The misunderstood queen

Henrietta Maria: Conspirator, Warrior, Phoenix Queen | Teller of the Unexpected: The Life of Roald Dahl, an Unofficial Biography

- Kate Green

Henrietta Maria: Conspirator, Warrior, Phoenix Queen

Leanda de Lisle (Vintage, £25)

IN Ken Hughes's film Cromwell (1970), there is a scene that sets up Henrietta Maria, Charles I's queen, as the villain of the piece. It is May 1641 and the Earl of Strafford, one of the King's 'evil counsellors', has just been executed by the will of parliament. Charles receives a deputation of MPs and the meeting is fractious. Suddenly, a portrait on the wall catches Oliver Cromwell's eye: Henrietta Maria in a necklace with large pendant cross, an unmistakable Catholic symbol. He glowers; there, in paint, is the most diabolical of the King's evil counsellors.

Then the queen herself appears (Dorothy Tutin, a remarkable likeness)-pretty, imperious, haughty even. She has overheard the diatribe against Catholicism and the accusation that her husband has failed to defend the Church and Protestant settlers in Ireland against attacks by the native Irish because of 'domestic expedience'. She is not amused.

Henrietta Maria, named after her father and mother, Henri IV of France and Marie de' Medici, is a goddaughter of the Pope. To Cromwell, a Puritan, Catholicism is a political force inimical to parliamentary government and the attempts to introduce ritual into the Church of England by the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, nothing but popery. Laud, the third of the 'evil counsellors', would go to the scaffold in 1645. In 17th-century England, there was no getting away from religion.