by David Cohen
At 8.15 a.m., the warming pan arrived.
By 10 a.m., s labour was reaching its end. ‘I die, oh you kill me, you kill me!’ she yelled.
The midwife, Mrs Wilkes, encouraged the Queen to push and, with the third push, the child was born.
‘I don’t hear the child cry,’ the Queen observed anxiously but just at that moment the baby did so.
Madame de Labadie, one of the Queen’s other bed women, took the baby from Mrs Wilkes and was about to carry the infant into another room when the King stopped her. James II called on the Privy Council to witness the Queen had given birth to a child.
‘What is it?’ he asked Madame de Labadie, eager to know if he had finally fathered a boy.
‘What Your Majesty desires,’ she replied.
The Earl of Faversham got the point and shouted patriotically to the horde in the bedchamber to ‘make room for the Prince!’
An ecstatic James knighted the Queen’s physician, Dr Waldegrave, on the spot and gave Judith Wilkes 500 guineas, apparently for her breakfast. On 12 June 1688, he wrote to tell Mary that she now had a brother. Of course, the unhappy sisters did not share their father’s joy: they could only see their baby half-brother as a religious and political threat. It would have been polite to congratulate their father and his wife. Instead, Mary sent an extraordinary missive to her sister, days after the birth. In an obsessive inquisition, she set out eighteen questions about the birth, numbering them as Q1 to Q18. The letter reeks of suspicion and malice; it also feels like a daughter’s cry for help after her relationship with her father had forever soured.
Mary’s first question was: ‘Had the Queen asked any of her ladies to feel her belly since she thought herself quick or late?’
Anne replied that she had never heard anyone say they felt the child stir, though the Protestant Mrs Dawson said she had seen it stir.
Mary then asked: ‘Was the milk that was in the Queen’s breasts seen by many or conducted in a mystery?’ Anne replied that she had never seen any milk expressed but again Mrs Dawson said that she had seen ‘it upon her smock and that it began to run at the same time as it used to do of her children’.
The next question requires some knowledge of seventeenth-century medicines. Mary enquired as to whether the Queen had openly taken astringents or ‘whether a mystery was made of that?’ Anne replied that she had seen the Queen use what she described as ‘restringing draughts’, a term whose precise meaning is uncertain.
The fourth question returned to the Queen’s breasts. Mary wanted to know: ‘Was the treating of the Queen’s breasts for drawing back the milk managed openly or mysteriously?’ Anne replied that one lady-in-waiting had come into the room when the Queen was putting off her clouts and she was very angry ‘because she did not care to be seen when she was shifting [excreting]’. Mary of Modena was hardly being unreasonable.
Q5 wanted Anne to specify at what time the Queen went into labour. ‘It was 8 a.m. and the King was sent for at once,’ she answered.
Mary then asked if ‘the notice [of the Queen’s labour] was sent secretly or let fly all over Whitehall and St James’s.’ Anne replied that the Privy Council had been told as soon as the King knew – there was nothing secret about the message.
‘At what time the Privy Councillors came into the bedchamber?’ Mary asked next. She was particularly interested in ‘whether a screen was erected at the foot of the bed or not’. There was no screen, Anne replied, and the Queen gave birth in the bed she had slept in all night and ‘in the great bed chamber as she was with her last child’.
Mary suspected former would-be nun, Mary of Modena, was in fact the best actress of her time. ‘Did anyone other than the Queen’s confidantes see the Queen’s face when she was in labour and whether she had the looks of a woman in labour?’ she asked. The additional questions resembled those that a prosecutor might have asked: ‘Who was in the room and how close did they stand to the woman giving birth?’
Anne said the foot curtains were drawn and the two sides were open. She reported, almost as if it were strange, that the Queen minded so many men being present while she was giving birth. The Queen then asked the King to hide her face with his head and periwig, which he duly did. Poor Mary of Modena’s body was clearly not her own to control. Anne added that when the Queen ‘was in great pain, the King called in haste for my Lord Chamberlain, who came up to the bedside to show he was there; upon which the rest of the Privy Council did the same thing’.
