The King Who Never Was

How do you construct an exhibition around so someone who died before they reached their nineteenth birthday- particularly when that individual isn’t a modern rock star but a 17^th century prince?   The National Portrait gallery has taken up this challenge in pulling together a fascinating exhibition on Henry Prince of Wales, eldest son of James VI and I.

Henry’s life doesn’t take a lot of telling.   He was born in 1594 in Stirling Castle (so I suppose I ought to take an interest in him as a fellow Stirlingite) and died, probably of typhoid, in 1612.   His death was greeted with almost hysterical outpourings of grief, at least from the social and cultural elites; his funeral was a far grander affair than that accorded to Queen Elizabeth herself nine years earlier.   Clearly this response could not have been inspired by many concrete achievements.   In his lifetime Henry became the focus of a form of 17^th century media cult, a screen on which others projected their hopes and aspirations and fantasies.  In the years immediately following his death his memory was invoked by those who (against the policy of King James) wished to see direct British combatant involvement in the opening phases of the 30 Years War.  Later, as the country slithered inexorably towards civil war, memories of Henry were tinged with nostalgia for a lost Golden Age cut short by his death, with the implied sub-text that things would never have reached such a pass if he had lived to become Henry IX.   It is no coincidence that the first printed biography of Prince Henry was published in 1641, dedicated to Charles Prince of Wales (the later Charles II).

In other words, any exhibition dedicated to Prince Henry is going to be as much about image as reality, fantasy as achievement.  The actual flesh and blood young man upon whose shoulders so many grandiose dreams were hung risks vanishing beneath the ideal prince whose features were projected on to him.  

All eldest sons of kings had a certain innate charisma in the medieval and early modern period from the moment they popped out of the womb- it went with the knowledge that this howling infant would, if he was lucky with disease and the other accidents of childhood, one day be the king himself.  Henry however experienced a more than averagely strong investment in his person on the part of others, particularly after his father had come into his English inheritance in 1603.   A lot of this was to do with James’ shortcomings.  There was huge initial enthusiasm for his accession.   Indeed it’s hard to overstate just how much relief there was that God’s proper order had at last been restored and that England was again, after nearly sixty years in which the realm was ruled first by a minor then by two successive childless females, under the sway of an adult Protestant male whose succession was already settled (the obligatory adulation of Gloriana had worn very thin indeed by the time Elizabeth died and its very shrillness never quite overcame the niggling sense that a Queen Regnant was fundamentally unnatural).  Unfortunately on closer inspection James was less than ideal.   He was physically unimpressive (weak legs and an overlarge tongue) and thoroughly unheroic.    He was far too keen on projects which inspired little enthusiasm amongst the elites of both England and Scotland (promoting full union between the kingdoms, schemes for the reunification of Christendom) and not keen enough on ones which the English elites loved (fighting Spain, preferably through state-sponsored piracy, conducting an aggressively Protestant policy in support of his daughter and son-in-law after 1618).   He had a prodigious intellect- and made sure everybody else knew about it.   He was soft on Catholics, even after Guy Fawkes and his colleagues tried to blow him up (it didn’t help that his wide, Anne of Denmark, converted to Catholicism).  He had absolutist tendencies and could not bring himself to take Parliament as seriously as it took itself.   He was extravagant and had favourites (the latter being code for “was thoroughly bisexual and enjoyed the company of handsome young men, whose worldly interests he promoted at the expense of the traditional elites”).   He might not exactly be a Bad King but he wasn’t quite what those who had been counting the hours until the old queen died were looking for either.

It isn’t surprising to find that James’ reputation has been re-evaluated in recent years, usually in a positive direction.   Nowadays history is mostly written by professional academics who are more likely to be impressed by his intellectual capacities.   Things which were held against him in his own time - his relatively tolerant approach to religion, his reluctance to take Britain into the continental wars- are now seen either as positive virtues or at least-as in the case of his sexuality- are a matter of indifference.   His absolutist tendencies can be seen as an understandable response to a dysfunctional political and administrative system and don’t look quite so reprehensible in a world which has lost a lot of the knee-jerk reverence for Parliament which prevailed even fifty years ago.  Even his violent opposition to smoking has put him on the right side of history.

