A Loving Family
‘On Saturday last . . . the queen happily gave birth to a prince, about midday, and so the king sees his desires fulfilled and the succession established.’
Henrietta Maria’s first pregnancy ended in the premature birth of a son in May 1629. It was apparent from the first that the child would not live and he was hastily baptized with his father’s name, dying only two hours after he had come into the world. The royal couple were clearly distressed by this setback – the queen referred to it in a letter to her mother as ‘my misfortune’ – but also confident enough in their newly cemented relationship to hope for a better outcome in the future. Some Protestants, however, angry at the king’s dissolution of yet another parliament in March 1629 and the proclamation that followed, which began with the ominous assertion that ‘princes are not bound to give account of their actions’, rejoiced at the Catholic queen’s loss.
The disorderly scenes that accompanied the rejection of the House of Commons’ Petition of Right and her husband’s determination that he would now rule without parliament seem not to have affected the queen’s health. Indeed, opposition to Charles made it all the more necessary to continue trying for an heir. Henrietta recovered well and during the autumn her craving for mussels signalled to the world that she was expecting again. Fearful that her daughter’s liking for energetic exercise might have brought about the previous premature delivery, Marie de Médici sent a sedan chair, ‘a beautiful chaise’, described by Henrietta as ‘handsomer than I deserve. Had I even no wish to go out in a chaise, that would make me go . . . I hope God will grant me the favour to go to the end of my term, and as to what depends upon me, I will take all possible care of myself.1 The French queen mother’s thoughtful gift was also acknowledged by Charles, who told her that his happiness depended on Henrietta’s safe delivery, signing himself ‘your very affectionate son-in-law and servant’. On 29 May in St James’s Palace, at about noon, his optimism and Henrietta’s fortitude were rewarded with the birth of another son. And it was clear from the outset that this one would live.
He was a large, swarthy child (the queen later called him her ‘black boy’), a Bourbon rather than a Stuart in appearance, contented to the point of laziness, a trait he would never entirely lose. The baby was named Charles, like his dead elder brother, and christened in the Chapel Royal, in a ceremony where everyone wore white satin with crimson embroidery, a costume that harked back to the marriage of King James IV of Scotland and Margaret Tudor in 1503. The child’s godfather was his uncle, Louis XIII of France, and his godmother was Marie de Médici, who, with characteristic extravagance, sent him diamonds. As the Corporation of London had also presented him with a gold cup worth £1,000 he was far wealthier as a newborn than he would be as an exile in his twenties. Though protocol required that neither of his parents was present at the ceremony, he was surrounded by the nobility of Great Britain and was later styled as prince of the same, though he was always known as the Prince of Wales. In fact, he was the first heir to the throne of England to be born in that country since 1537. It was as fine a start in life as could have been wished by his parents and Charles was determined to ensure that Henrietta continued to have the best of everything. Between 1629 and 1636 the furnishings in her bedchamber and the royal nursery nearby were replaced three times, at a cost of over £7,000, most of which was spent on sumptuous bed curtains and other textiles.2
Henrietta Maria wrote to her old friend, Mamie Saint-Georges, not forgotten despite the trauma of her removal to France four years earlier, with a charming and good-humoured description of the infant’s progress: ‘If my son knew how to talk, I think he would send you his compliments: he is so fat and so tall, that he is taken for a year old, and he is only four months: his teeth are already beginning to come: I will send you his portrait as soon as he is a little fairer, for at present he is so dark that I am ashamed of him.’3 Yet the greater part of the letter concerned Henrietta’s urgent requirement for more French petticoats and said nothing at all about her husband or the state of the country. The following year she wrote again to Mamie about her son, in less than flattering terms about his appearance: ‘He is so ugly that I am ashamed of him, but his size and fatness supply the want of beauty. I wish you could see the gentleman, for he has no ordinary mien [expression]; he is so serious in all that he does, that I cannot help fancying him far wiser than myself.’ Young Charles’s solemnity and chubbiness were not her only preoccupations in 1631, for she also confided to Mamie Saint-Georges, ‘I think I am on the increase again.’
