Henrietta Maria, born at the Louvre, 25th November 1609, was the youngest child of Henry IV. of France, whose assassination six months afterwards left the babe to the unwise upbringing of her mother, Marie de Medicis. A lovely little thing, bright of eye and wit, but spoilt and wayward, she was married in 1625 to Charles I., and speedily evinced her bigotry, if not by a barefoot pilgrimage to Tyburn, yet by refusing to share in her husband's coronation. The dismissal, however, of her French attendants, and the murder of Buckingham, removed two conflicting causes of jealousy; and for ten years Henrietta might call herself 'the happiest woman in the world—happy as wife, mother, and queen.' But she had also made herself the best-hated woman in England. Stafford fallen (she did her worst to save him), and herself menaced with impeachment, on 23d February 1642, the eve of the Great Rebellion, she parted from Charles at Dover, and, repairing to Holland, there raised £2,000,000. A year later, after a great storm, during which she bade her ladies 'Take comfort: queens of England are never drowned,' she landed at Bridlington (q.v.), and, marching through England, again met King Charles near Edgehill. She sojourned with him at Oxford, until on 3d April 1644 they separated at Albingdon, never to meet on earth. At Exeter, on 16th June, she gave birth to a daughter, and in less than a fortnight had to flee before Essex to Pendennis Castle, whence she took shipping for France. A cruiser gave chase, and she charged the captain to blow up the magazine sooner than let her be captured; but at length she landed on the coast of Brittany. A liberal allowance was assigned her, but she pinched herself to send remittances to England; and the war of the Fronde (1648) had reduced her for a time to destitution, when, nine days after the event, news reached her of her husband's execution. That even this crowning sorrow failed to teach wisdom is shown by her quarrels with her wisest counsellors, and her efforts to convert her children. The story, however, of her secret marriage to her confidant, Henry Lord Jermyn (afterwards Earl of St Albans), rests solely on gossip. After the Restoration, 'la Reine Malheureuse,' as she called herself, paid two visits to England—one of four months in 1660–61, the other of three years in 1662–65. Pepys describes her as 'a very little, plain old woman.' She died of an overdose of an opiate on 31st August 1669, at her château of Colombes, near Paris, and was buried (Bossuet preaching the funeral sermon) in the abbey of St Denis, whence her coffin was ousted at the Revolution.
See CHARLES I. and works there cited; also Strickland's Queens of England (new ed. vol. v. 1851).