Q12 concerned timing – Mary insisted on knowing to the minute how long the King had spent talking to Privy Councillors before the child was carried into the next room. Anne replied that the midwife had cut the navel-string at once but that the afterbirth did not follow quickly. The midwife had handed the baby to Madame de Labadie; the King stopped Madame de Labadie and told the Privy Councillors that they were witnesses that a child had been born. He asked them to come into the next room and see what it was, ‘which they all did’. Anne managed to inject one doubt: ‘for till after they came out again it was not declared what it was but the midwife had only given a sign that it was a son’. The baby might have been a girl, she implied, who was swapped for a boy baby, who just happened to be present. Even for conspiracy theories, this was extreme and would have required the King to have on tap a spare male infant, as well as possessing the skills of a fine magician.
At her sister’s request, Anne then listed all those present, starting with the Lord Chancellor but added that only the King held his wife while ‘the child was parted’.
Q14 asked if the Queen had ever given birth ‘so mysteriously, so suddenly and so few being called for’. ‘Few’ was hardly appropriate. Mary’s previous question had elicited a list of twenty-four men, as well as unnamed pages and priests and eighteen women – ‘All these stood as near as they could.’
Mary then asked whether anyone had noticed that the child’s limbs were ‘slender at first’ and then miraculously blossomed ‘to be round and full’. Her next question again harped on the possibility that a boy had been substituted for whatever the Queen had produced: ‘Was everyone permitted to see the child at all hours dressed and undressed?’ she wanted to know.
Anne replied that she had never heard of the change in the limbs, but they did avoid the child being seen. One reason, all too familiar to her, was that they did not want people to know that the child was extremely sick. ‘All of the servants,’ she sniped, ‘were papists so they would conceal anything.’
Mary then asked, ‘Is the Queen fond of it?’ Anne could offer some hope here as she had dined at the Palace soon after the birth and ‘they said it had been very ill of a looseness and it really looked so’ (the ‘looseness’ was presumably of the bowels). Yet the uncaring Queen came in from her prayers and sat down to eat without seeing her child. Afterwards, she ‘played at Comet and did not go to it till she was put out of the pool’ – in effect, until she was out of the game. If the child was truly hers, what kind of mother did that make her?
Finally, Mary wanted to know which of the women of the Bedchamber were in favour and when Charles II’s widow, Catherine of Braganza, had been sent for.
Mary and Anne were never going to accept that the child was really their half-brother. Their stepmother noticed and complained in a letter to Mary:
You are not as kind as you used to be and the reason I have begun to think is that since I have been brought to bed you have never once in your letters to me taken the least notice of my son, no more than if he had never been born.
The Queen had also discovered that Mary did not pray for her brother and berated her for this. Mary replied stiffly: ‘All the King’s children shall ever find as much affection and kindness as can be expected of children of the same father.’ She continued to believe that the child was not her natural brother and that her father was conspiring to secure a Catholic succession.
The baby who provoked a revolution
The birth of a male heir to James made possible a permane
nt Catholic dynasty. Several Protestants echoed Mary and Anne’s doubts that the baby had been smuggled into the bedchamber in the warming pan in front of over forty witnesses – not all of whom were ‘papists’. In order to prevent a Catholic succession, seven Protestant nobles invited the Prince of Orange to invade the country. Mary backed her husband against her father.
When William invaded, James had the larger army, but though he had much military experience – in 1650 he had served in the French army with General Turenne – he lost his nerve. On 11 December, he threw the Great Seal of the Realm into the Thames and attempted to flee to France but was captured in Kent. William had no intention of executing his father-in-law and allowed him to escape to Paris, where Louis XIV offered him a palace and a pension.
