April 9th, 1649: The Birth of a Royal Bastard?

1649 was the year that Charles II lost a father and gained a son. It had been less than three months since his father had been executed on the orders of a rebel parliament, dominated by Oliver Cromwell, and in the  moment that Charles I ceased to exist, in the eyes of millions the dead king's eighteen year-old son became Charles II, By the Grace of God, King of England, King of Scotland and King of Ireland. To them, the republic recently declared in the British Isles was both illegal and blood-stained.

The abolition of the British monarchy at the end of one of the most destructive and brutal civil wars in European history had scattered the surviving Royal Family to the winds. Charles himself was living in the Netherlands, where his eldest sister, Mary, had married the Prince of Orange and provided asylum for Charles when he was forced to flee England and lead the royalist resistance abroad. They had been joined by their second brother, fifteen year-old James, a strikingly handsome blond who was already being eaten up with cancerous hatred for parliament's murder of his father. Two of their siblings, thirteen year-old Elizabeth and eight year-old Henry, both of whom had been with their father on the day of his execution, were still being held in a republican jail in England and the youngest, four year-old Minette, had been smuggled out of England by a loyal palace servant and brought safely to Paris, where she was reunited with her grieving mother, Queen Henrietta-Maria.

To say that Henrietta-Maria was devastated by her husband's murder is something of an understatement. The bright and vivacious French princess who had been Charles I's wife for twenty-four years was now, at the age  of thirty-nine, a widow. In her heyday, Henrietta-Maria had been the first lady of a court celebrated for its elegance and its patronage of the arts. She had also been demonised in parliamentarian circles for her Catholicism, her foreign birth and her antipathy towards democracy. She had been unfairly blamed by parliamentarians for leading her husband into a rift with Parliament and thereby causing the civil war. Charles I needed no encouragement to believe in the cause of absolute monarchy and, in any case, Henrietta-Maria had taken absolutely no interest in politics for most of her married life. She had all-but worshipped the ground her husband walked on and Catholic and French envoys had often been frustrated by the Queen's refusal to recommend a policy which she thought her husband might not like to hear.

The news that her beloved husband had been beheaded outside the banqueting hall of the royal family's favourite London home was broken to Henrietta-Maria on a January evening by her Master of the Horse, Henry Jermyn. Whilst her servants collapsed weeping hysterically around her, Henrietta-Maria did not speak or move. It was only when her childhood friend, the Duchesse de Vendôme, came to visit her, hours later, that Henrietta-Maria, now the Queen Mother, collapsed shrieking and moaning with 'her extreme grief.' She sent news to her sister-in-law, the Queen Mother of France, that her husband's death 'had made her the most afflicted woman on the wide earth.' For days and even weeks after Charles's execution, Henrietta-Maria had sat hugging the hands of her ladies-in-waiting, piteously declaring: 'I have lost a king, a husband and a friend, whose loss I can never sufficiently mourn, and this separation must render the rest of my life an endless suffering.'

Under the circumstances, it was understandable that Henrietta-Maria, who was usually so omnipresent (even occasionally overbearing) in her children's lives was apparently unaware that her eldest had just impregnated his most recent mistress. The Queen Mother was in any case uninterested in her son's bed hopping and was instead focussing all her attention on trying to get her children, Elizabeth and Henry, released from Cromwell's prisons. She was also distracted when Paris itself erupted in riots aimed at overthrowing the government, which brought back terrible memories of the days when London too had first been convulsed by protests. It would be months before the indomitable Henrietta-Maria had recovered her fighting spirit and galvanised herself to endure any sacrifice and any pain to ensure that the cause of the monarchy triumphed in the end. 

Meanwhile, in Rotterdam, the young and exiled Charles II was forced to confront the fact that he had become a father. Had his father still been alive, it is hard to imagine how the devout and monogamous King would have reacted to his son's womanising. Charles I had never taken a mistress, either before or during his marriage, and he expected his sons to do likewise. Charles II, however, enjoyed sex far too much to adhere to his father's moral code. Furthermore, he enjoyed the company of women, both inside and outside of the bedroom and he was of the cheerful persuasion that God would never damn a man for seeking a little pleasure. The eighteen year-old prince had certainly not been a virgin when he first seduced Lucy Walter, a beautiful Welsh socialite. But then, neither was she.

