Bringing Them Up Royal: How the Royals Raised their Children from 1066 to the Present Day

by David Cohen

  His own turbulent childhood had marked James deeply; he wrote: ‘Neither deceive your self with many that say, they care not for their Parents curse, so they deserve it not. O invert not the order of nature, by judging your superiors, chiefly in your own particular! But assure your self, the blessing or curse of the Parents, hath almost ever a Prophetic power joined with it.’

  He then turned to more mundane matters. People would always be watching the king and so his table manners must be impeccable as he should often eat in public but he should avoid the slightest suggestion of gluttony – he must not be seen scoffing anything too exotic, such as a peacock stuffed with pomegranates. Henry should also not be ‘effeminate in your clothes, in perfuming, preening, or such like’, and no king should make ‘a fool of yourself in disguising or wearing long hair or nails, which are but excrements of nature’.

  Shakespeare was writing his great tragedies when James became King of England. In Hamlet, the Player King tells the Prince to match the gesture to the word. As Hamlet was written before the Basilikon, it seems James made use not just of the Bard’s ideas but almost his words. His son should pay attention ‘framing ever your gesture according to your present actions’. The king should take care ‘in your gesture; neither looking sillily, like a stupid pedant nor unsettledly, with an uncouth morgue, like a new-comeover Cavalier’. He had to be natural, grave and courteous or he would be accused of arrogance. In addition, he must be careful ‘not to keep nodding at every step’ to make himself popular, but he had – a question of image again – to look grave and ‘with a majesty when ye sit in judgment, or give audience’.

  As must be evident now, James wrote well. In the following extract, he compares the mind and body to an engine, instructing Henry that he

  should use a plaine, short, but stately style, both in your Proclamations and missives, especially to foreign Princes. And if your engine spur you to write any works, either in verse or in prose, I cannot but allow you to practise it: but take no longsome works in hand, for distracting you from your calling.

  He advised his son to write in English for there was nothing left to be said in Greek and Latin.

  From the mind, James turned to the body. The king should engage in pastimes which could improve his abilities and health and he repeated his novel use of the word ‘engine’ – ‘I grant it to be most requisite for a King to exercise his engine, which surely with idleness will rust and become blunt.’ But a king also needed to relax and could play cards, though James warned against chess ‘because it is over-wise and Philosophicke a folly’. At cards, the king’s son must ‘play always fair, that ye come not in use of tricking and lying in least: otherwise, if ye cannot keep these rules, my counsel is that ye all utterly abstain from these plays.’

  He ended by urging Henry to remember his duty to God and to ensure that his deeds reflected ‘the inward uprightness of your heart’ and showed ‘your virtuous disposition; and in respect of the greatness and weight of your burden, to be patient in hearing, keeping your heart free from preoccupation, ripe in concluding, and constant in your resolution’.

  It was better to take time to make decisions than to be hasty and then change one’s mind. James urged his son ‘to digest ever your passion, before ye determine upon anything’. Henry should judge every man according to his own offence and not punish or blame the father for the son, nor the brother for the brother. He should always judge the virtue of those he was dealing with and never seek excuses to take revenge.

  James’s finale to his son was florid, but heartfelt:

  I will for end of all, require you my Son, as ever ye think to deserve my fatherly blessing, to keep continually before the eyes of your mind, the greatness of your charge: And being content to let others excel in other things, let it be your chiefest earthly glory, to excel in your own craft.

  It was, among other things, a beautiful love letter. James, however, turned out to be as unlucky a parent as he had been a child.

  Prince Henry’s sickness

  In 1607 Queen Anne fell ill and asked Sir Walter Raleigh for a dose of some potion with which he had returned from the Americas (probably quinine). It was generous of Raleigh to send some, since he was her husband’s prisoner in the Tower – though his life there was none too harsh. His wife sometimes came to stay and they were allowed to share a bed. Raleigh was permitted to garden and he started writing his History of the World.

