The women who have worn the crown: their lives, their loves, their stories. England and elsewhere, princesses sometimes too with dashes of all kinds of royal.
Henrietta Maria, Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland painted by Anthony Van Dyck
On June 13th 1625, a young French princess walked into a church in Kent and emerged as Queen of England. Henrietta Maria arrived in her future kingdom as a pretty, cultured woman who had already been used to commanding a court. She left, 40 years later, as a largely unpopular woman who got little sympathy - even when her husband was executed during the Civil War that tore her adopted country apart in the 1640s. In fact, there were plenty who blamed Henrietta Maria in part for the conduct of her husband in the conflict and who were willing to lay many of the problems of the Royalist faction at her feet. Henrietta Maria is one of just a handful of women to have been wife to one king and mother to two more but in her lifetime she was, for some, a villain and now she is an unpopular queen that history has largely forgotten.
On a cold winter's day, the teenager who had once been Queen of England met a tragic fate within the walls of her former realm's greatest fortress. Catherine Howard, consort to Henry VIII for 15 brief months before her downfall, was executed at the Tower of London on February 13th 1542. Her title of queen had been removed almost three months earlier as she faced allegations of betraying the king through adultery. And on that grey morning, the final part of her story unfolded.
Elizabeth Woodville had been pretty unstoppable until 1466. She had married a king, seen off those who wanted to denounce her marriage as invalid, been crowned queen of England and started to snap up some of the most eligible spouses in town for her siblings. When she gave birth to her first baby with Edward in 1466 everyone expected it be a boy. The queen had had two sons with her first husband and Elizabeth and Edward got whatever Elizabeth and Edward wanted and they wanted a son and heir for the House of York. So the arrival of a little girl was a surprise, as was her name. But the choice of names for the daughters of Edward and Elizabeth is pretty intriguing all round, starting with the first. And their naming decisions perhaps give us more pointers to the politics of the court of the House of York.
Caroline of Brunswick is a marvellous Queen Consort. On paper, she had nothing going for her at all. But she ended up far more popular than her husband and she's one of the most recognizable of all consorts.