Lucy Walter, the daughter of a wealthy Welsh landowner, was the same age as Charles II and she had led a similarly adventurous romantic life. Described by the writer John Evelyn as a beautiful, flirtatious but stupid brunette, Lucy had enjoyed several lovers after her family's home had been ransacked and destroyed by Cromwell's armies during the civil war. Her first lover whose name we know for certain was Lord Algernon Sidney, a republican. She later left Algernon's bed for that of his younger brother, Robert, a royalist. Unlike his brother, who had sided with parliament during the Civil War, Robert was a colonel in the royalist army and he was eventually forced to flee abroad to Holland when the monarchy was overthrown. With her family's fortune destroyed and little chance of it being reclaimed under a republican government, Lucy followed Robert into exile and the two lovers were re-united in Rotterdam, quickly picking up where they had left off. It was through Robert that Lucy first met Prince Charles, who became her lover within days of being introduced.

Not long after they first slept together, Lucy discovered that she was pregnant and both she and Charles seemed fairly insistent that he was the father. However, some of Charles's court-in-exile were less convinced. In the first place, what had been a minor royal love affair when Lucy first announced her pregnancy had suddenly become something much more significant when the act of regicide in London turned Lucy's lover from a prince into a king. The eyes of the world were now fixed upon the exiled House of Stuart to see what they would do next and it was not exactly ideal for them to see the young king parading around town with his disreputable mistress proudly flaunting her swollen belly. 

Secondly, there were many in Charles's entourage who were by no means certain that he was the father of Lucy's baby. There is little to suggest that Lucy broke off her fling with Robert Sidney once she began sleeping with Prince Charles; Charles himself hadn't minded sharing. He had no intention of being faithful to her; why should he demand the same of her? Whatever his faults, Charles II did not preach a sexual double standard to his mistresses and in the seventeenth century, that is surely to his credit.

This controversial baby, born in a private house Lucy was renting in Rotterdam, was a boy, which made the debate about his paternity even more important. He was christened James, a good Stuart family name, and, at Charles's insistence, christened a Protestant too. In time, when his throne was restored to him, Charles II showered lands and titles on the boy he affectionately called "my Jimmy" - he became Duke of Monmouth, Earl of Doncaster, Earl of Dalkeith and Baron Scott. He was also to marry Anne, Duchess of Buccleuch, one of the great society heiresses of the 1660s, thereby acquiring a second ducal title.

Given all that, it seems clear that Charles II believed himself to be baby James's father. But was he? Many in the court-in-exile quite simply didn't believe Lucy and believed she had been able to get away with it because everybody else was too busy with other things to investigate her claims properly. Had Charles's mother Henrietta-Maria been in a more observant emotional state, it's highly unlikely that the out-spoken and refreshingly frank queen would not have queried the various holes in Lucy's story. For instance, the baby had been born only seven months after Charles's arrival in the Netherlands. Yes, premature babies then and now were possible, but considering the fact that Lucy had also been sleeping with Robert Sidney for months before Charles reached The Hague, wasn't it far more likely that he was the father? Years later, when his most notorious mistress, Barbara Villiers, presented him with a string of bastard children, Charles chivalrously acknowledged two of them - Anne and Benedicta - as his own, even though it is almost certain that he was not their biological father. Charles II was too moved by the sting that bastardy left on a child in the seventeenth century and he knew it was a sting which only a royal father might alleviate that he put his name to at least two children that were not his out of kindness. Might James Crofts have been the first?

We shall never know if Charles II was really the father of James Crofts. Many at the time believed he wasn't and several of those who insisted that Robert Sidney was the baby's sire were perfectly well-placed to know the truth. Against that, however, must be weighed the fact that Charles himself gave every appearance of believing the baby was his. Chivalrous he may have been, but if he had really thought that James was not his child, it is difficult to believe he would have given him so many aristocratic titles in the years after the restoration of the monarchy. Equally, of course, it is quite possible that both theories are correct - Charles believed he was the father but those around him who believed Sidney was were correct in their suspicions.