  After the quinine had helped her, the Queen started to visit Raleigh. James did not stop these visits, and the Queen once took her eldest son with her. Henry became fascinated by Raleigh and could not understand why he should be imprisoned. He is rumoured to have said: ‘No one but my father would keep such a bird in a cage.’ Henry now started to champion the idea of releasing a man who had been found guilty of plotting against his father, though James refused to countenance the idea.

  The summer of 1612 was unusually hot. Prince Henry seems to have enjoyed it, playing tennis and then ending the day with a swim in the Thames.

  On 10 October, Henry developed a fever. Over the next ten days, he seemed to improve, though he often had headaches. He was well enough by 25 October to dine with his father. Within twenty-four hours, Henry had sharp pinched faeces, which, James noted a little pedantically, Hippocrates considered a sign of serious illness. From that point on, he became more and more concerned about his son’s health.

  Two nights after he ate with his father, Henry suffered new symptoms: irregular breathing and twitching movements. The next day, when the fever was worse and Henry’s abdomen badly swollen, the best doctors could offer was senna and rhubarb. Henry then began to show symptoms of delirium. At one point, he jumped out of bed, babbling like a lunatic. He also started to defecate in his clothes as he stumbled about the room. Again, Raleigh’s elixir was sent for, but this time the quinine did not work. Henry finally died on 6 November 1612. James was distraught, and it was after his son’s death that he became infatuated with at least one younger man.

  Tongue-tied Charles now became James’s heir. He had recovered from his sickly childhood but seems to have been unable or unwilling to follow the subtle advice James had given Henry. It is tempting to suggest that Charles needed to prove he was strong because he had been weak as a boy, could not speak clearly and was the victim of persistent teasing by his brother. James never produced a second version of the Basilikon dedicated to his second son, Charles.

  The death of James I in 1625 signalled the end of over a century when British kings and queens had been determined to have well-educated children. Their offspring were unusually intellectual and even produced some serious writing – Henry VIII’s attack on Luther, Catherine Parr’s two books on theology, Elizabeth’s translations and the four tracts written by James I. His True Laws of Free Monarchies is also not quite the crude statement of the Divine Right of Kings many historians have assumed – the King had duties to God but also to the people. The fact that God had anointed him did not mean that he could ignore questions of justice and morality; there was a tripartite contract between ruler, the ruled and God.

  Charles I – the King who asked too much of his son

  Charles I does not seem to have grasped his father’s subtleties; after a disastrous attempt to marry a Spanish Princess, he married Henrietta Maria, the sister of the French King Louis XIII, in 1625. She was only fifteen years old, nine years younger than Charles. Their first son died when he was just a day old. Henrietta said she intended to forget the loss, while her mother blamed the midwife. But the Queen was soon pregnant again and, this time, her mother Marie de Medici sent for a French midwife and a ‘useful chair’ to make sure nothing went wrong (she also insisted the curtains around the royal bed should be a soothing green).

  Around 4 a.m. on 29 May 1630, Henrietta went into labour, and she was delivered of a very large and obviously healthy boy eight hours later. Charles I was so pleased that he gave the midwife £1,000 – a truly fabulous sum then. The baby was named Charles after hi
s father, but was largely brought up in the care of the Protestant Countess of Dorset to make sure he did not become a Catholic. The young Charles learned his lessons well, as an extraordinary incident reveals.

  By 1639, when relations between Charles and Parliament were at breaking point, the nine-year-old Prince of Wales was made to attend seven weeks of debate in Parliament. The boy sat in the House of Lords at one side of the empty throne. Charles said he would not attend these debates and then promptly did so, but ‘incognito’. He had a special box made and sat in it, sometimes with the Queen and sometimes with his daughter, Mary. The Chamber was not large and so the idea that the King could hide in a box without Members of Parliament realising his whereabouts was absurd. His father’s bizarre behaviour must have convinced many in Parliament that the King was not fit to rule.