Posthumous vindication is all very well (and my own view is that the pendulum has perhaps swung a bit too far the other way on James) but it didn’t do much for James in his lifetime.   His shortcomings created a very visible space which Henry filled.   He was (obviously) young and physically active, keen on military training and very willing to participate in the neo-chivalric panoply of jousting and more or less staged combats within court theatrical performances which were so prominent in English court festivities.  Although church attendance wasn’t much emphasised, his household was suitably Protestant, staffed by military men and run on military lines- and a Catholic-free zone.   He was learned enough to keep his end up but not a bookworm or a clerk (his writing tutor made an acid comment about the quality of his penmanship in one of the doodle-covered princely exercise books displayed in the show).   He was a keen sponsor of ship building- the largest vessel in the royal fleet, the “Prince Royal” was built at his behest and a small ship for his own personal use was under construction when he died- and encouraged exploration voyages in search of the North West Passage.  He was also emerging as a keen patron of the arts when his life was cut tragically short.   In other words, he was ideally suited for the Protestant Prince role which so many in England- those who had done well out of Elizabeth’s wars and a younger generation full of half-digested chivalric impulses- were desperate to see filled.   At its most radical, he was viewed as the New Constantine who would lead a Protestant Crusade to crush the Papal Antichrist under the ruins of St Peter’s.

It’s not surprising that the myth has grown up that James and his son were very much at odds.   In its more extreme forms, the claim is that relations between them were as bad as those later routinely encountered between the Hanoverian monarchs and their eldest sons, with father and son running parallel, mutually hostile, courts.  This always looked a stretch; for one thing, the Hanoverian princes in question were men in their twenties and thirties when they fell out with their fathers.   The current view embraced in the exhibition catalogue is that this is simply untrue.   Henry was brought up according to the principles established by James himself (in excruciating detail) in his advice book “Basilikon Doron” (lots of martial exercises and no football).   His household was staffed by James’ nominees, answerable to the king rather than to Henry.   James, it is suggested, was self-aware enough to realise that he didn’t tick all the boxes for ideal kingship and was content to let his son cover areas where he was weak- being royal, then as now, was a family business.  It’s even suggested that James was prepared to allow people to think he and his son had differences of opinion as a way of keeping options open and avoiding irrevocable commitments.   Even if this may be a bit over-sophisticated, the reality is that there were few major areas of potential disagreement during Henry’s lifetime; the serious divisions over how best to support his sister Elizabeth and her husband Frederick the Elector Palatine (first in the latter’s claim to the throne of Bohemia and then in trying to get his lands back after the Holy Roman Emperor confiscated them in the wake of the collapse of his Bohemian venture) only come after 1618.    Like any self respecting teenager Henry grumbled about his parents and their fuddy duddy ways while James was (quite reasonably) concerned that the adulation surrounding Henry would go to his head and make him vulnerable to bad advisors.  There was clearly considerable latent scope for discord had Henry lived- but he didn’t.

Some other aspects of the myth of Prince Henry don’t stand up to much close examination.  The “no Catholics need apply” rule only applied to his very immediate household.  He was happy to appear in masques designed and staged by Inigo Jones, who came from a Catholic background.    He worked closely with (and lavishly funded) a Tuscan special envoy to his father’s court in drawing up increasingly elaborate garden designs for the palace of Richmond which was in the process of being modernised to serve as his primary residence when he died.  In reality it was very difficult to do princely magnificence around 1610 without dealing with Catholics- be they Italian architects and garden designers or Flemish painters and tapestry designers.    The “warrior prince” image also requires considerable qualification.  He cultivated the companionship of military men and corresponded with major commanders like Prince Maurice of Nassau.  He appears to have enjoyed his participation in jousts and was happy to be depicted at pike exercise (though the pike he’s training with below clearly isn’t the 16 foot long monster carried by a common soldier).   He was certainly portrayed often enough in armour (a couple of particularly beautiful suits which he owned are in the show) and even in vaguely military settings.  Maybe he did dream of military glory and maybe he would have been a fine soldier if he had been put to the test.   The reality is that he never heard a shot fired in anger and we can never know whether in practice he would have been any more belligerent than his father.   For all the rather nagging insistence on his vigour and fondness for strenuous exercise the portrait record suggests a rather slightly built young man- just how robust was his health even prior to the illness which carried him off?  

So how in the end does one disentangle the man from the myth?  Does it even make sense to talk of Prince Henry’s own tastes and preferences, given the way in which others moulded the face he presented to the world?   I’m not sure- and I’m not enough of an expert on the period to be totally confident in my guesses. 

