It was fortunate that the young father and mother, as they gazed into a cradle garnished with taffeta and ribbons, could not foresee even their own future: separation, violent death for one, desolate widowhood for the other. Yet Charles I and Henrietta Maria might have been comforted by knowing the end of the story. The fairy-tale element persisted. The boy himself would pass through every vicissitude known to a prince in such stories, but ultimately he would survive them all.
Unlike his father, unlike his grandfather Henri Quatre, unlike his great-grandmother Mary Queen of Scots, unlike his great-grandfather Lord Darnley, unlike his brother James and his exiled descendants, Charles II would die in his own royal bed. And he would die as the dominating monarch his father, grandfather James and brother all dreamt of being without success. He would die master in his own house, confessing the religion his mother was harried for practising and for which Mary Stuart was executed and James II driven out. He would die the last absolute King of Great Britain.
So perhaps the auspicious star, whose celestial rays duly ornamented the medal commemorating his ‘singular birth’, was not so delusive after all.
The marriage of this baby’s parents in May 1625 had brought together a disparate pair – at any rate in terms of religion. The Kingfn2 was not only the supreme governor of the Protestant Church in his own country, but was emotionally committed to Anglicanism as such. He eschewed equally the Roman Catholic tenets which lay, as it were, beyond the right wing of Anglicanism, and the Puritan practices which increasingly permeated its left. His father had been raised under the influence of Scottish Calvinism, but had later grafted onto its theology a belief in proper episcopal organization best summed up by that crude and effective phrase, ‘No Bishop, no King.’ His mother had passed from the Lutheranism of her youth to the comfortable Catholicism of her later years without being allowed to make any impact on her children’s religion. Both surviving members of her family, the King himself and Elizabeth of Bohemia, were brought up as and remained Protestants.
Henrietta Maria on the other hand had been brought up as a pious Roman Catholic, and never abandoned her religion. Her father, the magnificent, dominating Henri Quatre, had deserted the Protestantism of his youth in order to attain the French crown, with another crude but effective observation, ‘Paris is worth a Mass’: the French royal family was in future ostentatiously Catholic.
But it is important to remember this mixed religious heritage when the time comes to consider the foundations and structure of Charles’ own beliefs. Although neither of his parents underwent a conversion of any sort, three of his four grandparents changed their religion for a variety of political and spiritual reasons.
Charles, the first child in our history to be born heir to all three kingdoms, also enjoyed an appropriately mixed heritage of blood.fn3 Or, as Edmund Waller elegantly turned it, Charles was
A Prince on whom such different lights did smile,
Born the divided world to reconcile!
Historic names sparkle like jewels – some of them slightly flawed gems – in Charles’ genealogical tree. Through his father he descended from Scottish James, canny, intellectual and somewhat boorish; the improbable son of that ill-fated enchanter Mary Queen of Scots and the degenerate Darnley. James had married a Danish Princess, Anne, daughter of Frederick II and Sophie of Mecklenbergh-Schwerin. The union brought a good strong strain of northern blood, Scandinavian and German, into the British royal family, which proved most helpful. Neither Tudors nor Stuarts had proved conspicuously fertile in the last hundred years: but James and Anne between them produced a quiverful of children.
The effect of this family was to transform what might otherwise have been a miserable marriage into a perfectly acceptable partnership by royal standards. Anne, easy-going if rather frivolous by nature, was quickly despised for her girlish tastes by the infinitely cleverer James. In any case the King had been since boyhood romantically inclined towards his own sex. As the years wore on, and especially after the arrival of the Scottish court in the luxurious atmosphere of London, King and Queen went their separate ways. James turned to favourites, including George Villiers, created Duke of Buckingham; Anne turned ‘to favour and to prettiness’, including such laudable if extravagant projects as the patronage of Inigo Jones. But James was a devoted father. That bond at least kept the royal pair together.
