the apathetic Anne of Denmark.
Henrietta Maria was a much more capable and spirited lady.
England had not seen anything of her type for 200 years
when Margaret of Anjou had become the French Queen
of the kingdom with her husband Henry VI.
In a game of baseball, after three strikes, you'd be out.
With Henrietta, she already had two against her, one
for being French and the second for her Catholic leaning.
So could Henrietta now stay in the game?
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Henrietta was classed as an afterthought
for the current King's wife
when his initial plan was to marry
the Spanish Infanta, but Spain rejected that request.
The duke of Buckingham, George Villiers, was the man behind the negotiations.
He had strived to get this one over the line after his disastrous attempts in Spain.
It came down to Louis XIII, the excessively refined King,
to determine what would be suitable for his sister.
Henrietta had no choice in the matter, and she was shipped off
to England to meet her new spouse, the new King, Charles I.
The couple were married at Canterbury, with all the usual splendour characterising these events.
Henrietta was 16 at the time, Charles 23.
However, it's said, at first sight, the couple were not impressed by what they saw.
Although Henrietta was small, she still towered over her husband,
who was embarrassed by his diminutive height of just 4' 10".
He could do little about this, but to increase his overall height,
Charles would often be seen wearing tall hats and high heeled shoes.
Charles was considered the least intelligent of his family
after being compared to his brother Henry and his sister Elizabeth.
He had, like his father grew up with a stammer, he was a nervous child,
but as King would hide his feelings with a bold outlook yet remained distant to people
when the mood took him, neither of these traits endeared him to the queen.
Over time Charles would find out the lady he had married was a solid and spirited soul.
She was not what Charles expected, and he wouldn't have called her promising wife material.
Henrietta overlooked Charles daily, refusing to learn English but would continue
to chat amongst her french maids while ignoring everyone else at court.
When the couple married, it was guaranteed that Henrietta could
continue her Catholic practices, but this turned sour
when she was often found hounding and mocking the protestant Anglicans.
Could things get worse?
The King's coronation was again an absurd event; Henrietta refused to attend.
Instead, she had a large party at her house.
Charles was clearly upset, this marriage was not working,
and he had to find a resolution to this now ongoing problem.
Charles decided that he needed to rid himself of her French entourage.
He asked Louis if he would accept this in the summer of 1626.
Louis, who had done the same to his own wife's ladies, could hardly refuse the offer.
But Henrietta screamed when the royal guard took her to a room in St.
James Palace, where they would lock her in until all her ladies had been removed.
Only to be replaced by English ladies.
One of which was the unscrupulous Lucy Hay, Countess of Carlisle,
mistress to the Duke of Buckingham.
The Countess was also a powerful woman,
she had a wicked sense of humour, and before long, Henrietta became great friends with her.
Charles despaired that these two had become so close.
He knew what the Countess was like, and if nothing else, his wife
was being now being dragged down a road, she would struggle to come back along.
Then more bad news was to follow with the assassination of Buckingham
by a man called Felton; he had been returning from France after yet
another unsuccessful campaign in his long line of failures.
Although Charles was not like his father in that he had male favourites, Buckingham had become
a dependable man with a ruthless streak, something the King used to his detriment.
Now utterly alone in the world for the first time, Charles turned to his wife, Henrietta.
It would spark something never before seen in the marriage, LOVE.
Between 1629 and 1644, Henrietta
would produce nine children by Charles.
Maybe miracles do happen!
It was the start of a very long love affair; at last, the couple saw eye to eye,
and joy had returned to the court after a long and miserable existence to this point.
Storm clouds would once again start to gather, and it was Henrietta
who had inadvertently created this down swing in fortunes.
You see, Henrietta was also a firm believer in the divine right,
something all monarchs of the period had been taught.
But Charles, like his father, never fully grasped power,
and made enemies at parliament, and although he tolerated Catholics,
he would persecute protestants to the point they left the country.
England was now becoming seriously threatened by its own rule,
and civil war was on the tip of everyone's tongue.
It would be Scotland who was first to throw a stone.
Charles had attempted
to impose the Anglican church over his Calvinist subjects north of the border.
Scotland refuted the claim, and war looked imminent,
but Charles had no money to fight and so recalled parliament.
