‘The Female Bedchamber of Queen Henrietta Maria; Politics, Familial Networks and Policy, 1626-1641’ in Nadine Akkerman and Birgit Houben (eds.), The Politics of Female Households: Ladies-in-Waiting across Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2013). Chapter submitted by invitation (original) (raw)

While most formal institutions of power, Parliament, the law courts and the Privy Council, were closed to English aristocratic women, the patron-client relations that characterised elite society were, as Sharon Kettering points out in her study of France, "informal, fluid, non-institutional, and well suited to the exercise of indirect power through personal relationships by women". 1 Similarly, in her analysis of Jacobean court women, Helen Payne has argued that women had the power "to influence or to mediate, the power to recommend a person or a suit, and occasionally the power to broker, but this power was wholly dependent on relationships with powerful men". 2 According to Payne, the one exception was Jane Drummond, Anna of Denmark's First Lady of the Bedchamber, whose influence was dependent solely on her mistress's favour, as well as on the mistaken assumption that Anna wielded significant political influence over James I's foreign policy. 3 Though attendance at the Caroline court provided aristocratic women with similar influence, access and favour, necessary to engage in early modern politics, a position within Queen Henrietta Maria's Bedchamber offered more opportunities for women than under the first Stuart queen consort. This was due to three main factors: first, the reorganisation of Henrietta Maria's household structure in 1627; second, the close personal relationship of Charles and Henrietta Maria; and third, the ability of Caroline court women to engage in politics not only through their dependence on powerful men, but also through the favour of the 1