The love affair between Charles II and Lucy Walter soon fizzled out and both moved on to other conquests. In Lucy's case, more men and in Charles's, the attempted liberation of Scotland from the republican armies. Lucy later moved to Paris, where she enjoyed a string of lovers, but died at the age of twenty-eight, possibly from tuberculosis. Years later, some of her acquaintances would claim that she had once told them that during her stay in Rotterdam, she and Charles had secretly been married. By the time the story surfaced in England, Charles II was back on the throne and actually married to a Portuguese princess, Catherine of Braganza. Charles and Catherine had not married until 1662, four years after Lucy's death, which meant that even if the stories of a clandestine marriage were true, it did not affect the legality of Catherine's marriage. However, as the years passed and Queen Catherine failed, time and time again, to produce a living child and King Charles gallantly refused to divorce her, the rumours that he had once been Lucy Walter's husband took on a more sinister significance. Because of the Queen's childlessness, the King had no other legitimate children and if he had married Lucy Walters at the end of the civil war, didn't that mean that their child was now the rightful heir to the throne?

Tragically and stupidly, the young duke (above) seemed to believe this story and he grew more and more obsessed with the idea that he was his father's heir. The fact that he might not even have been King Charles's biological son, let alone his legitimate one, was conveniently forgotten. When Charles II died of kidney failure in 1685, the throne passed to his brother James, a convert to Catholicism who now inherited the throne as King James II. Buoyed along by his deluded (or feigned) belief that his parents had been married, despite the fact that neither he nor anybody else could find any documentation to prove his theory, Monmouth rose in rebellion against his uncle. Many supported him - eager to see a Protestant king instead of a Catholic one. The rebellion failed and on July 15th, four months after his alleged father's death, James, Duke of Monmouth was gruesomely and incompetently beheaded in the Tower of London. It took over five blows to severe the head of a man who may, or may not, have been the first-born son of the "Merry Monarch."

Discovery of King Henri's skull

At the height of the French Revolution, the royal tombs of France were desecrated, violated and their contents scattered to the four winds in an excess of urban unrest. In the square outside the Basilica of Saint Denis in Paris, the skulls of the dead kings and queens were used as footballs or target practise by the revolutionary mob. Most were never recovered and to this day most of the magnificent restored tombs in Saint Denis are empty shells. 

Now, it seems that the skull belonging to the founding sovereign of the Bourbon dynasty, whose rule was overthrown in the Revolution of 1789 - 1792, has been discovered. King Henri IV, who ruled France from 1589 until 1610, unified the kingdoms of France and Navarre, as well as bringing about an end to the destructive Wars of Religion. He was (and to some extent still is) a popular monarch, whose assassination by a deranged religious fanatic in 1610 plunged the nation into mourning and political crisis. He was succeeded by his young son, Louis XIII, although practical power was held by his mother, Marie de Medici. 

The story of Henri IV's skull is a fascinating one. After being stolen during the ransacking of the cathedral, Henri's alleged skull somehow ended up in the possession of a Parisian tax collector, where it has remained since 1955. (Its exact whereabouts between 1789 and 1955 are still somewhat shady.) A team of nineteen scientists has, however, concluded beyond reasonable doubt that it is indeed the skull of King Henri IV and that the marks made by the dagger during the frenzied assassination can still be seen.

In a rather touching and appropriate gesture, the scientific team decided not to hand the monarch's head over to the current French government, but rather to entrust it to the King's closest living descendant - His Royal Highness Prince Louis de Bourbon, Duc d'Anjou (right). His Royal Highness described the moment as "very emotional" and stated that whilst he hoped to return the skull to its original resting place at the basilica of Saint Denis, where it can rest alongside the remains of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, he is aware that as a claimant to the French throne he may not be able to persuade the current French republican government. The prince says that is profoundly aware of the "familial and moral" obligation he now has to find Henri IV a proper resting place. 