  A year or so later, the King made another even more peculiar demand of his son. Thomas Wentworth, the Earl of Strafford, was Charles’s most able minister. When he convened a new Parliament in November 1640, the Commons impeached the Archbishop of Canterbury and started to sniff for Strafford’s head. John Pym, who was famous for his hostility to the divine rights of Kings, loathed Strafford. Strafford went on trial for high treason but the trial collapsed for lack of evidence. Pym now dredged up the tactic used against Thomas Seymour. He moved a Bill of Attainder, which simply stated Strafford was guilty and should be executed. Like any other Act, the Bill needed the Royal Assent. Charles promised Strafford that he would not sign. On 13 April 1641, the Commons passed the Bill with a huge majority of 204 to 59 and the Lords passed it, too, in early May.

  Charles believed he could save Strafford from execution at the very last minute, but he did not have the courage to refuse the Royal Assent and so he signed the Bill on 10 May. A scene must have followed of which sadly there is no known record. Charles summoned his son and told him that he relied on him to pull off an astonishing political coup: it would be up to the boy to persuade Parliament to spare Strafford. The next morning, the Prince of Wales attended the House of Lords to read out a desperate message. This time, his father was not hiding in his ludicrous box to hear his son beg the Lords. Now that Strafford had been condemned, would not Parliament be satisfied with just keeping him in prison to ‘fulfil the natural course of his life’? If Parliament conceded that, it would afford His Majesty ‘unspeakable contentment’. The boy read the message no doubt more eloquently than his tongue-tied father might have done, but there was no reprieve and on the 12 May Strafford was executed.

  As a result perhaps of seeing the Prince of Wales so often in the Chamber, Parliament tried to intervene in Charles’s education. With his mother a Catholic, the Commons wanted to ensure the Prince received a proper Protestant grounding and one of the most distinguished of the King’s enemies, John Hampden, suggested he be appointed as tutor. In a politically unwise move, the King refused.

  The dispute between King and Parliament grew worse and Charles was eventually forced to leave London in January. After some time trying to gather troops, he raised the royal standard in Nottingham on 22 August 1642. Both sides then recruited armies. The Civil War that followed brought the Prince of Wales, his younger brother James and their father very close. Henry VII, Henry VIII and James I had not taken their children into battle with them. Charles I’s son had to grow up faster than any British monarch for centuries.

  The King took both his sons to the Battle of Edgehill in 1642. Three years later, when he was only fourteen years old, Charles was made commander of the English forces in the West Country. The teenager did not have true charge but took part in some fighting. He spent three years on the campaign with his father, sharing a few successes and mostly failures, because Cromwell had better generals, more money and more resources. By spring 1646, the King was losing the war and decided that his sons should leave England for the relative safety of France, just as Henry Tudor had done 175 years earlier.

  The teenage Charles first made for the Isles of Scilly, where he and his tiny court had to live in a castle whose roof leaked badly. They then set sail for Jersey, where their lodgings were more comfortable. Charles finally reached France, where his mother was already living in exile and his first cousin, eight-year-old Louis XIV, was undisputed King.

  While Cromwell and Parliament controlled England, the situation in Scotland was more confused. The Scots would support King Charles as his father, James, had also been King of Scotland. They, however, insisted Charles I accept some harsh conditions. The Civil War unleashed a flood of preachers, prophets and men of God, who squabbled about such important theological issues as whether Christ had owned his own clothes. The most powerful group in Scotland was the Covenanters, who had bound themselves to keep Presbyterian doctrine. In 1640, the Scottish Parliament adopted the Covenant and the Covenanters became, in effect, the government of Scotland.

  The Scottish Parliament was deeply suspicious of the English Parliament so Charles I fled north. He thought, as he so often did, that he could control events but the Scots insisted he first accept the Covenant. The King refused and eventually the Covenanters lost patience. They handed him over to the commissioners of the English Parliament in early 1647.

  Charles’s sons were safe in Europe but no one was prepared to help them much – the boys even had trouble raising money to survive. After Paris, Charles moved to The Hague, where his sister Mary and brother-in-law, William II, Prince of Orange, seemed more likely to assist the royalist cause but they too did very little.

