Henrietta Maria of France

A daughter of the house of Bourbon, Henrietta Maria was born at the Louvre on 25 November 1609, the youngest child of Henry IV of France and Marie de' Medici and sister of Louis XIII. Her marriage to Charles I of England, concluded by proxy in Paris in May 1625 and in person at Canterbury that June, was intended to bind the Stuart and Bourbon crowns. Because she was Catholic, she was never crowned with her husband, declining to take part in a Protestant rite.

The marriage began coldly, strained by disputes over her French household and the influence of the Duke of Buckingham, but after Buckingham's assassination in 1628 it became close and affectionate. Henrietta Maria bore nine children, among them the future Charles II and James II; her daughter Mary, Princess Royal, married William II of Orange and was mother of William III, while her youngest daughter, Henrietta Anne, married Philippe, Duke of Orléans, brother of Louis XIV. The North American colony of Maryland, chartered in 1632, was named in her honour. Her open Catholicism and her circle at court fed Puritan suspicion of the monarchy during the disputes of the 1630s.

When civil war came she worked tirelessly for the royalist cause. In 1642 she travelled to the Netherlands to raise money and munitions, pawning crown jewels; returning in 1643, she landed at Bridlington under naval bombardment and brought a convoy of arms to the king at Oxford. In 1644, pregnant and in poor health, she left England for France, and never saw Charles I again. His execution in 1649 left her a widow in exile, living modestly on a French pension and devoting herself increasingly to religion; she founded a convent at Chaillot.

At the Restoration of 1660 she returned to England and kept her court at Somerset House, but the climate and the changed country suited her ill, and in 1665 she went back to France. She died at Colombes, near Paris, on 10 September 1669, and was buried in the royal basilica of Saint-Denis, the resting place of her Bourbon ancestors.