lucrative oriental trade to British merchants. He and his court were important promoters of the project to realise the decades-long dream of planting the British race permanently in American soil. Whatever we think of colonialisation now, such men transformed the world.
As a man and prince, Henry saw himself to be European as much as British, using as one of his mottoes the expansionist ‘Fas est aliorum quaerere regna’, ‘It is right to ask for the kingdoms of others’. At his death aged eighteen, he was preparing to go and stake his claim to be the next leader of Protestant Christendom in the struggle to resist a resurgent militant Catholicism. He was a devout, Puritan-minded Protestant. In the arena of politics, there is a case for seeing Henry’s court as a significant waystation between the abortive aristocratic uprising in 1601 – when the 2nd Earl of Essex sought to force Queen Elizabeth to name James VI of Scotland as her heir in Parliament – and the regicides who shivered in the Palace of Westminster’s Painted Chamber, ready to sign the death warrant of Henry’s little brother, Charles I, in January 1649. By the time of Henry’s death, you could see the prince and his court positioning themselves at the front line of so much that came to define Britain in its heyday.
I am aware that when I say, Henry did this, and Henry did that, one question arises at once. Who was Henry?
Henry was a son, brother, friend, master, patron. ‘Henry’ was the crown prince. The inverted commas around his name allude to the medieval idea of the king’s two bodies – ordinary man and the monarchy, the Crown. The natural man decayed and died. The Crown merely suffered a demise and passed to the next bearer. Crown Prince Henry possessed a physical body and a body politic. He was a boy and the crowns united: the first Prince of Wales born to inherit the united kingdoms of Britain.
His legacy stretched beyond his death to the conflagration coming in 1618. The Thirty Years’ War would be the longest, bloodiest conflict in European history until the First World War in 1914. It tore Europe apart, and Henry had been determined to drag England towards involvement in it. What did that imply about his character?
He was only nine when he came to England. For nearly a decade in Scotland and nearly a decade in England some of the most influential men, and women, of the Jacobean age wanted to shape the character of the future king and his monarchy. Who he responded to, and to whom he did not, suggests what kind of king he would have made.
His effigy remains as a symbol of his dual nature. As his teenage body rotted in its coffin, his icon was supposed to live for ever. The eager ravages the effigy suffered reflect how well Henry had grown into his public role. By 1612, his court was recognised as an important power bloc at home and abroad. For me, he is the greatest Prince of Wales we ever had.
A recent straw poll shows how far Henry has dropped out of the national memory. In 2012 the National Portrait Gallery in London staged an exhibition devoted to him. It introduced what one reviewer after another called this ‘forgotten prince’ to a wider audience. The faceless anonymity of his effigy now symbolises his disappearance. Many people do not realise his brother Charles was never born to be king – nor how bright a star Henry rose to be in the Jacobean and European firmament. This biography is driven by a passionate desire to change that.
As I set out on my researches, Westminster Abbey began work to create new galleries to house its unique collection of effigies, including what remains of Henry’s. This book is my contribution to the restoration of Henry, Prince of Wales – from forlorn worm-eaten object in a backroom, to an iconic, colourful character standing tall in his time and place, on the stage of British history.
PART ONE
1594–1603
ONE
‘A SON OF GOODLY HABILITY AND EXPECTATION’
Dawn, Tuesday, 19 February 1594. The herald left his fire, shivered up the stone steps and strode out onto the walls of Stirling Castle to announce the great news. For four years Scotland had waited for a child, a male heir, to secure the throne. At last the king ‘was blessed with a son of goodly hability and expectation’. Prince Henry Frederick Stuart’s birth gave ‘great comfort and matter of joy to the whole people’. The entire day cannonades ricocheted across the country. Scots of all ranks danced in the light of huge bonfires, as ‘if the people had been daft for mirth’.
The proud father, James VI, despatched messengers to his fellow princes of Christendom, the first sent galloping south to London. Henry was James’s gift to his childless cousin, the ageing, putative virgin queen, Elizabeth Tudor of England. The gift he expected in return was nothing less than her thrones and dominions. A prince had been born to embody the kingdoms united for the first time in history. If Elizabeth would name James VI of Scotland and the future King Henry IX her heirs, the boy could secure England’s as well as Scotland’s future.
Throughout the celebrations, Henry’s mother, Anne of Denmark,* had remained lodged in the birthing chamber at Stirling Castle.
Landing at Leith four years earlier, fifteen-year-old Anne had made a sensational entrance: pale-skinned, reddish blonde hair, notably attractive, she rode through Edinburgh, her new husband at her side showing off his queen. Behind them the king’s oldest friends, the Mars of Stirling Castle, followed stony-faced. From the side of the highway, a flock of black-clad ministers of the Scottish Calvinist kirk eyed the daughter of Denmark – her ‘peach and parrot-coloured damask’ dress, her ‘fishboned skirts lined with wreaths of pillows round the hips’; their gaze travelling across her liveried servants, horses and silver coach – and shuddered.
In England these hard-liners – or ‘purer’ Protestants, as they saw themselves – were derided as ‘Puritans’. They called themselves the godly. Soon enough, Christian duty would compel them to open their pursed lips to censure Queen Anne and her circle for their erratic attendance at interminable sermons on sin and corruption. God made them denounce the young queen’s ‘lack of devotion to the Word and Sacrements’, and love of ‘waking and balling’ – staying up late to dance and gamble. She filled her evenings with music and elaborate court entertainments. One radical Calvinist griped that all royals were ‘the devil’s bairns’, so what could you expect? (James responded by exiling him.) The idea of Anne as utterly frivolous would prove remarkably enduring.
Anne knew herself more than equal to them. Her brother, Christian IV, ruled Denmark – the Jutland Peninsula and the islands around it. His influence extended over Norway and east across what is modern-day Sweden, Gotland and the Baltic island of Bornholm. He also ruled Iceland and Greenland. To the south, Denmark controlled the German duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. Holstein lay within the borders of the Habsburg-dominated Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. So, one branch of the house of Oldenburg, Anne’s family, were also imperial princes, owing allegiance to the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna. This involved the Danes in German and imperial affairs. Off the north coast of Scotland itself, Denmark claimed the Orkneys and owned the Faroe Islands.
Anne grew up a royal princess of one of the largest Protestant political entities in Europe. Her grandfather, Christian III, converted Denmark to Lutheranism in 1536, but Denmark declined to adopt the ‘purer’ form of Protestantism – the Calvinism that Scotland came to profess under John Knox. Anne’s former suitor, Prince Maurice of Nassau, withdrew his offer on hearing that she would not convert to Calvinism in order to marry him.
Denmark’s location gave it control of the sea lanes connecting the Atlantic to the Baltic. The tolls it charged shipping to pass through the Danish Sound and trade with the Hanseatic ports, made its monarchy wealthy. When Christian IV finished modernising it, Denmark boasted