Despite her eighteen questions, Mary was upset by the circumstances surrounding the deposition of her father and was torn between concern for him and duty to her husband, but she was convinced that William was working to ‘save the Church and State’. She travelled to England and wrote of her ‘secret joy’ at returning to her homeland, ‘but that was soon checked with the consideration of my father’s misfortunes’. William noted her conflicted state and instructed her to look cheerful when they arrived in London. As a result, she was criticised for appearing cold to her father’s plight. James felt betrayed and savaged Mary in a diatribe, criticising her disloyalty. For her part, she was deeply hurt by his attack.
William and Mary took the throne jointly in 1689 and agreed to a political compromise, which was the final resolution of the Civil War. The Bill of Rights laid out basic rights for all Englishmen and there would be no royal interference with the law; the sovereign remained the fount of justice but could not unilaterally establish new courts or act as a judge. Parliament had to agree to any new taxes. Any subject could petition the monarch without fear of retribution and there was to be no standing army unless Parliament agreed. The monarch would not interfere in the election of Members of Parliament. Freedom of speech in Parliament was also guaranteed.
The Bill of Rights barred Roman Catholics from the throne as ‘it hath been found by experience that it is inconsistent with the safety and welfare of this Protestant kingdom to be governed by a papist Prince’. Now the monarch would have to swear a Coronation oath to uphold the Protestant religion. British democracy slowly evolved from the Bill of Rights to the system we now have.
Almost miraculously, Anne now gave birth to a boy, who managed to outlive her previous children. William, Duke of Gloucester was born on 24 July 1689 at Hampton Court. Much of what we know about him comes from a memoir written by a royal servant – Jenkin Lewis – who spent seven years with him.
When William was born, he seemed to be ‘a very weakly child’ and few believed that he would live long. His wet nurse had too large a nipple so a new nurse was found and, for the next six weeks, the baby thrived. ‘All people now began to conceive hopes of the Duke living,’ Lewis wrote, ‘when Lo he was taken with convulsion fits.’ In despair, Anne summoned physicians from London, who recommended an age-old remedy: change the wet nurse. This decision led to a comic parade as mothers of young babies flocked to Hampton Court, hoping to be chosen as the breast fit for royalty; the infant Duke was then passed from breast to breast, testing each potential wet nurse.
The final choice was pure accident. The baby’s father was passing through the room where the would-be wet nurses were lined up, their breasts on display, and spotted a Mrs Pack. The wife of a respectable Quaker from Kingston, one can only imagine her breasts inspired confidence. Prince George at once ordered Mrs Pack into bed with his ailing son, ‘who sucked well and mended that night’.
Mrs Pack was, according to Lewis, however, an unpleasant woman who traded on her sudden fame and was ‘fitter to go to a pigsty than to a Prince’s bed’. There was some mystery as to the nature of the illness that William had been suffering from, which caused ‘an issue from his pole’, according to Lewis. Some historians of medicine have assumed this to mean some kind of fluid coming out of his head.
After that, William seems to have grown up fairly normally. He began to walk and talk, though his walking was never perfectly normal. In some ways, he was a very active boy, although he could not go up or down steps without help. Lewis was not sure whether this was a real infirmity or due to ‘the overcare of the ladies about him’. The issue came to a head one day when William’s father believed the boy was shamming and, for the first time in his life, beat him with a birch rod. Following this, the child conceded he might go downstairs just leaning on one person’s arm. ‘He was whipped again and went ever well after,’ Lewis noted.
As pious Protestants, William’s parents felt the boy needed a tutor who would concentrate on religion. Dr Pratt was aptly named, as he did not think the boy should have much fun or play games. For his part, William liked games, especially military ones, and the memoir records him studying the Norman Conquest and planning an invasion of France. A smart tactician, William told Lewis: ‘I go to conquer France but I will burn my shipping so that my men may not desert me by coming back.’
Instead of discussing famous battles, Dr Pratt larded on conventional morality. He asked the boy how he could be a Prince and not be tempted by ‘the pomps and vanities of this world’.