Her suspicions were well founded. Eighteen months after the arrival of their first child, the royal couple were again parents, this time of a girl, Mary, the Princess Royal, born on 4 November 1631. The little princess was not as healthy as her strapping brother, however, and there were fears that she might not survive, resulting in a hasty and low-key christening by Archbishop Laud. ‘Some apprehension there was at first,’ it was reported, ‘of danger in the child, whereof his majesty made a pious use, and caused her forthwith to be baptized by the name of Mary, without other solemnity than the rights of the Church.’ The doubts surrounding the new princess’s health were short-lived. She and Henrietta were soon said to be in perfect health, ‘so nothing is wanting to make this joy entire, both to his majesty and the entire kingdom’.4
Other children followed regularly over the next nine years. James, duke of York, the second son, a fair, blue-eyed child and his mother’s favourite, was born in November 1633. James’s arrival was greeted with a christening ceremony that befitted his rank and role as the additional heir, coming close to that of Prince Charles in its solemnity and pomp. A procession of heralds, London aldermen, judges, knights of the Privy Council and various viscounts, barons and earls were in attendance, led by the great court figures of the queen’s chamberlain, the earl of Dorset (whose wife was appointed lady governess to the royal nursery), the earl of Lindsey and the lord chamberlain, the earl of Pembroke. These were names mostly from the old noble families of Tudor times and their continuing influence represented a conscious effort on the part of Charles I to maintain links with the Elizabethan age, which seemed to him to represent the ideal of a relationship between monarchy, aristocracy and common people. Prince James, whose Catholicism would become a bugbear to his elder brother many years later, began life with godparents of unimpeachable Protestantism, the Dutch prince of Orange and the prince palatine, son of Charles I’s sister, Elizabeth of Bohemia, herself James’s godmother. Elizabeth, countess of Kent, carried the baby, a role which would have pleased her grandmother, the famous Bess of Hardwick. As a statement of the enduring importance of the nobility, the christening of Prince James made a powerful impact.
The royal family continued to grow. James was followed two years later by Elizabeth, then by Anne in 1637. The queen made an excellent recovery after the birth of her third daughter, as the countess of Leicester reported to her husband in March 1637: ‘The queen is the best in her childbed that ever I saw. The king dines and sups with her and sits by her the greatest part of the day. The little princess shall be privately christened by her brother and sister.’5 This picture of the devotion of the royal couple is all the more touching in the context of Princess Anne’s sadly short life. Their next child, Katherine, born in 1639, died shortly after birth but Prince Henry, duke of Gloucester, who came into the world as troubles were mounting for his parents in 1640, was a healthy boy. The youngest child of Charles I and Henrietta Maria was born during the Civil Wars, in 1644, and baptized as Henrietta. History, however, knows her as Henriette Anne, or by her eldest brother’s fond nickname, Minette.
Like all royal children, the world of this brood of little Stuarts was both privileged and rarefied. Each had a staff of their own immediate servants and Charles became particularly fond of his nurse, Christabella Wyndham, an affection which would be revived during his time in the West Country during the Civil Wars, when Mrs Wyndham was living with her husband in Somerset. Many aspects of the children’s lives, including tutors, were shared, as was accommodation. For some years, before Prince Charles’s household was enlarged and his governor appointed, the children all lived together. During the winter their residence was St James’s Palace, a magnificent Tudor edifice built by Henry VIII, according to a sixteenth-century Spanish diplomat, as a home for his own children. Its interior decoration was exuberant: ‘Painted and gilded fleur-de-lys, sunbursts, white harts, daggers, portcullises and the famous thornbush from which Henry VII had plucked his crown on Bosworth Field’ were among its riot of visual display.6 Summers were frequently passed at Richmond, which was farther out of London and considered healthier. Nor were the Stuart children without playmates. Brought up with them were the two sons of the assassinated duke of Buckingham, the second duke, named George, after his father, and his younger brother, Lord Francis Villiers. The king believed that he owed his friend the education of these handsome, lively boys within his own family and the duchess, who had married again and converted to Catholicism, was not allowed to keep them with her when she moved to Ireland with her second husband.
There would also be visits to Whitehall and to Hampton Court when the court moved there for recreation, or to escape the diseases of the warmer months. Charles and Henrietta Maria were, in comparison with earlier monarchs, affectionate and attentive parents, but it is easy to sentimentalize their relationship with their children. This was not a modern family, living under one roof. The king and queen had their own roles to play in national life and they viewed their offspring within the wider context of these obligations and expectations. Still, they came to visit regularly, walking with them in the orchards of St James’s and inspecting their educational progress. The elder children were brought to court on state occasions to learn what was expected of them in such circumstances. Despite his distant public persona, Charles I was always at his most relaxed with his wife and family. Though he had not enjoyed the more carefree upbringing of Henrietta, he seems to have demonstrated greater outward affection towards his children than she did. A small man himself, he kept a record of their heights as they grew, on an oaken staff at the palace of Oaklands. They were always delighted to see him, rushing to greet him, for example, when he returned from Scotland in 1638.