At the time of his assassination, King Henri IV was survived by both of his wives. His ex-wife, a glamorous and delightfully badly-behaved princess, known popularly as "La Reine Margot," and his current queen, an Italian aristocrat Marie de Medici. His legitimate children (all from his second marriage) included the new king, Louis XIII, who reigned from 1610 to 1643, his rebellious younger brother Gaston, and their three sisters - Elisabeth, Christine and Henrietta-Maria. The lovely Elisabeth became Queen of Spain through her marriage to King Philip IV, five years after her father's murder; the elegant but temperamental Christine married Vittore-Amadeo, Duke of Savoy and had five children and the youngest, Henrietta-Maria, married King Charles I of Britain and became the mother of two future British kings, Charles II and James II. 

For The Guardian's report on the hunt for Henri IV's skull, click here. 

December 8th, 1542: The Birth of Mary, Queen of Scots

A thick snow and a treacherous layer of ice enveloped the Scottish countryside as the faithful made their way to church to observe the Feast of the Immaculate Conception on that dark and frigid day in 1542. Now, the feast and its name are frequently misunderstood, for the Immaculate Conception has in fact nothing to do with the virgin birth or the Incarnation of Christ, as is so often assumed. Instead, it is the belief that at the moment of her conception in the womb of her mother, Saint Anne, the Holy Virgin - having been conceived by normal and earthly means - underwent a pre-natal miracle, whereby she was preserved forever from the stain of Original Sin. She therefore became, in the moment of her conception, full of grace. Debates about this philosophical concept had both bedevilled and enlightened the Middle Ages, where the issue of whether or not the Immaculate Conception was true, false or unknowable had been hotly debated within the universities and monasteries of the West. It was only in 1854 that it was infallibly defined as requisite dogma for believing Roman Catholics, but it had enjoyed its own feast day in the west for nearly eight centuries by that stage. It had not always been the happiest or most tranquil of theological beliefs. The Dominican Order were still, in the sixteenth century, objecting that the entire notion of the Immaculate Conception pertained to blasphemy and implicitly belittled the sacrifice at Golgotha. Even some of the medieval church's most devout enthusiasts for veneration of Mary in its fullest form had been opposed to the Feast - Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, in particular, had waxed into near apoplectic fury at the very mention of it. Aquinas insisted that Mary had become immaculate at the end of her life, not at the beginning. Bernard was more aggressive, dispatching a scathing letter to the priests of Lyon Cathedral when he heard they were contemplating celebrating a Mass in honour of the Immaculate Conception in 1150. As far as he was concerned, venerating Mary's conception in Saint Anne's womb was tantamount to venerating a sexual encounter - "Or are we to assume that there was no sin where lust was not absent?" he snapped. The belief in Mary's innate sinlessness, however, was particularly popular amongst lay Christians, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, and the Franciscan order, which had much more flexibility and sensitivity when it came to the feelings of the laity, leant their support to the Immaculate Conception, in opposition to the Dominicans, who still zealously opposed it.

By the beginning of the fifth decade of the sixteenth century, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception was therefore an optional festival to be observed as the diocese, priest or congregation felt appropriate. If any Scotsman or woman had been able to brave the horrific winter blizzards to make it to the local chapel in time for Mass that day, it is likely that they would have been attending a church which did celebrate the festival. In Scotland, it was generally popular with Catholics across most of the social hierarchy. If any parishioners had been attending Mass in the tiny chapels which dotted the countryside in the forty snow-covered miles between the Palace of Linlithgow and the Palace of Falkland, it may have been that at the very moment sweet hymns, prayers and incense were wafting their way towards Heaven in praise of a celestial Mary that their thoughts would have been interrupted as they heard the royal messengers thunder-by on horseback outside, carrying news that another, more terrestial Mary had entered the world.

The 27 year-old Queen of Scotland, Marie, had not relished sending out those messengers. She had wanted more than anything to give her husband a male heir. Both of their sons - James and Robert - had died as infants and now the hopes of the Stewart dynasty rested on the tiny, frail little princess sleeping contentedly in her sumptuous cradle. Her mother, Marie de Guise, was a woman whose entire life had been spent as living proof of accepting the things one cannot change. She recovered quickly, both from the rigours of childbirth and from the disappointment of the baby's gender. The same could not be said for her royal husband, who was lying in the midst of a soul-crushing depression in his apartments at Falkland Palace, not having made it to his wife's side either because of the weather or because of his mental health. When the news was brought to him that Queen Marie had been delivered of a girl, rather than a boy, the King lay in his bed stock-still for a moment, before muttering, "It came from a woman, and it will end in a woman." Then, he turned his face to the wall and gave up even the pretence of wanting to carry on living.