For what it’s worth, I think the naval interests were real.   While I don’t for one moment suppose that Prince Henry would have been pulling on the ropes or swarming up the rigging of his personal ship, the notion of a royal prince going pleasure cruising in English waters was genuinely novel. There was no precedent for royalty messing round in boats- even monarchs who took an interest in naval affairs rarely if ever took to the sea just for the pleasure of it.  Henry was engaged enough to form close links with his favourite naval architect, the talented but corrupt Phineas Pett (one of a dynasty of ship designers and dockyard administrators prominent in English naval affairs for generations- Samuel Pepys had repeated run-ins with another Pett seventy years later).   Indeed he turned up in person to put the frighteners on an inquiry investigating allegations of corruption against Pett, who was acquitted rather in the teeth of the evidence.   I think the art loving was genuine as well.  His father showed no interest in collecting (not even books).  While Henry didn’t live long enough to commission any significant art in his own right, he was dabbling in the art market by his death, using intermediaries well placed to be up with the latest trends in European painting and literature.  Most of the art which entered his possession came by way of presents and inheritances but presumably you don’t give a prince a present which he’s unlikely to appreciate.  It’s also intriguing that Henry inspired Robert Peake, the official Serjeant Painter to the King, to produce work quite unlike anything else he painted.  Peake’s portraits were normally in the very backward looking Elizabethan tradition, almost as rigid and static as Orthodox icons and revelling in the surface glitter and sheen of rich textiles and jewellery.   Henry inspired him to a much freer and more active style- and even to create the first full size equestrian portrait of an English royal, a strange allegorical piece depicting Henry in tilt armour pulling Father Time along behind him.   This very literal take on a young man in a hurry becomes almost unbearably poignant when one knows that its subject was dead within two or three years of its creation.

Which, perhaps, leads to the inevitable unanswerable question- would the reign of a putative Henry IX in fact have been the golden age of so many dreams?   I wonder.   On the positive side, Henry clearly had far more charisma than either his father or his brother Charles and (to the extent that the “Protestant Prince” image accurately reflected his real preferences) he was probably more in tune with the views of important elements of the English elite than either of them.   Perhaps that’s the problem.   It’s all too easy to see Henry, who appears to have been genuinely close to both of his siblings and liked his brother-in-law Frederick as well, deciding to undertake a full on military commitment on behalf of Elizabeth and her husband the moment he was at liberty to do so.   Would his charisma and the apparent popularity of the Protestant cause have persuaded the Parliamentary classes to put their hands in their pockets and vote for the taxes which would have been necessary to create and maintain a credible army in the field?   I have my doubts.  When Charles finally gave Parliament the war against Spain it had been baying for its response was grudging in the extreme.   The English parliament had a history stretching back to the 1370’s of believing war could be waged on the cheap and that royal resources were quite adequate for the job with minimal recourse to taxation if applied properly.  No amount of evidence to the contrary ever seemed to shake this conviction for long and the usual response to failure and inadequate funding was to cry corruption and start witch hunts aimed at whichever royal minister happened to be unpopular at the time (the corruption was usually real enough, but a red herring in the big scheme of things).   The Pett affair suggests that Henry was every bit as tolerant of corruption in favoured servants as his father had been.   He seems to have enjoyed the masques which have been very much held against his brother and cited as proof of how out of touch Charles was.  One suspects that his court would have been every bit as extravagant as that of his father- and the tendency of contemporary historians to take a more generous view of the kind of extravagance which can be labelled “discerning cultural patronage” was not shared by 17^th century commentators (unless of course they were the direct recipients of the patronage).     I suspect the sheen would have gone off the golden boy once he actually had to make decisions with real world consequences.   It’s easy to imagine him leading a typically under-resourced, under-equipped English army of raw recruits and village troublemakers forcibly enlisted to get rid of them to catastrophic defeat in Germany (like the Ile de Rhe fiasco of 1627, only without a fleet to evacuate survivors).    He might well have been killed (or, worse, captured) in the process.   Even if that worst case scenario had not materialised, it’s entirely plausible that his putative reign might have been as troubled as that of his brother, though for somewhat different reasons.   It’s quite tempting to create a dystopic alternative history in which the king whose head was chopped off on a chilly January morning in 1649 was the terminally discredited figure of Henry IX

In reality, of course, Henry didn’t live long enough to disappoint anyone and died with his aura intact.   The Peake canvas below has a rather different poignancy.   In this the Prince’s companion is Robert Devereux, Third Earl of Essex (and son of Elizabeth’s fallen favourite).   When the English Parliament raised an army to fight Henry’s brother in 1642, Essex (by then a seasoned soldier from the German wars) was appointed its commander.    I wonder if he remembered posing for the portrait over thirty years before……