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.
She liked jokes. She once managed to inveigle Charles into gambling with her for a golden crucifix. The king won, and was placed in the embarrassing position of having to decide whether to keep it or not. The Catholic Elizabeth Thorowgood thought that the king was sympathetic to Catholics because of his wife, but Mary Cole, also a Catholic, thought the opposite. She wondered how the queen could stand it.
She could stand it best by making and enlarging her own brilliant Catholic world, lit and sculpted with the very latest. And Henrietta wanted London to know it was there; in 1638, she even planned a procession to Somerset House to celebrate the birth of the dauphin. She made a new and very Catholic festive calendar for it; in 1637, there was a special Christmas Mass, attended by her flock of recent converts, and at Worcester House, in the Strand, there was a display of the Holy Sepulchre during the 1638 Easter season. But on Holy Thursday 1638, the Spanish ambassador shocked London by processing through the streets, crucifixes and torches held aloft, from the queen’s chapel to his own residence. There was a minor riot, and he was warned by the king.
So neither Henrietta nor her allies were content to hear Mass in a private fashion. It was not only that she felt she had nothing to be ashamed of. She was not even trying to revive Catholic England, that medieval past that had been violently rocked to sleep by Elizabeth and James and by her husband. She was trying something much more ambitious. She was attempting to bring modern Catholicism to England, and with it the eye-popping glories of the Catholic baroque that had fuelled the Counter-Reformation with their beauty and exoticism. She was hoping to seduce the English aristocracy with the brilliant modernity of a Church that was part of a rich aesthetic future. This was a far riskier project. It was also doomed to ultimate failure.
But not at first; initially it succeeded brilliantly. When the Earl of Bath attended Catholic Mass for the first time, he wondered aloud why Protestants were deprived of the many splendid aesthetic consolations offered by Rome. There were multiple conversions among Henrietta’s ladies, and Rome became quite the fashion, especially when Lady Newport converted, despite her husband’s godliness. The centre of much of the bustle was the household of Olive Porter, niece of Buckingham; she had been miraculously prevented from dying in childbirth in February 1638. ‘Our great women fall away every day’, wrote one of Strafford’s less sanguine correspondents. One of the horrors was that it was all so … feminine. But there were men involved too – social historian Lawrence Stone speculates that in 1641 something in the order of a fifth of the in peers were Roman Catholics. Historian Kevin Sharpe suggests that not only were there more Catholics in the 1630s – and more visible Catholics – but that overall numbers may have reached 300,000. The papal envoy George Conn reported happily that while in the past Catholics would only hear Mass in secret, now they flocked to