Yet Charles I was as much dynast as affectionate father and he was determined to use his children in the demonstration of his majesty and power. The paintings of them which he commissioned are an abiding reminder of his taste and interest in art and also of his understanding of how it could be used to reinforce the image of Stuart kingship. He was not entirely pleased with some of the paintings of his family, which he thought depicted too much of their childish appeal and not enough of the dignity of the Stuart royal house. A modern eye is, of course, charmed by the portraits for precisely the reasons that the king had reservations about them. Yet the earliest painting of Charles and Henrietta with the Prince of Wales combines many of the elements that the monarch valued. He and his queen are fashionably but not ostentatiously dressed, she sitting and he standing at either end of a velvet-covered bed, with Prince Charles uncomfortably perched next to his mother, looking as if he might be about to tip over. But while the viewer is, at first, drawn to the slightly comical two-year-old, in his baby cap and apron (the style for all aristocratic boys under four years of age), it soon becomes apparent that the crown lying in the centre of the bed is intended as a potent symbol of the monarchy and the promise of the child’s future.
A series of paintings by van Dyck charts the growth of the royal family, culminating in the group portrait of the children painted in 1637 in which they are almost upstaged by a huge dog at the centre, on whose head Prince Charles rests a commanding hand. Mary and James stand respectfully to one side and Elizabeth holds the baby Princess Anne, whose chubbiness belies her eventual ill health. This picture hung over the king’s breakfast table at Whitehall, while the queen displayed another van Dyck, of her three eldest children, at Greenwich. Her attachment to this portrait survived the vicissitudes of the Civil Wars and was hanging in her French house at Colombes when she died. Throughout the 1630s, van Dyck was also painting Henrietta Maria, showing her development as a confident consort. There is a kind of tranquillity about her at this time that depicts a real contentment. No wonder she described herself as the happiest of women.
At St James’s Palace, the life of the Stuart children followed an established routine. English royalty had a tradition of rising early, with the notable exception of Elizabeth I, who always slept badly and was not a morning person. Helped to dress by their attendants, the youngsters began the day with a service of prayer followed by a substantial breakfast of mutton, chicken and bread washed down with ale. Lessons and physical exercise made up the rest of the morning and early afternoon, until they met together for dinner, the main meal of the day, at three o’clock. Here there was plenty of choice. The fare they were offered could include game, meat and fish with desserts of tarts and custards and sometimes sweetmeats such as marzipan. The food was accompanied by wine from Italy. English water was still of doubtful purity in the seventeenth century and no one would have considered it as a beverage to accompany food. The last meal of the day was supper, a lighter version of dinner, and then the younger children were put to bed. The older ones, however, were sometimes invited to sup at Whitehall with their parents, so that they could learn court etiquette.
Charles I was a stickler for protocol. At this time, when he was ruling without parliament, he needed the support of his nobility – the elaborate ritual of the christenings of his two sons bore witness to this – and he made considerable efforts to enhance its role by reviving chivalric customs and restoring its ‘ancient lustre’, which many believed had been tarnished by the louche court of his father, James, and the profligate award of new titles.7 The king was keen to ensure that his children knew how to behave in public, whether at audiences with visiting diplomats or at an evening’s entertainment at Whitehall. Though they were no doubt impressed by the grandeur of these occasions, the formality placed demands on the children, and particularly on the apparently greedy Prince Charles, who did not share his parents’ abstemious appetites. Nor could four-year-old Princess Mary be persuaded to sit still for her portrait, as her embarrassed mother reported to the child’s aunt, the duchess of Savoy, in 1635.8
There were, however, compensations and not just the plentiful supply of dolls, lead soldiers and other toys enjoyed at playtime. One of the most important facets of court culture in the 1630s was the masque. Charles I and Henrietta were both enthusiastic patrons and participants in these lavish spectacles, encouraging their children to take part as they grew old enough. The masques were a key feature of the winter season, providing light and colour at an otherwise gloomy time of year. It became a custom for the king and queen to create a masque for each other in which they would both act – a further indication of their mutual affection, as well as a vehicle for Charles, a monarch who loved the visual arts, to use this idealized world to reinforce his image. And for Henrietta Maria, brought up in the theatre of the French court, involvement in all aspects of the production was a stimulating alternative to the demands of frequent pregnancies. In January 1631, Charles produced a piece called Love’s Triumph at the Banqueting House at Whitehall. He played the hero and his wife the Queen of Love. Her role was to rid the court of the gods of all disorder and vice and to reinstate honour and virtue. This was a theme that Charles wished to impress on his aristocracy and, indeed, the country as a whole. He saw it as the duty of a monarch and the lynchpin of his kingship. The following month, Henrietta and her ladies, including Lucy Hay, delighted their audience in their green, gold and silver costumes for the masque Chloridia, in which the queen played a nymph who became a goddess through the love of Zephyrus, the west wind. By the age of six, Prince Charles himself, resplendent in blue and crimson taffeta, was being cast in the leading role of the curiously named Prince Britomart for yet another production, this time at Windsor. Set in a distant time of Romans and Druids in Britain, the play was acted out by Charles and the Villiers boys who danced, sang and recited verses.
