Queen Henrietta Maria and "Mistress Parliament": Unsettled Queenship and English Political Rhetoric, 1642–1649

Drawn partly from critical work by Judith Butler and her followers, this article is grounded on a subtle idea concerning the relations between gender and politics in seventeenth-century English print culture. This idea is that gender and politics are, as it were, co-constructed in a contingent dynamic: that each is constantly being revised and redefined in performative and ritualistic ways, producing what subsequently come to seem stable and perhaps natural arrangements. Here, the focus is on representations of queenship – a concept that embodies in body politics key ideas which define what a female is and should be – before, during, and after the first Civil War in England, i.e., the 1630s, the early 1640s, and the late 1640s (with a brief postscript extending to the 1690s). In the first place, royal masques and exhibited art pieces articulated an ideal of "CARLOMARIA" – Charles I and Henrietta Maria as a harmonious unity, and therefore, England. In the second, Queen Henrietta Maria – who made prodigious efforts for the royalist campaign – was denounced for infidelity, popery, and autonomy in a misogynistic narrative. In the third, the parliament itself was figured as a wanton and promiscuous "queen" who not only generated monsters but could indefinitely do so, because the Parliamentarians in fact envisaged a polity in which parliament became a fixture as a frequently re-created reproductive body rather than a conventional one-off assembly called and dismissed by the king for immediate purposes. And at last, the brief postscript suggests that the situation they created may help explain the oddly conjoined notion of monarchy adopted by William and Mary after the Glorious Revolution. Examining these episodes based on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, this article argues for the fluidity and path-dependency of gender/politics relations over these tumultuous years and hopefully showcases the contingency of gender relations in a broader sense.