The blood which Charles inherited through his mother was half French and half Italian. Henrietta Maria,fn4 as the daughter of the late King of France, by no means considered herself bettered by marrying the King of England: for Charles I to have the great Henri Quatre as a father-in-law was surely an honour in itself. But Charles II would find it a more dubious advantage to be the grandson of Henri of Navarre. Indeed how bitterly at times he must have regretted those blithe words of his progenitor on the subject of Paris and the Mass, as people often do come to loathe the panache of their famous ancestors, too frequently quoted against them. Whenever changes of religion were either suggested or imputed to Charles, his relationship to Henri Quatre, that celebrated worldly convert, was always stressed; at other times he was besought to emulate his grandfather in heroism, or at least to remember whose grandson he was.
Charles was, then, by blood one-quarter Scots, one-quarter Danish, one-quarter French and one-quarter Italian. Further back, the marriage of the cousins Mary Queen of Scots and Darnley increased the proportion of Scottish noble blood; while Mary’s Guise mother supplemented his French inheritance. For the thin but vital trickle of English – Tudor – blood which had ensured his family’s succession to the English throne, it was necessary to go back five generations to his great-grandmother’s grandmother, Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII. And even that Tudor blood was itself basically Welsh.
It was no wonder that King James had swept aside contemporary discussions of heredity when he ascended the English throne, preferring to delve into a mythological past where creatures like Brute, first King of all the Britons, flourished. Titus Britannicus, a eulogy of Charles by Aurelian Cook appearing shortly after his death, referred to him as having all the blood-royal of the Christian world in his veins – British, Saxon, Danish, Norman and Scottish from his father, Bourbon of France, Austrian of Spain and Medici of Florence from his mother.3 It was English blood itself which was lacking.
Nevertheless, in his tastes, Charles remained a very typical Englishman all his life: his enjoyments united him with, rather than divided him from, his subjects. In his case, blood was evidently less important than those early formative years, rated so highly by the Jesuits and modern psychology. These were spent in carefree, nurturing England.
The victory of environment over heredity was the more remarkable because of Charles’ striking physical appearance, which was even more foreign than his actual blood. First, he had an abnormal darkness of complexion, a truly saturnine tint. This darkness was the subject of comment from the first. His mother wrote jokingly to her sister-in-law that she had given birth to a black baby and to a friend in France that ‘he was so dark that she was ashamed of him’. She would send his portrait ‘as soon as he is a little fairer’.4 But Charles never did become fairer. Later the sobriquet ‘the Black Boy’ would be used, still commemorated in English inn signs.
There was definitely a strain of very dark, swarthy Italian blood in the French royal family, inherited through Marie de Medici, which might and did emerge from time to time. Anne of Austria, wife of Henrietta Maria’s brother Louis XIII, was said to have given birth to a baby having the ‘colour and visage of a blackamoor’, which died a month after its birth. In 1664 another Queen of France, wife of Charles’ first cousin Louis, was supposed to have given birth to a black child.5 There was even a ‘fanatic’ fantasy at the time of the Popish Plot in the late 1670s, that Charles had been fathered on Henrietta Maria by a ‘black Scotsman’– a neat combination of two prejudices of the time, against the Catholics and the Scots. So it became convenient to refer to the then King as that ‘black bastard??
?.6
Of the many grandchildren of Marie de Medici, Charles was the only one to look purely Italian; the rest being in general both frailer and paler. But his appearance was certainly a complete throwback to his Italian ancestors, the Medici Dukes of Tuscany. Directly descended as he was from Lorenzo the Magnificent there is a striking resemblance in their portraits. Bishop Burnet,fn5 alluding to Charles’ Italianate appearance and intending to make a political point concerning tyranny, compared the King to a statue of Tiberius.7 Marvell was presumably describing the same phenomenon when he described Charles as
Of a tall stature and of sable hue
Much like the son of Kish, that lofty Jew.
Charles’ second most striking physical attribute was that same tall stature. About two yards high, said the Parliamentary posters seeking his capture after the Battle of Worcester; six feet two inches, stated another, and he may have been as much as six feet three inches tall. Since a man of six feet two would be outstanding in a crowd today, the effect of Charles’ salient height may be imagined in an age when the average male height, due to diet and disease, was so much less than in our own time. On his sea voyage towards his Restoration in May 1660, Charles marked his own height in his cabin with a knife; afterwards numerous sight-seers measured themselves against the spot, but even the tallest could not reach it.8 As with his relationship to Henri Quatre, Charles must have lived to curse his eminence. The problems of tall men today in aeroplanes, cars and beds are as nothing compared to the problem which faced Charles fleeing after the Worcester defeat, compelled to try and disguise the one physical attribute which no make-up can conceal.