James V's cryptic comment was an acknowledgement of his ancestress, Marjorie Bruce, a Scottish princess from whom the Stewarts had acquired their subsequent claim to the throne. The rule of the Stewarts had begun with a woman and, in the shape of his tiny daughter, it would end with one as well. No woman could possibly hope to hold a kingdom as troublesome as Scotland, considering how many men had failed to do so over the last few centuries. That Mary would prove incapable of holding Scotland under her rule was true, but her father could not known how incorrect he was in saying the Stewarts' association with monarchy would die with her. It is thanks to Mary that James V's descendants still sit on the British throne today.

The King was ensconced at Falkland Palace when he heard the news of his daughter's birth, one of the Scottish royal family's most conspicuously magnificent homes. The birth itself had taken place at Linlithgow Palace, a fantastically beautiful residence which seemed like something lifted right out of a fairy tale. With its many turrets and graceful stonework, rolling green fields and breathtaking setting beside a loch, Linlithgow belonged to a world of Arthurian legend, rather than 16th century reality. It was here, in its luxurious and pretty confines, that Marie de Guise had chosen to give birth for the third time since her marriage to the King of Scots, a man curiously torn between his twin obsessions of the sacred and the sexual. He had loved God as he had loved women - intensely, viscerally, potently. He had been married before, to Princess Madeleine de Valois, a delicate teenager who had not long survived the traumatic sea journey to the harsher climate of Scotland.

Marie de Guise had been born in 1515 into one of the greatest and most ancient families of the French aristocracy, the House of Guise, whose wealth and power had already begun to rival that of the Valois, France's royal family at the time. As a young girl, she had been married off to the Duc de Longueville and with him she had become the mother of two sons. When the duke died in 1537, he left Marie a widow at the relatively tender age of twenty-two. She was not beautiful, or even particularly pretty, but she was intelligent, gracious, sophisticated and determined. She was also fabulously well-connected and had proven her ability to procreate thanks to her first marriage. By the standards of her day, Marie was a tall woman and hearing news of this, King Henry VIII of England, recently made a widower by his third wife's death in childbed, proposed marriage to the fetching French heiress. Henry too was tall (as well as increasingly wide) and he proclaimed, "I am a big man and I need a big woman!" Marie replied that although she was a big woman, she had a tiny neck and therefore couldn't risk a marriage like poor Anne Boleyn's. Henry's pique was turned into incandescent fury when Marie added insult to injury by marrying his troublesome nephew, James, King of Scots, a year later. The thwarted monarch then flounced off into a disastrously short-lived marriage to the Princess of Cleves. Only time would show what a dangerous enemy he had become to Marie de Guise.

Now, four years later, it was difficult to tell if Marie regretted her decision to marry into Edinburgh rather than London. The great love of her life had been her first husband, not her second, and the Scottish nobility was fractious, quarrelsome and treacherous. Many resented the "Auld Alliance," the ancient diplomatic ties between Scotland and France, which Marie represented and more and more of the people were beginning to turn towards the new Protestant religion, rather than the old Catholic faith which Marie's family in France considered themselves to be one of the European champions of. Still, perhaps Scotland with all its troubles was preferable to a marriage with Henry VIII. After all, earlier that year he had cut off the head of his fifth wife, a flighty and vivacious teenager who had allegedly been carrying on affair with a handsome young buck of the court behind her corpulent husband's sizable back. To butcher one wife was extraordinary; to butcher a second looked like a worrying habit. Moreover, Marie had never intimated by word or gesture that she found Scotland anything other than delightful. In her justly acclaimed 1968 biography of Mary of Scots, Lady Antonia Fraser wrote that her mother Marie was "a woman of innate tact [who] was at pains to please her husband by praising his country. Fife, for example, she admired extravagantly, and confided to James that although she had been warned in France that she would find Scotland a barbarous country, destitute of comforts, ever since her arrival she had found the exact reverse". Scotland was both more civilised and more luxurious than its European counterparts liked to pretend, but it was also a political minefield as Marie eventually discovered to her cost.