  Charles was far more loyal than many Princes of Wales – he was desperate to know just what was happening to his father. He wrote to General Thomas Fairfax, who effectively ruled with Cromwell, that: ‘we have no sources of information regarding the health and present condition of the King our father.’ They were forced to rely on ‘the common gazettes’, which reached Holland. Charles told Fairfax that he had sent a servant to present his humble respects to His Majesty but Parliament had prevented the man from seeing the King. Charles had reasons to believe that his father had been moved from the Isle of Wight, ‘with some intention of proceeding against himself with more rigour or of deposing him from the royal dignity given him by God alone or even of taking his life, the mere thought of which seems so horrible and incredible’. Charles acknowledged his father was in Fairfax’s power and begged him to consider ‘the choice you make’.

  Some historians claim Charles attached to the letter a blank piece of paper on which Parliament could write the conditions under which it would release the King, but, in her biography of Charles II, Antonia Fraser claims this to be a myth. Whatever the truth, Charles made it clear that Parliament could make considerable demands of him so long as his father was safe.

  Cromwell then tempted the young man and offered Charles his father’s throne if he would agree to the constitutional safeguards the King had already refused to accept. But Charles did not allow himself to be tempted. After some soul-searching by Parliament, the King was put on trial. The prospect of the trial provoked much reaction in the courts of Europe: there was no doubt that Charles I would be found guilty, but his son still hoped that he would be saved the block. Charles I’s youngest son and daughter were allowed to see their father the day before he was beheaded in 1649. The King embraced them and told them to maintain the dignity of the Stuarts. However, Cromwell did not allow them to send a letter to their brother. The Prince of Wales only found out that his father had been beheaded while he was playing tennis. One of his small band of courtiers read the dreadful news in a gazette and hurried to inform the Prince. Charles was devastated – the boy who had failed to save Strafford had also failed to save his own father. Biographies tend to gloss over his sense of loss and his attempts to console his mother and siblings. At the age of eighteen, Charles was head of a family which had lost its power, position and virtually all sources of income.

  When Charles I was executed, the English and Scottish crowns were still united. The Covenanters might have been politically radical but the
y also believed in the literal truth of the Bible, and the Old Testament is mostly the story of the kings of Israel. The Scottish Parliament was willing to allow Charles to take the Scottish throne so long as he did what his father had refused to do and signed the Covenant. As soon as Charles reached Scotland on 24 June 1650, he agreed, even though he disliked its doctrines and disliked many of the Covenanters even more. He had seen the dangers of his father’s stubborn defiance.

  Charles was crowned King of Scotland on 1 January 1651, but Cromwell had no intention of allowing a threat to develop in the North. He defeated Charles at the Battle of Worcester in September 1651. With his father dead and his inheritance lost, Charles was forced to flee again.

  Cromwell offered a reward of £1,000 for Charles’s head and warned that anyone who helped him would be guilty of treason and put to death. Posters proclaiming this were put up all over England. Charles had grown into a very tall man, which made it difficult for him to disguise himself. Nevertheless, he managed to get to Normandy. It was the start of a further nine years of exile.

  While Charles waited and waited with little money, and seemingly little hope, Cromwell invaded Ireland, fought the Dutch (in case William of Orange was tempted to help Charles) and even sent the Navy to the West Indies to remind the world of how powerful the English Commonwealth was; the very word ‘Commonwealth’ was, of course, a provocation to any royalty. As it established itself, however, Europe’s kings betrayed not just their own class, as a Marxist historian might have put it, but also their own family. The French were especially perfidious.

  Far from helping her son, Henrietta made things more difficult because she allowed her religious adviser to encourage Charles’s brother, James, to become a Catholic. In November 1654, Charles wrote to his mother, begging her to put the interests of her son above her faith: ‘I must conclude that if your Majesty does continue to proceed in the change of my brother’s religion I cannot believe Her Majesty does either believe or wish my return to England.’ If his mother ‘had any kindness towards him’, she would not persist, as no one in England would believe that Charles did not condone his brother abandoning the Protestant faith. That was folly at a time when he needed as much support in England as he could muster. Charles even invoked the memory of his father who, he claimed, had told James never to change his religion. Henrietta was more interested in her soul and that of James than in her oldest son’s political future, however.