The monarchs we never had
Prince Henry (1594–1612)
Who was he?
Henry Frederick Stuart, first child of James VI of Scotland and Anne of Denmark, was born on 19 February 1594 at Stirling Castle in Scotland. He was christened at midsummer and it is said that the central event in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, written shortly after, is based on the royal baptismal party.
In 1598, James put pen to vellum and wrote the Basilikon Doron – Greek for ‘royal gift’ – a guide for Henry’s conduct when he, too, became king. In it, James warned his heir of meddlesome ministers and expounded the doctrine of the divine right of kings.
After the death of Elizabeth I in March 1603, the Scottish king was welcomed to the English throne as James I by wildly jubilant subjects. Most of their joy was actually undisguised relief over the smooth succession and the avoidance of the devastating civil war that many of them had feared. Suddenly they had an experienced king, a relatively young man wed to a king's daughter, and the father of three healthy children. England also fell in love with the new heir to the throne: the handsome, athletic and highly promising nine-year-old Prince Henry.
Henry had become duke of Rothesay, earl of Carrick and Lord of the Isles immediately on his birth. Following his father's accession to the English throne, he was made duke of Cornwall and, seven years later, was invested prince of Wales and earl of Chester, thus bringing together the Scottish and English titles that have been held by male heirs to the British throne ever since.
From his birth, Henry was the focus of myth-makers – clergymen, poets, noblemen – all eager to impose their own agendas. His reputation for temperance and for chivalry and his patronage of artists, architects, and men of letters seemed to promise that the reign of Henry IX would be another renaissance. For those frustrated with James's seeming religious toleration, Henry would be a warrior king, the anti-Catholics’ champion who would unite Protestant Europe and drive the Papists into oblivion. He would undo the lifework of his peacemaker father and rekindle the age-old conflict against Spain. He would promote English patriotism not only through war, but through aggressive colonisation. He would rebuild the crumbling navy and make England a power to be respected and feared.
The young prince apparently absorbed these expectations and attempted to fulfil them. He excelled in martial sports, was a fine horseman and was fascinated by naval and military history. He carried on a correspondence with Henry VI of France, befriended the imprisoned Sir Walter Ralegh and supported the colonisation of Virginia. The Puritans held up his austere, disciplined life as an example as well as a rebuke to the decadence of the Jacobean court. Henry was quite the Protestant – when his father proposed a French marriage, he answered that he was 'resolved that two religions should not lie in his bed’.
How did he die?
In November 1612, 18-year-old Henry took an unseasonable dip in the highly polluted Thames and fell ill. He delayed taking the medicine that Ralegh had sent from the Tower (probably quinine, which might have broken the debilitating fever) and died on 6 November, probably of typhoid – a diagnosis that is reasonably certain because of the surviving records of the post-mortem examination. However, rumours implicating James in his son’s death circulated. After all, said some, the king had been heard to grumble ominously: ‘Will he bury me alive?’ after watching retainers fawning over the handsome young prince at court …
Henry's death provoked a widespread outpouring of grief from the prince's family and household, from the subjects who lined London's streets for his funeral, and from the English and Scottish poets who marked the occasion in verse. When Henry's chaplain Daniel Price lamented in a memorial sermon that his master ‘would have been subject for all pens and object for all eyes’, he was half right: Henry immediately became a subject for all pens, as memorial poems were composed, printed, and circulated as early as his funeral procession.
What were the consequences?
It is difficult to gauge the extent to which British and European history would have been different had Henry lived. It is possible that the well-informed Protestant prince, once king, would have adopted policies agreeable to Parliament, keeping it in voluntary submission to the crown and thereby preventing the English Civil Wars, in which his younger brother, as Charles I, lost his head.
On the other hand, if Henry had lived, would he have, as the Puritans wanted, led England into a disastrous continental war?
In any case, Henry was certainly a hard act for Charles to follow. Many of the latter’s character faults can be traced back to a childhood spent in the shadow of a talented and universally loved older brother – his lack of confidence, his vacillation when decisions had to be made, his often fool-hardy actions – faults that seem to have led him inexorably towards his crisis with Parliament and, ultimately, to his beheading.