The thick blanket of snow presented Scotland at its most rugged, its most perfectly and spectacularly beautiful on the day of Mary Stewart's birth. But, it would not be a true part of Mary's story if it was not saturated in drama and intrigue. Scotland was in the depth of one of the worst national catastrophes and humiliations in its history. Her father the King had badly bungled his torturous diplomatic interactions with England or, more specifically, with his uncle King Henry. The rapid deterioration in Anglo-Scottish relations had been sped-up by a lethal combination of King James's poor decisions and King Henry's venomous cruetly. On November 24th, two weeks before the princess's birth, the two armies had clashed at the Battle of Solway Moss. The result was a devastating defeat for Scotland, in which half of the fighting flower of the Scottish army lost their lives. Grief stricken and traumatised by what he had seen on the battlefield and realising that his kingdom was now essentially defenceless in the face of his uncle's vindictive wrath, King James had returned to his palace at Falkland, taking to his bed. And it was there that the news that his two dead baby boys and thousands of dead soldiers had been replaced by a screaming, useless, defenceless girl was brought to him by messengers who knew they could expect no reward for bringing such tidings.

Back at Linlithgow, Queen Marie proceeded like a model of propriety. Everything must be done according to the rule book of royal etiquette and it was arranged that the princess should be baptised in the nearby Church of Saint Michael, which stood at the palace gates and which can still be seen today. The baby had been born a trifle premature, with the Queen perhaps going into labour as a result of the worry caused by the recent defeat of the national army. The result was unhelpful rumours that the "Queen was delivered before her time of a daughter, a very weak child, and not likely to live". The Queen Dowager of Hungary heard later that it was a miracle the baby had lived to see Christmas given the state she was in at the time of her birth.

Much of what happened next sounds miraculous or, rather, improbable. James V died six days after his daughter's birth, at the age of thirty. His daughter thus became a reigning queen before her one week-birthday and his 27 year-old widow assumed the Herculean task of ruling Scotland for her, struggling to preserve Mary's inheritance in the face of the epic political turmoil James V left in his wake. It was a task which would have felled a lesser-woman and whatever one might think of the de Guise clan, Marie de Guise was never anything less than an heroic woman.

And so it was, in a turret room in the north-west tower overlooking a freezing loch that the tragic, mesmerising and improbable life of Mary, Queen of Scots first began. It was a life which was to bewitch and betray, dazzle and destroy, in equal measure. She was the daughter of a great woman and a troubled man, born into a turbulent age. It's difficult to think of a more appropriate entrance for the life of one of history's most enigmatic and controversial queens.

December 7th, 1545: The Birth of Lord Henry Darnley

Henry, Lord Darnley, was destined to become the second husband of Mary, Queen of Scots and thus the father of King James, the first man to unite the thrones of England, Ireland and Scotland under one monarchy. Darnley and his wife Queen Mary had birthdays one day apart from each other - tomorrow, December 8th, was Mary's birthday, as I hope to post about tomorrow.

Later, Henry Darnley was known for many things - his good looks, his sexuality, his alcoholism, his temper, his narcissism and, in the end, his grotesque and mysterious murder. At the time of his birth, however, there was nothing to suggest that the baby aristocrat's prospects were anything less than golden. 

He was born at Temple Newsam House, a luxurious mansion in the north of England which had been given as a wedding present to his parents, the Earl and Countess of Lennox. The earl was technically a member of the Scottish nobility, but he had been living in exile in England ever since his disastrous support for the English invasion of Scotland had lead to him being branded a traitor. 