These masques have been regarded as frivolous and costly extravagances on the part of a royal couple who were seriously out of touch with the growing climate of resentment in the British Isles against the king’s personal rule and the measures he took to obtain finance without parliament. But such a retrospective judgement overlooks the symbolic importance which Charles I attached to these entertainments and their place in his vision of kingship. As he rehearsed for one of these extravaganzas in 1637, he described himself as the ‘happiest king in Christendom’. Happiness is not an emotion one tends to associate with Charles I but, in the 1630s, with his lively and supportive wife and their family, he believed that the culture of the court bound the nobility to him and would safeguard his throne. For his children, secure in their privileged lifestyle, such entertainments reinforced their royal identity, providing an exciting alternative to their normal routine. These were halcyon days.
Until the Prince of Wales was seven, the overall responsibility for his welfare and that of his siblings lay with the countess of Dorset. Born Mary Curzon, she was the daughter of a Derbyshire family who had married Edward Sackville, fourth earl of Dorset, in 1612. It was customary for ladies in charge of royal children to be of mature years – Lady Dorset was in her forties when appointed, and a mother herself – but she had not been the first choice for the job. Instead, she took the post originally intended for Jane Ker, countess of Roxburghe, a member of the Scottish aristocracy with a long-standing connection to the Stuart court and a favourite of Charles I’s mother. But Lady Roxburghe was Catholic and the king did not consider her a fit governess for his sons. Lady Dorset was deemed a suitable replacement. Though Henrietta Maria’s marriage treaty had stipulated that she should have the responsibility for her children’s upbringing in their early years, Charles would not honour these terms and, by 1630, the queen was not inclined to dispute with him on this point. And as the education of their daughters was held to be of less national significance, Lady Roxburghe was soon to find employment as the head of Princess Mary’s household. Her influence on the princess’s religion cannot have been great, for Mary remained a Protestant throughout her life, despite later maternal pressure. As Lady Dorset’s family was also partly Catholic, her appointment seems to have been acceptable to the queen. In fact, both the countess and her husband were pro-French and loyal supporters of Henrietta Maria and of the Stuart dynasty.
The task of being governess to the royal children was far from a sinecure. It called for organizational and financial management skills as well as tact. An appropriate moral climate was to be maintained and there were always concerns about illnesses. Lady Dorset was no spendthrift and like lady governesses before her she found herself juggling the requirements of appropriately luxurious accessories for the children (a cradle of crimson damask with gold and silver fringe and ‘six pair of fine Holland sheets’) with staff shortages, such as when she asked Sir Thomas Wentworth, the lord deputy of Ireland, if one of the duke of York’s servants could be spared from going to Ireland because the duke had so few people to wait on him.9 The possibility that one of the children might fall seriously ill or even die was a constant concern and the fact that the queen had a habit of rushing to her children under such circumstances cannot have made Lady Dorset’s life any easier. In fact, the first letter that Henrietta Maria wrote to Prince Charles was occasioned by a nasty bout of illness that had struck the seven-year-old. His refusal to take his medicine caused the queen concern: ‘Charles,’ she wrote, ‘I am sore that I must begin my first letter by chiding you, because I hear that you will not take physic. I hope it was only for this day and that tomorrow you will do it, for if you will not I must come to you and make you take it, for it is for your health.’10
By the summer of 1638, the prince was no longer Lady Dorset’s charge. Like heirs to the throne before him, he was moved to a separate establishment under a male governor, while his brother and sisters remained at St James’s Palace. The new head of his household was William Cavendish, earl, and later duke, of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Though their time together was to be cut short by external events, the earl of Newcastle had considerable influence over the future Charles II.
