The Royal Academy exhibition of Charles I’s reunited collection is breathing new life into the king’s martyrology. But history has still mostly forgotten that Charles I’s reign witnessed English Catholicism’s near-triumph and a phenomenal mission to reconvert Britain that was led for two decades by the sophisticated, politically alert and supremely devout Queen Henrietta Maria.
A century after the dissolution of the monasteries, things began to look good again for English Catholics. In 1625 Charles I, a man of considerable sympathy for continental art and worship, inherited the throne and married Henrietta Maria. A French teenager descended from the Medicis, Henrietta Maria had been raised with strong views on how to run a Catholic court, and she arrived in England bearing vast chests of paintings, sculpture, textiles, books and jewellery, and numerous attendants, many of whom were ordained and dressed in Catholic costumes that had not been seen in England for generations.
The French court had strong ties with Rome and had insisted that the nuptial contracts include provision not only for Henrietta Maria to practise her own faith on arrival in England, but also for her to be attended by those foreign religious figures on whom the integrity of her faith depended, from cardinals to nuns and friars. For the first time in living memory, London became the centre for legal Catholic worship. The faithful arrived from as far as Scotland to receive the sacraments, often carrying with them their dead in the hope that they might be buried in the small plot of consecrated ground near the queen’s new residence at Somerset House.
There was controversy at the chapel doors, however, with Charles insisting that the legal protection of Catholic worship extend only as far as the queen and her entourage, and that his own subjects must be barred from entry. He placed soldiers at the gates – but only when his Puritan detractors demanded it most vociferously. Once they were placated, the guard was removed.
One of the Capuchin friars who accompanied the queen kept a meticulous record of her English mission. In London, Henrietta Maria formed and led two confraternities: the Holy Rosary and St Francis. She took her entourage on a very public pilgrimage to pray at the site of the Tyburn tree, where Catholics had been martyred under Elizabeth I. Remarkably, even a statue of the Virgin Mary, the cult most reviled throughout the Reformation, was sent to Henrietta Maria from her mother and was carried to and around the queen’s London chapel by a priest in pontifical habit. The Capuchins settled in monastic quarters and maintained a constant presence in the chapel at Somerset House, where the cycle of sung and silent prayer, Mass, lectures, preaching, catechism, meditation and confession (all in both French and English) continued throughout the day and night. Curious Catholics and Protestants visited the monastery to observe the simplicity of life there.
The Capuchins themselves took note of the luxury in which most Londoners lived, untaxed by Parliament since the beginning of the king’s personal rule. Where, they asked, did the money go? It was evidently not spent on the country’s churches, which were neglected to the point of desecration. The lowness (and meanness) of most English worship was something Charles and his archbishop, William Laud, strove to correct. But before they did Henrietta Maria herself established a liturgy so spectacular as to confirm all Puritan opinions of Catholic excess. The queen was a passionate sponsor of the theatre and the first public Mass said in her chapel was famous for its use of the most recent stage technologies. Winches lifted clouds from above the altar to reveal the Eucharist bathed in golden light, music resounded through swathes of incense, all to the delight of crowds packed inside the chapel or peering in from outside.
The queen’s piety also shaped her arrangement of everyday life in her palaces. There she recreated the Carmelite retreat she had enjoyed in her youth at the Convent of the Incarnation in Paris. A court observer noted that at Easter in 1626, Henrietta Maria and her ladies retired to Somerset House where cells, a refectory and an oratory had been set up “in the manner of a monastery”. There they “sang the hours of the Virgin and lived together like nuns”.
Henrietta Maria did not only influence the religious landscape of London. She also helped shape the king’s taste in painting, sculpture, architecture, theatre and the social and intellectual culture at court.
Her influence on English writing was significant, too – and controversial. John Cosin’s notorious Collection of Private Devotions (1627) was written after the queen’s French ladies chided their English counterparts for having no private devotions. It took the 1560 Elizabethan primer as its model, reintroducing readers to the calendar of feast days, instructing them on the lives of the saints and the hourly cycle of prayers and observance, and teaching them how to calculate moveable feasts.
It gave guidance on the Lord’s Prayer, Creed, the Ten Commandments, Beatitudes, virtues and vices, and included meditations and prayers for every occasion, from dressing in the morning to childbirth and death. It even contained an unacknowledged poem by St Ignatius Loyola and a frontispiece whose Jesuit overtones did not go unnoticed by controversialists.
The book was immensely popular: it went through three editions in 1627 alone, and five more before Cosin’s death. Some passages were later adopted in the unpopular Scottish prayer book of 1637. Three generations after the religious houses had been closed in England and in the absence of any structured guide to daily devotions, the style of Catholic piety that came to court with Henrietta Maria soon spread.
The Little Gidding community in Cambridgeshire established a semi-monastic life, structured by regular worship, shared property, a taking of vows and a preference for high worship. Before establishing the community, Nicholas Ferrar had been in Italy where the spirituality of Francis de Sales had impressed on him the style of lay piety so popular at Henrietta Maria’s court.
The king, who was himself regularly in attendance at the queen’s chapel in the 1630s, was a great advocate of Little Gidding and a sponsor of their Gospel concordances, which were full of Catholic devotional images that Ferrar had brought back with him from the Continent.
Richard Crashaw, a member of the community, produced the most Catholic of metaphysical poetry and eventually converted to Rome. Another devotional group sprang up in London in the 1620s and 30s under the direction of William Austin, and began to generate its own prayer pamphlets.
These groups were inspired by the queen’s reintroduction of Marian piety and a kind of spiritual life that was arranged around semi-monastic community, vivid devotional practices, clever conversation, and a deep appreciation of literature and the arts.
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Of course it didn’t last. Before the 1640s were over, Charles and his archbishop were dead and Henrietta Maria had retreated to France with her children. In the spring of 1643 a group of MPs, led by Sir John Clotworthy and Henry Marten, pillaged and desecrated Henrietta Maria’s chapel and the Capuchin monastery. By then anti-court revolutionary fervour had shifted its attention from Whitehall to Somerset House: the queen’s palace became iconographically the most significant court space in England. Hostile tracts in 1640 argued that through the queen’s Capuchin friars “the king was contaminated with popery”.
The City of London accused the friars and others at Somerset House of “seducing the people”, and when the parliamentary ordinance was given for the seizure of the royal houses, Somerset House was quickly broken into and ransacked, its chapel whitewashed and turned into a preaching house fit for the Lord Protector.
For two decades, the legal Catholic communities in London depended for their existence on Henrietta Maria’s sovereignty. In this, she was the most prominent and powerful figure in the Catholic Church in England, a role for which her upbringing had prepared her. Henrietta Maria was, as her confessor acknowledged, the “foundation” of the “Catholic religion … in England”. “As the life of the queen kept [the Catholic mission] alive,” he said, “so her decease was death to it.”
Dr Bonnie Lander Johnson is a fellow, lecturer, and director of studies in English at Selwyn College, Cambridge
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