Fleeing England with her mother as an infant in the midst of the English Civil War, Henrietta moved to the court of her first cousin King Louis XIV of France, where she was known as Minette.

[1] She married her cousin Philippe I, Duke of Orléans and became a fille de France,[2] but their relationship was marked by frequent tensions over common suitors.

[3] Henrietta played an instrumental role in negotiating the Secret Treaty of Dover between France and England against the Dutch Republic in June 1670, the same month as her unexpected death at the age of 26.

Jacobite claims to the British throne after Henry Benedict Stuart's death descend from her daughter Anne Marie.

Her father was King Charles I of England, her mother the youngest daughter of Henry IV of France and Marie de' Medici.

[5] After a particularly difficult birth, Henrietta was put in the care of Anne Villiers, Countess of Morton, known at that time as Lady Dalkeith.

[6] For Henrietta's safety, the queen made her way to Falmouth and then returned to France to ask Louis XIV to assist her husband's war efforts.

This lavish establishment soon diminished, as all the money Queen Henrietta Maria received was given to her husband in England or to exiled cavaliers who had fled to France.

At the end of the Fronde, Queen Henrietta Maria and her daughter moved into the Palais Royal with the young Louis XIV and his mother and brother Philippe.

At the same time, Queen Henrietta Maria decided to have her daughter, who had been baptised in the Church of England, brought up as a Catholic.

[12] Louis and Maria Theresa married in June 1660, after which Queen Anne turned her attention to her unmarried son Philippe.

This change of fortunes caused the flamboyant Philippe, a reputed bisexual who had been party to a series of sexual scandals, to propose to Henrietta.

Before this, there were rumours at court that Henrietta had received proposals from Charles Emmanuel of Savoy and the Grand Prince of Tuscany, but nothing came of them as a result of her status as an exile.

[18] Henrietta's return to France was delayed by the death from smallpox of her elder sister Mary, Princess of Orange.

Her brother Charles II, to whom she had always been very close (it was he who gave her the nickname Minette), had been trying to establish a closer relationship with France since 1663, but only in 1669 did he set the wheels in motion by openly avowing that he would become a Catholic and bring England back to Catholicism.

Appealing to Louis XIV, she managed to arrange to travel to England, where she arrived in Dover on 26 May 1670, remaining there until 1 June, the day the treaty was signed.

Provided that the conquest was successfully completed, England was promised several very profitable ports along one of the major rivers that ran through the Dutch Republic.

Queen Maria Theresa was present with the former king of Poland, John II Casimir, and the English ambassador, the Duke of Buckingham.

A mausoleum, surrounded with altars and silver urns, and adorned with a crowd of mourning allegorical statues, among which Youth, Poetry and Music were conspicuous, had been erected in the centre of the choir.

Everyone having taken their places, hundreds of candles burst into flame giving a cloud of incense; and the Archbishop of Reims assisted by other bishops, began the Mass, which was chanted by the King's musicians organised by Lully.

"[40] Monsieur married again in 1671 to Elisabeth Charlotte of the Palatinate, who, like Henrietta, was descended from Mary, Queen of Scots, sharing James VI of Scotland and I of England as a common ancestor.