This northern aristocrat was then aged about forty-five and was a long-serving courtier, having been one of Prince Henry’s companions before the untimely death of James I’s elder son. Talented and ambitious, he was born in the Elizabethan age and it has been said that he, like Charles I, espoused the values of this earlier period: ‘Newcastle’s “Elizabethanism” was at the core of a carefully constructed identity. It provided a set of standards and aspirations that he sought to live his life by, but, at the same time, it also underpinned a calculated pitch for political preferment.’11 Newcastle was blessed with many of the necessary attributes of a courtier. He was an outstanding horseman, fencer and jouster and an accomplished writer of plays and verse, counting Ben Jonson among his friends. Two of his plays were performed by the King’s Men at the Blackfriars theatre between 1639 and 1641, so he evidently found time to continue his literary career while supervising the Prince of Wales. Yet, despite being a court ‘insider’, he was not of the old nobility; Buckingham had proposed him for a title shortly before his assassination in 1628. His ambition did not endear him to everybody and he had made no secret of his desire to be the prince’s governor. In pursuit of this goal, he endured some anxious moments, writing to his first wife in 1636: ‘I find a great deal of venom against me, but both the king and the queen hath used me very graciously . . . they say that absolutely no other shall be for the prince . . .’12
Newcastle got his wish, as befits the descendant of a tenacious family. Like the countess of Kent, he was also a grandchild of Bess of Hardwick. But it certainly cost him, for in the execution of his office he spent the extraordinary sum of £40,000. Being governor gave him overall direction of the preparation of Prince Charles for the throne, though the appointment of Brian Duppa, bishop of Chichester, as the chief tutor to the prince and the duke of York was suggested by Duppa’s patron, Archbishop William Laud. Duppa met with no opposition from Newcastle, who respected his scholarship and moral qualities. The boy’s equestrian training Newcastle undertook himself. ‘Too much contemplation spoils action,’ he wrote in a letter of advice to the prince. It was apparently taken to heart, for neither as boy nor man did Charles II put much store on study, despite having the philosopher Thomas Hobbes as his tutor while in exile.13 One piece of Newcastle’s wisdom, however, proved both accurate and prophetic. It was, his governor noted, unwise to place too much emphasis on religion, ‘for one may be a good man, but a bad King’.14 This was not a distinction that the young prince’s father ever understood.
Charles had moved away from his siblings but he still shared some of his lessons with James and family events continued to play an important part in his life as he rode with his governor and sat in the schoolroom. In the mid-1630s he had met his cousins, Charles Louis and Rupert, the sons of his exiled aunt, Elizabeth of Bohemia, and though it is often supposed that he was impressed by these older, rather dashing boys, there is little evidence to suggest how he reacted to them. Being an exile, as Charles would learn only too well, was far from romantic. And if the predicament of the palatine princes was not sufficient to alert the royal children to the vagaries of power politics, the arrival of their grandmother, Marie de Médici, in autumn 1638 certainly left an impression, both on them and a deeply sceptical English public.
It was a dubious distinction of this troublesome lady that she caused problems wherever she went. The rapprochement with Louis XIII of the 1620s had always been uneasy and in the struggle with Richelieu for influence over her son, Marie was simply not a clever enough politician to win. Her pro-Spanish machinations angered the chief minister of France while the staunchly Catholic queen mother abhorred the fact that the cardinal still allowed Huguenots freedom of worship, despite defeating them militarily. She grew increasingly impatient and her clumsy attempts to overthrow Richelieu culminated in the disaster of the so-called Day of the Dupes, in November 1630, after which she was exiled from the French court for a second time and confined to the chateau of Compiègne. The following year she fled to the Spanish Netherlands, living in Brussels and making what amounted to a state visit to The Hague in 1638, shortly after the inception of the new Dutch republic, which, despite the Calvinism of many of its leaders, was pleased to be able to welcome the disgraced mother of Louis XIII. Yet however warm the reception in Holland, it was never going to be a suitable place for Marie to reside. So her thoughts turned, in the same year, to her daughter in England and she decided to move to join Henrietta Maria, whom she had not seen for thirteen years.
