Portrait of Henrietta Maria of France as a Child

Henrietta Maria was the youngest of the six children of Henry IV and Marie de' Medici, and she is about two here, which is how the Palatine Gallery arrives at a date of around 1612, following the scholar Ludwig Burchard. In 1625 she went to England to marry Charles I, and stayed Catholic in a kingdom whose laws were against it. Her chapel and her French household were held against the king for years. Once the civil war began she raised money and arms for him abroad, and she was in France when he was beheaded in 1649. She died near Paris in 1669, nine years after her son was restored to the English throne. Florence holds two more likenesses of her, one from Pourbus's workshop showing her grown up, and a copy after van Dyck's profile of the queen. This is the one where she is two.