‘I will walk in God’s commandments and keep his ways,’ William replied smartly. (I like to imagine he sniggered the moment he was out of Pratt’s way.)
In 1695, William asked Lewis to help him compose a battle song for his troops. At this, Lewis dashed off eight rhyming couplets starting:
Hark Hark the hostile drum alarms
Let ours too beat a call to arms.
After Mary died in 1694, William of Orange ruled alone and visited the boy every month. The Prince once made Lewis prepare complex toy fortifications so that he could impress his uncle. William now read the reports in The London Gazette and worked out that they had implications for his own position. When he saw that both Houses had issued a declaration of loyalty, he decided to compose one of his own. It ran: ‘I Your Majesty’s most dutiful subject had rather lose my life in Your Majesty’s cause than in any man else’s and I hope it will not be long ere you conquer France.’
William had no more intention of invading France than going to visit the Pope but his soldier-mad nephew was obviously itching for action. The note continued: ‘We Your Majesty’s dutiful subjects will stand by you as long as we have a drop of blood.’
The boy Prince needed courage as he pluckily endured a succession of illnesses. In the spring of 1696, his eyes swelled and became bloodshot. The Queen sent for Dr John Radcliffe, who prescribed a horrid medicine, which William promptly spat out. Radcliffe then applied blisters to the boy’s back, which made him scream out in pain.
The most serious problem, however, was that William seems to have had a bizarrely large head. Some medical historians, like Jack Dewhurst, claim he suffered a mild form of hydrocephalus (water on the brain), but that condition is usually associated with low intelligence. William was certainly not backward, though. Lewis’s memoir makes it clear that he was quick-witted and could learn about the great generals of the past, their tactics and technologies. Fortifications particularly fascinated the boy.
The Prince’s games with soldiers
In 1937, the future Queen Elizabeth II became involved in a Girl Guide troop, which meant that she could work and play with normal children. The project was seen as novel and democratic. In fact, it wasn’t at all novel, but it seems royals can forget their own family history.
William was good friends with George Lawrence, an enterprising boy who organised a troop of twenty boy soldiers, which included many children of the royal servants. Lawrence drilled them. William joined in the fun and then organised a troop of his own, recruiting more children of the household and its servants. Anne and her husband were delighted their boy was bright and busy, but it was too good to last.
The year 1700 would turn out to be one of calamities. On 25
January 1700, Anne miscarried yet again. Jack Dewhurst, who analysed her obstetric history, argued she had been pregnant at least seventeen times. Twelve of these pregnancies ended in a miscarriage or stillbirth. Four of the five children who were born alive died before the age of two. Few women have undergone such ordeals and it says much about Anne’s strength of character that she was not continuously depressed.
In July 1700, the son on whom she doted suddenly became very ill. Four days after he first started running a fever, William died. He was just eleven years old. Devastated, Anne ordered her household to observe a day of mourning every year on the anniversary of his death. The personal tragedy had huge political implications, too. When her son died, Anne was the only individual remaining in the line of succession established by the Bill of Rights. To avoid a Catholic restoration, the English Parliament passed the Act of Settlement in 1701. If neither William III nor Anne had children, the crown would go to one of James I’s granddaughters: Sophia, Electress of Hanover. She was formidably clever. More crucially, she was a Protestant and she even had a son.
The news that Sophia would inherit infuriated James II. He died in 1701, with none of the conflicts with his one surviving daughter resolved. His widow wrote to Anne to inform her that her father forgave her, but also as a reminder of her promise to seek the restoration of his line. But Anne had no intention of ceding her rights to the Catholic child who had been at the centre of the warming-pan episode.
John Locke, one of the first experts on childcare
During the penultimate decade of the House of Stuart, John Locke (1632–1704) was developing a very modern philosophy of childcare. Had Sophia, her sons and her grandsons followed his advice, the history of England would probably have witnessed fewer family disasters in the next century.