Marie was fond of her children but a shortage of funds probably played as much a part in her desire to come to England as maternal yearning. Charles I was not keen to play host to his mother-in-law but he eventually accepted her arrival with dignity, ensuring that she had an appropriate reception at Harwich, after a miserable voyage across the North Sea, and going himself to Chelmsford in Essex to escort her to St James’s Palace, where the pregnant Henrietta and the rest of the family were waiting for her. When the carriage carrying Marie and her son-in-law arrived, the four eldest royal children witnessed an emotional reunion between their mother and grandmother while the king privately wondered how he was to meet the cost of providing for Marie and her surprisingly large entourage. His anxieties, given that he was himself having to find increasingly arcane and unpopular means of raising money during his personal rule, were well founded. Marie de Médici was an expense he could ill afford. He was also concerned about her influence over her daughter in matters of religion. Charles I’s religious policies were, if anything, even more disliked than his financial ones, and the tide of anti-Catholicism was growing. Increasingly, Puritan rhetoric was aimed at Henrietta Maria and the king did not need his mother-in-law to aggravate the situation.
What the royal children made of Marie is harder to say. They were not her only grandchildren; her daughters had families of their own in Spain and Italy and her younger son, Gaston, duke of Orléans, was an indulgent father to his daughter Anne, the supremely self-confident cousin not yet encountered by the little Stuarts. And just a month before Marie arrived in England, Anne of Austria had, at last, given birth to an heir to the French throne, the future Louis XIV, a child Marie would never see. Marie had her own apartments at St James’s and, according to Henrietta, her health improved after her arrival in England. ‘I found her at first a little changed,’ she wrote to her sister in Italy, ‘but it was just the hardship of the voyage. She is now looking well again, and has given me a second lease of life by being able to see her and serve her again.’15
Henrietta’s happiness at her mother’s arrival was soon tempered with sadness. At the beginning of January 1639, she gave birth to a fourth daughter, Katherine, who only lived a few hours. The grief-stricken queen was ill after the delivery but recovered well and was pregnant again by the autumn. The following summer, in July, she bore a third son, Henry, duke of Gloucester, who was born at Oatlands Palace in Surrey, a favourite residence of the queen. It was an easy delivery and the child showed every sign of health. It has been said that he was named for his mother and maternal grandfather, Henry IV of France, but it seems equally possible that Charles I was remembering his own brother and acknowledging the importance of Henry as an English regal name.
Welcome as this new prince was, the year 1640 ended with a tragic loss for the royal family. Just before Christmas, Princess Anne died. Her demise was not entirely unexpected, as her health had been poor throughout her short life. Van Dyck flattered to deceive in his family portrait, where his depiction of the infant in her sister Elizabeth’s arms suggests a bonny baby. Anne suffered from recurring respiratory problems, probably tuberculosis. This disease, so prevalent at the time, had been the scourge of the Tudors but was less common among the Stuarts. Though aware that Anne was often ill, the suddenness of her death, at which neither parent was present, distressed Charles and Henrietta. The little princess’s deathbed scene was described by the Victorian writer Mary Anne Everett Green in a manner almost as maudlin as the death of Little Nell in Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop. ‘Her health, from early infancy, was extremely delicate; a constant feverish cough showed a tendency to disease of the lungs, and before she had completed her fourth year, consumption terminated her existence.’ The child’s fortitude in the face of death was remarkable. Her attendants gently reminded her that she should say her prayers as the end approached and the exhausted child did her best. ‘I am not able to say my long prayer [the Lord’s Prayer],’ she told them, ‘but I will say my short one: Lighten mine eyes, oh Lord, lest I sleep the sleep of death.’ ‘This done,’ added Mrs Green, ‘the little lamb gave up the ghost.’ An autopsy report remarked ‘. . . it is easy to judge that this princess could not be long lived and that a great part of her life (under the good pleasure of God) has been at least as much owing to art as to nature.’16
Henry’s birth and Anne’s death symbolized the uncertainties facing the Stuart royal family in the year 1640. While the rhythm of their daily lives, of the schoolroom, of riding lessons, public occasion and private pastime continued, there were strong undercurrents of discontent flowing all around them, in the three kingdoms that their father had tried to govern as an absolute monarch, imposing his will on a realm that was increasingly fractured by religious differences and constitutional debate about his methods of government. As yet, this meant little to his five surviving offspring but there were subtle hints that an observant child could have noticed. Their parents were ageing and less relaxed. Henrietta, worn thin by the demands of childbearing, was beginning to lose the bloom and vivacity of her youth. Her devotion to her husband was unwavering but the king himself was beset by difficulties and the grey was starting to come in his beard. Prince Henry, the newest addition to the Stuart line, slept peacefully in his cradle but he would never really know his father, or experience the light-hearted childhood of his siblings. The world around them all was changing and they would be as severely affected by it as the humblest of their father’s subjects.