At first sight this height may seem a surprising phenomenon, since Charles I was short and Henrietta Maria positively tiny: she was termed ‘the little Queen’ – not always in tenderness. But his grandmother Anne of Denmark was tall, with a large bone structure: she had what would now be thought of as typical Scandinavian looks, with tow-coloured hair and a ruddy complexion. It would seem therefore that Charles’ individual appearance was a combination of those two bloods least associated with him in the popular imagination – Danish and Italian.
The result, attractive as it may be by modern standards, was not much admired at the time. Charles was considered rather peculiar-looking, as he himself was the first to admit, with typical self-deprecation: ‘Odd’s fish, I am an ugly fellow,’ he observed to the painter Lely after inspecting his own portrait. His curling and sensual mouth, so beguiling in our day, was considered particularly hideous, almost a deformity. Big mouths were definitely not the fashion: ‘large and ugly’ wrote Madame de Motteville with firmness of this particular feature, when describing Charles at the age of sixteen in her memoir of his mother.9
And fair hair itself was in principle preferred to dark. For one matter, there was a contemporary suspicion that beneath a saturnine appearance there lurked a saturnine character, something generally defined as melancholy and not particularly pleasant. Lord Mulgrave, for example, who was brought up at Court, thought it worth making the point that Charles being swarthy and cheerful was an exception to the rule.10
It took time for Charles to prove to the world that an attractive, good-humoured fellow lurked under his dark skin. Even his mother wrote that he was an ugly baby, and so large that at four months he might have been a year old. Charles succeeded in charming much of the world despite rather than because of the oddities of his physical appearance.
In a picture painted when Charles was a few months old, his proud parents flank their offspring. The King stands, a dignified figure, if not yet possessed of that hieratic appearance of dramatic suffering uncovered by Van Dyck. This franker portrait shows Charles’ father with blunter features, of no great distinction, with a strong resemblance to those of James I.
Henrietta Maria’s appearance also needed the help of a great artist and courtier to flower on the canvas. There is general agreement about the quality of her looks: when she was young, her attraction lay in her animation and in particular her sparkling black eyes, which, combined with her doll-like figure, made her at the time of her marriage ‘a most absolute delicate lady’, in the words of Simonds D’Ewes. But there was something simian about her. Her arms were disproportionately long, and, as she grew older and more unhappy, she lost weight rapidly, which did not suit her. By the birth of Henriette-Anne in 1644 she had become a sad, small monkey of a person, whose wide mouth looked almost grotesque. It was left to Pepys, at the Restoration, to describe Henrietta Maria – at fifty – as ‘a very little plain old woman’.11
Those days lay far in the future. The young couple in the portrait are boldly delighted with their new treasure.
As has been related, the first child of Charles I and Henrietta Maria died at birth. All the circumstances of this sad event were unfortunate, including the fact that the baby was premature and the local midwife called into Greenwich Palace inadequate. But the Queen determined to put the tragedy behind her: ‘As to my loss, I wish to forget it.’12 After all, she had now had the reality of her husband’s love, and it must have been some secret comfort to her that during the labour he had urged that, if there was any choice to be made, the mother rather than the child should be saved.