His wife, Countess Margaret, was a niece of King Henry VIII of England and, as such, she occupied a privileged place in the English royal hierarchy. Beautiful and glamorous, with a strong personality, Margaret had once been one of the bright young things of the court aristocracy and she had enjoyed friendships with men and women as diverse as Mary Tudor, Anne Boleyn, Mary Shelton, Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard. In her younger days, however, she had also been something of a scandalous figure, having embarked upon torrid affairs with two members of the ambitious but attractive Howard family. In 1536, she had fallen madly in love with Queen Anne Boleyn's uncle, Lord Thomas Howard, at precisely the time when Queen Anne's political credit was falling. Thomas had been imprisoned by the King and the poor man later died incarcerated for having dared make love to the King's niece. Margaret had apparently failed to learn her lesson from this tragic affair and a few years later, she became the lover of Queen Catherine Howard's brother, Lord Charles Howard. When this liaison was discovered in 1541, an enraged King Henry, who was ironically obsessed with the concept of female sexual purity, had Margaret temporarily detained in an abandoned convent. She only escaped further punishment because everybody's attention soon switched to the much greater scandal of Queen Catherine's adultery, later in the same year.

Sufficiently chastened by her experience this time around, Margaret re-invented herself as an icon of Catholic royal propriety and she willingly entered into a marriage with Matthew Stewart, Earl of Lennox, the King's trusty Scottish ally - or dogsbody, depending on one's point-of-view. The baby born in 1545 (Alison Weir in her book Mary Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Darnley suggests it may have been 1546) was christened Henry in the King's honour and the ageing monarch also agreed to stand as godfather to the infant who bore his name. Margaret had, apparently, been forgiven.

Lord Darnley - a courtesy title borne by the eldest son and heir of the earls of Lennox - blossomed into a handsome and intelligent youth. His parents ensured he received a superb education, even sending him abroad to France once they felt his English tutors had no more to teach him. He was well-read in the Classics, History, Theology, art, music and languages (he was fluent in English, French and Latin, as well as understanding parts of Gaelic.) Whilst studying in Paris, the French writer Castelnau wrote that it was "not possible to see a more beautiful prince." Darnley stood at about 6'3" in height and he had a slim, elegant, toned physique, fair hair and a pretty, almost effeminate, face. His parents idolised him and he had a ready charm, which he used to get his own way and to get both women and men to fall for his charms. How far he managed to persuade the men to fall is still a matter of debate, although Alison Weir makes a very convincing argument that Darnley's numerous teenage sexual conquests probably numbered as many men as they did women.

Beneath the surface of beauty, charm, wealth and intellect, however, Lord Darnley hid an altogether less attractive side of his personality - as anyone familiar with the life of Mary, Queen of Scots will tell you. Although he was an intellectual, he was not clever and he possessed an explosive temper. Spoiled and entitled, he was also indecisive, selfish and deceitful. His manners appeared only in a position where he was the weaker party, when he was placed in any position of authority he exhibited "a very insolent disposition". Much worse than his promiscuity or his extravagance was his alcoholism, since there can be no real doubt that Darnley was a functioning alcoholic by the time he reached the age of twenty. 

This tragic and often contemptible youth, who began life on this day in the final years of Henry VIII's reign, in a splendid Yorkshire mansion, was to acquire some measure of contemporary importance because his good-looks and connections managed to seduce the equally beautiful Queen of Scotland. And, by her, he became the father of a future king. But Darnley's real impact on history only came on a chilly morning of February 1567 in Edinburgh, when he was found half-naked and strangled amidst the smouldering ruins of a house blown apart by gunpowder. It was only then that Henry, Lord Darnley finally became a figure of importance, acquiring a significance in death far beyond anything he had enjoyed in life, sparking one of the greatest and most devastating political scandals in history.

James II's wedding suit

Via Tea at Trianon comes an account of the sumptuous wedding suit worn by the future King James II when he married his second bride, the lovely Italian princess, Maria-Beatrice of Modena, in 1673. The suit, shown above, is still preserved and on display in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

James's time as King in Britain was short, lasting only from 1685 until he was deposed in 1688. He and Maria-Beatrice were to spend the rest of their lives in exile, as guests of the French Royal Family, with Maria becoming an important figure in Court life at the recently-completed palace of Versailles, where she was much admired.

James, then Duke of York, had been married before, to the late Lady Anne Hyde, who had lost her battle to cancer two years earlier. With Anne, James had fathered eight children, although only two survived - the future queens, Mary II and Anne. With the beautiful Maria (or, to give her her full name, Maria-Beatrice-Eleanora-Anna-Margareta-Isabella d'Este of Modena), James was to have a further seven children - Catherine-Laura (died at the age of ten months), Isabella (died aged five), Charles, Duke of Cambridge (died as a baby during the smallpox epidemic of 1677), Elizabeth (died a few weeks after her christening), Charlotte-Maria (died of a possible allergy at the age of three months), James Francis Edward, regarded as "King James III" by his father's supporters and "the Old Pretender" by those who supported James II's exile (1688 - 1766) and Princess Louisa-Maria (1692 - 1712), who was born during the royal couple's exile in France.