But his parliament had already had enough of his sweeping changes.
The best thing for them was to remove the King and his wife.
England would soon be divided by the royalists who wanted to retain the crown
and keep the King and the roundheads who wished to be rid of Charles for good.
Henrietta quickly realised the potential threat now coming to her family;
she took action, and the high spirited queen was now going all guns blazing.
She appealed to the pope and her brother, although he wasn't much use.
In a panic, Henrietta took the crown jewels to Holland to pawn and raise money for the fight
Upon her return, she somehow managed to sneak back into the country
before meeting up with Charles at his new HQ now in Oxford.
On one occasion, Henrietta took to the battlefield to encourage her royalist troops.
But by 1644, she had fallen pregnant again,
and Charles showing much concern, wanted her moved to safety.
The royalist stronghold of Exeter in devon would be where she now resided.
But the roundhead General Thomas Fairfax slowly overcame
the royalist stronghold and made significant inroads.
It would be in July that Fairfax captured the area along with Henrietta.
She had given birth but was still recovering when the general called.
She was taken to Falmouth onto a waiting ship and set sail
into exile back to her homeland of France.
Henrietta never saw her husband alive again.
For the following five years,
Henrietta contacted everyone for support, but nothing came of her appeals.
She was left helpless, her husband and children were under threat,
and the Queen's hands were well and truly tied.
In 1645 after the battle of Naseby when the royalists were crushed,
Charles fled to Scotland, his children were already under the guard of Cromwell
and his roundheads, and it wouldn't be long before Charles fell to the same group.
Charles was handed over to Cromwell in exchange for a cash payment, the end was now in sight.
He would begin imprisonment on the Isle of White at Carisbrooke castle.
In 1648 Charles had somehow managed to get the scots
to fight on his behalf, but they were no match for Cromwell,
and unlike the last time, on this occasion, the Scots were routed.
As a result, English royalists were sent to Barbados
as slave labour; as for Charles, he was tried and condemned to death.
When news reached Henrietta, she left the French court, took no further part
in any political activity,
now just concentrating on bringing up her daughter, also called Henrietta
and the one son who had managed to escape the bitter feud in England, Henry.
Her remaining children fought on in the cause to get Charles
some salvation, but Henrietta played no part in this.
Her boys would end up scattered around Europe as royal exiles.
The Stuarts looked doomed from here on in, but once again,
fortune was on their side when in 1658 Cromwell died.
He had regretfully placed his inept son in charge Richard,
but as his nickname suggests, Tumbledown Dick he didn't see through his supposed tenure.
England was in chaos again; with no new leader
on the horizon, the people would now speak.
They wanted a King back, caring not, whether the next one was good or bad.
After lengthy negotiations, Charles II landed back on the coastline to a wild
and wonderful greeting from the folks back home on 29
May 1660, which was also his 30th birthday.
It showed that although a military dictatorship had once ruled with an iron fist,
the people of England wanted to get back to a more normal peaceful environment.
There only wish now was to have
a new constitutional monarch, and Charles II fitted the bill perfectly.
Once coronated, Charles would send for his mother Henrietta;
she was now the proud occupant of somerset house
and gifted an annual income of 60,000 pounds.
In 1661 she briefly went back to France to see
the wedding of her daughter Henrietta to Philip of Orlean.
In 1662 she welcomed Catherine of Braganza, the new wife to Charles II.
But Henrietta never sat back and openly disapproved of much of her family's relationships.
Her husband had always been faithful and considerate and proved to be an excellent father.
On the other hand, her sons were the complete opposite,
being unfaithful, full of vice and corruption.
Henriettas health began to decline in 1665 when she returned to France, staying at Colombe
with her favourite daughter; it was here she died on 31
August 1669, the very place she had started out some 60 years earlier.
Henrietta had never been on excellent terms
with the English, and they had never warmed to this French queen.
As a mother and wife, she did her best under the most stressful challenges.
However, Henrietta was a prominent Royalist figure whose perceived
influence deepened the rift between the two waring sides.
She was a genuine concern for her peers, who saw her as "invading"
the male world of politics and "threatening the natural order of authority."
In some ways, this led to her own, and her husband's downfall.