Henrietta Maria concentrated her energies on recovering, and replacing the lost child as soon as possible. To that end, she took herself off to the spa at Tunbridge Wells, whose waters were renowned for their good effects on gynaecological problems. (This spa, incidentally, makes constant appearances in the court history of the seventeenth century, as high-born but barren ladies, not the least of them Charles’ own wife, Catharine of Braganza, sought there the cure to their troubles.) But the conception of Charles was more romantic than such planning might indicate. The Queen grew restless, cut short her visit to Tunbridge Wells, and moved with her entourage to Oatlands Palace, near Weybridge. The King, hearing of this, paid Oatlands a surprise visit. It was here that Charles was conceived. By mid-October the Queen knew she was pregnant again: in one of the last letters of his life the King addressed Charles in a moving phrase: ‘You are the son of our love….’13
This time a midwife was sent over from France by Marie de Medici. She also despatched a useful chair, and a charm against miscarriage in the shape of a heart: Henrietta Maria wore the charm constantly, worrying when she forgot to put it on. It was also decided that this birth should take place at St James’s Palace, so much quieter than the official royal residence at Whitehall. London in those days had a heavily eastward slant: thus the setting of this red-brick hunting lodge, built by Henry VIII, was quite pastoral in the early seventeenth century. Not only did it have a fine view of the St James’s deer park – that park on which Charles himself later lavished so much care – but, being surrounded by other open spaces and fields, St James’s Palace was cut off from the bustle of Westminster.
Here a bed with hangings of green satin was made ready at a cost of nearly seven hundred pounds. Luxurious beds were one of the major outlays of the time, as will be seen in the magnificent beds caparisoned for Charles himself, his wife and mistresses – rather as expensive cars are bought today.
Finally, Queen Henrietta Maria reached that ‘happy hour for herself and us’, as one contemporary put it.14 Her labour began at about four o’clock in the morning. Shortly before noon, the baby was born in one of the Tudor rooms to the south of Colour Court, fronting St James’ Court.fn6 Almost immediately, according to the custom of the time, he was taken from his mother and given to a wet-nurse to be fed. Rockers stepped forward to the royal cradle: that too was according to the custom of the time, the only thing of note about them being the fact that they were Protestants. It had been part of Henrietta Maria’s marriage contract, carefully laid down, that her children should not be nursed by Catholics. But the King presented the successful midwife, who, being French, probably was a Catholic, with £1,000.
The baptism, which took place on 27 June, was also according to the rite of the English Church. The ceremony was pe
rformed by the Bishop of London, the King’s friend William Laud. It was a significant and appropriate choice. Although it would be another three years before he was created Archbishop of Canterbury, already Laud’s name was synonymous with the repression of Puritanism within the English Church. Laud was nearing sixty, but his whole preferment had come since the accession of King Charles I: he had been made a Privy Councillor and had recently taken part in a harsh judgement against the Puritan Leighton in the Star Chamber.
For the baptism, the Lord Mayor of London presented a silver font. The Duchess of Richmond stood proxy for the godmother, the Queen of France, and, as a tribute to her principal’s status, was fetched in a coach drawn by six plumed horses: her retinue (both sexes) arrived wearing white satin set off by crimson silk stockings. The baby’s wet-nurse received a chain of rubies from Marie de Medici, the dry-nurse being given a silver plate; the six (Protestant) cradle-rockers were given a selection of silver spoons, cups and salt-cellars. From a less successful relation, the Elector Palatine, the husband of his aunt Elizabeth, the baby received a jewel.15
Charles began his life in the traditional long white clothes of linen and satin. But, unlike English babies of the time, he was not swaddled. Aristocratic French mothers did not approve of this habit of rolling up the baby like a tiny mummy – the Huguenot heiress Charlotte de la Trémouille, wife of the Earl of Derby, fought the same battle in her nursery at about the same date. Psychologists who have recently pointed out the dangers of deprivation of physical contact in the new-born would be happy to think that the baby Charles was allowed to lie freely (and he undoubtedly showed every sign of enjoying physical contact uninhibitedly in his later years).
The next step was to dress the child in tiny linen shirts (still preserved in the Royal collection). In 1631 he was handed over to the Countess of Dorset, who became his official governess, and given his own miniature establishment. Unlike the first choice of governess, the Catholic Countess of Roxburgh, she was an impeccable Anglican. The Countess of Dorset replaced the dry- and wet-nurses he had enjoyed since birth. One of these foster-mothers, Mrs Christabella Wyndham, was to feature in Charles’ life in another interesting connection. Later the early experience was recalled most favourably by Charles’ foster-sister Elizabeth Elliott. It had been the greatest happiness that could befall her, she wrote at the Restoration, ‘to suck the same breast with so great a monarch’; she therefore petitioned the monarch for some financial recognition of the fact.16