The couple and their surviving children lived out most of their exile in the magnificent château of St. Germain-en-Laye (below), a gift to them from King James's cousin, Louis XIV. James II died there in the autumn of 1701 and he was originally buried in the Chapel of Saint Edmund in the Church of the English Benedictines on the Rue St Jacques in Paris. James was followed to the grave eleven years later by his daughter, the unmarried Princess Louisa-Maria, who died at St.-Germain at the age of nineteen in the spring of 1712, to her mother's great distress. The princess's body was taken to the Church of the English Benedictines, to rest alongside her late father's. Queen Maria-Beatrice died six years later in the early summer of 1718, after an agonising battle with cancer. She was buried in the Abbey of the Visitation of Saint Mary at Chaillot. The bodies of King James, Queen Maria-Beatrice and Princess Louisa-Maria were all destroyed during the French Revolution.

After a failed attempt to retake the British thrones in 1715, James-Francis re-settled in Rome, where he married Princess Maria-Casimira of Poland and fathered two sons - including the future "Bonnie Prince Charlie" of legend. James-Francis or, "James III and VIII" as his most loyal adherents had known him, passed away as a guest of the Papacy on New Year's Day 1766 and he was granted the honour of being buried in Saint Peter's Basilica.


Today, James II and Maria-Beatrice of Modena have no mutual living descendants. All of their children, bar James-Francis, died before they could reproduce and of James-Francis's two children - "Bonnie" Charles-Edward's marriage to Princess Louisa-Maximiliana von Stolberg-Gedern was barren and his younger brother, Henry-Benedict, entered the Roman Catholic Church and became Cardinal of Santa Maria.

"The Queen of Maryland"

Historical novelist, Elena Maria Vidal, profiles the life of Henrietta-Maria of France, Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland, wife of King Charles I and mother of Kings Charles II and James II. The daughter of King Henri IV of France and his second wife, Marie de Medici, Henrietta-Maria married the new King of England in 1625 and remained by his side until the traumas of the Civil War, which took her husband's life. It was in the Queen's honour that the future American state of Maryland, Elena Maria's home State, was named.

"In the lone tent, waiting for victory,  
She stands with eyes marred by the mists of pain,
Like some wan lily overdrenched with rain:
The clamorous clang of arms, the ensanguined sky,
War's ruin, and the wreck of chivalry
To her proud soul no common fear can bring:
Bravely she tarrieth for her Lord the King,
Her soul a-flame with passionate ecstasy."

- From Henrietta Maria by Oscar Wilde

May 13th, 1536: The Disbanding of the Queen's Household

"So much the more
Must pity drop upon her. Verily,
I swear, 'tis better to be lowly born,
And range with humble livers in content,
Than to be perk'd up in a glistering grief,
And wear a golden sorrow."
- William Shakespeare's "Henry VIII," Act II, Scene III

With the Court still adjusting to the news that four of their rank had been condemned to death on the spurious charge of being the Queen's lovers and with many mourning the fates of Henry Norris and Francis Weston in particular, the government moved through Sir Edward Baynton, the Queen's Chamberlain, to notify her household that their services were no longer required. They could go home; the Household of Queen Anne Boleyn was no more. It had been formally disbanded by order of His Majesty the King. It had been eleven days since the Queen had been plucked from amongst her servants, dressed in crimson and gold and jewels, surrounded by sobbing retainers still clutching the silver plates from which Her Majesty ate; it had been eleven days and she would not be coming home.

So, the ladies and the grooms, the priests, the shoe-makers, the milliners, the seamstresses and musicians, poets, tutors, scholars, jesters, fools, stable-hands, cooks, valets, ushers, guards, maids and laundresses returned to their homes. The Queen they had served was no more; the Queen they would serve, officially, did not yet exist.