Diane Purkiss - The English Civil War - A People’s History

Henrietta held to a belief for which material objects – people, places – were important. Catholicism was not something that happened in the head; it involved the vital and willing body in strenuous acts of faith to other bodies, beginning with Christ’s own bleeding body, and ending with those of the martyrs. Visiting Tyburn, she would have felt something of what we might feel visiting the site of Auschwitz – awe, pity, fear, and passionate indignation – and a little of the fear might still have felt pressing and personal, for the laws of England allowed people to be hanged for being Catholic, for doing no more and sometimes rather less than Henrietta’s marriage treaty allowed her to do. Only two years after the treaty was signed, two Catholics were hanged at Lancaster. Henrietta’s family were Catholic, as were her friends, and she was personally devout. Events like the hangings were utterly baffling for her, and hardly added to an already imperilled sense of security.

Catholics had been feared since the 1570 papal edict against Elizabeth I, but what aroused a new kind of anxiety was the perceived influence of Catholics at court. The powerful Duke of Buckingham’s wife and his mother had both converted to Catholicism in 1622. Catholic icons were still being imported into the country. One member of the 1621 Parliament reported that rosaries, crucifixes, relics, and ‘papistical pictures’ were flooding in, and that in Lancashire they were made and sold openly in the streets. In The Popish Royal Favourite, William Prynne claimed that Buckingham’s ‘Jesuited mother and sister’ influenced him and through him the kingdom. Henrietta’s marriage treaty guaranteed her the right to practise her own religion, and her household servants to do the same. This was by itself enough to terrify. But her behaviour made matters worse. Henrietta was strongly, passionately, vehemently Catholic. The English were inclined to read this as rather tactless. They hadn’t been unduly pleased by the previous queen Anne of Denmark’s Catholicism, but at least she had shown the good taste to keep it decently under wraps. Henrietta was a woman of real conviction, which meant she didn’t and couldn’t. She was also a girl in her late teens, not very experienced in politics or used to compromise. Half Bourbon, half Medici, she had not learnt much about giving way from her mother. She stoutly refused to attend her husband’s coronation, because it was a Church of England ceremony.

Henrietta’s fervour had much to do with fashion. To a godly critic of the queen, Catholicism was part of a deadly and poisoned past, but to the queen herself it seemed the future. Catholicism fitted with court fashions; the court loved ritual and drama, colour and the baroque. The Laudian idea of ‘the beauty of holiness’ was one that Catholicism could accept, even if Laud himself was eager to maintain boundaries. When the aestheticization of faith became the goal, England could only lope awkwardly behind Rubens’s Antwerp or Bellini’s Rome. Both Charles and Henrietta did not want to trail in last in the aesthetic revolutionary army; they wanted to march in the front ranks. Precisely because the godly were not keen on images, pagan or Christian, those vanguards were dominated by Catholics.

As well, Henrietta wanted to be Esther, freeing her people through her influence. She was called to save English Catholics from the savage prejudices of their fellow-countrymen. Henrietta had been asked by the pope himself to promote Catholicism in her new kingdom. She went about it with characteristic verve and taste.

The centrepiece of her campaign was the building of her hated chapel. She wanted to create a new kind of place of worship, employing the most avant-garde and brilliant architect, Inigo Jones. The foundation stone was laid on 14 September 1632, and the chapel opened 8 December 1635, the feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary. One French envoy claimed that it had taken a long time because Inigo Jones was a Puritan and did not want it done. However, like many a godly soul, Jones was not averse to commerce, and after he had been given some additional monies, the work was completed.

The old chapel, which had existed since Anne of Denmark’s day, had been unpopular enough. Apprentices talked of pulling it down in 1634. The new one became a symbol of all the terrors the queen’s very existence came to evoke. It was plain outside; inside it was exuberant, rich, fanciful. There were the gold and silver reliquaries. There were ciberia, chalices, embroidered stoles. There were paintings, statues, even a chapel garden, a tribute to the queen’s interest in all things that grew green. It was, observers thought, ‘quite masculine and unaffected’ on the outside. But inside it was splendid, with an elaborate altarpiece made up of a series of seven oval frames containing angels sitting on clouds. A delicate carved screen on fluted and gilded Doric columns marked the entrance to the queen’s closet. And the opening celebrations were more splendid still.

As George Garrard observed tartly, ‘the ceremonies lasted three days, massing, preaching and singing of litanies, and such a glorious scene built over their altar, the Glory of Heaven, Inigo Jones never presented a more curious piece in any of the masques at Whitehall; with this our English ignorant papists are mightily taken’. The king visited it three days after the opening, and told Father Gamache that he had never seen anything more beautiful or more ingeniously contrived. It had one feature which would strike some modern Catholics as surprising, and which horrified Protestant contemporaries. An eminent sculptor named François Dieussart ‘made a machine, which was admired even by the most ingenious persons, to exhibit the Holy Sacrament, and to give it a more majestic appearance’. The resulting spectacle deserves a full description, even though it is tiring; the ceremony itself must have been even slower:

It represented in oval a Paradise of glory, about forty feet in height. To accommodate it to the hearing in the chapel, a great arch was supported by two pillars towards the high altar, at the distance of about eight Roman palms from the two side walls of the chapel. The spaces between the pillar and walls served for passages to go from the sacristy to the altar … Over each side appeared a Prophet, with a text from his prophecy. Beneath the arch was placed outside the portable altar, ten palms in height … Behind the altar was seen a paraclete, raised above seven ranges of clouds, in which were figures of archangels, of cherubim, of seraphim, to the number of two hundred, some adoring the Holy Sacrament, others singing and playing on all sorts of musical instruments … all conceiving that, instead of the music, they heard the melody of the angels, singing and playing upon musical instruments … In the sixth and seventh circles were seen children with wings … like so many little angels issuing from the clouds … In the eighth and ninth circles appeared cherubim and seraphim among the clouds, surrounded by luminous rays … All these things were covered with two curtains. It was the 10th of December, in the year 1636, that the queen came with all her court to hear Mass. As soon as she had taken the place prepared for her, the curtains being drawn back, all at once gave to view those wonders which excited admiration, joy, and adoration in her Majesty and in all the Catholics … Tears of joy seemed to trickle from the eyes of the queen.

This magic chapel was the height of fashion, but in essence not unique. Before the Reformation, such contraptions were not uncommon, and they were not, of course, intended to fool anyone, but to add a dramatic element to sacred ritual. In the 1433 York Domesday pageant, there was ‘a cloud and two pieces of rainbow of timber array for God’ and a heaven with red and blue clouds, an iron swing or frame pulled up with ropes ‘that God shall sit upon when he shall sit up to heaven’. At Lincoln Cathedral, a series of ropes and pulleys allowed the Paraclete to descend at Pentecost. The grail romances sometimes described similar contrivances. Reincarnating and refurbishing such sacred dramas, Henrietta had not meant to trick anyone, any more than she thought people would take her for a goddess when she appeared before Inigo Jones’s painted scenes, so lifelike in their three-dimensionality. What she did intend to convey was sophisticated knowledge, spectacle, and perhaps fun.