Queen Henrietta Maria of England, by Anthony van Dyck, 1636. incamerastock/Alamy.
In June 1643 reports spread of Henrietta Maria’s advance south from Yorkshire. She was, parliamentarians observed fearfully, ‘chief and commander’ of ‘an army of outlandish papists’ and ready ‘to swallow up us and our [Protestant] religion’. They called the queen a ‘Hogen-Mogen princess’, from the Dutch for ‘high and mighty’ – mighty for the arms she had brought from Holland to aid the royalist cause in the Civil War. In the Commons they had drawn up articles of impeachment, describing her as a ‘traitor’ and papal conspirator, who now ‘levied war against parliament and kingdom’. In popular memory Henrietta Maria remains the wife who ‘turned Charles I Catholic’ and encouraged his authoritarianism, so causing the Civil War.
