The Prince Who Would Be King:

The Life and Death of Henry Stuart

Sarah Fraser

William Collins, £25

Review by Trevor Royle

MOST people have heard about Charles I, the troubled autocratic king who plunged his three kingdoms into a disastrous civil war and was executed at the block on a cold winter’s day in 1649. But very few will know much about his older brother Prince Henry who died some three decades earlier, in November 1612. Partly this is because he was a youngster, a mere 18-year-old and partly it is because the eldest son of King James VI of Scotland and I of Great Britain has been cursed by being one of history’s “if only” characters. Promoted – overly so, it should be said – as the king who never was and who could have changed the direction taken by his country, Henry emerges from history as an ambitious and energetic young man whose true worth can never be truly gauged, only estimated at long range.

It is not as if he is unknown or a shadowy presence who has emerged without trace. There are readily available archives in London and Florence and he has attracted the attention of several recent biographers but that has not dissuaded award-winning author Sarah Fraser from having her own tilt at him. The result is a pleasantly readable book with a strong narrative which leaves little unsaid about the subject and his immediate court. It helps that Fraser is clearly not a little in love with her subject and why not? From all the available accounts Henry was the Prince Charming of his day, a young man who combined physical attributes, notably courage, with a ready wit and a capacity to wear his learning lightly.

If at times he comes across as a goody-two-shoes then that too cannot be helped. This was a young man who was addressed by the poet Ben Jonson as “the richest gem, without a paragon” and who was admired by his closest friends for his physical beauty, strength and general wisdom. Fraser skates over the uncomfortable fact that Jonson and other sycophants at court owed their livings to Henry’s patronage and the obverse of all this approbation is a tendency to do down the younger brother Charles who is written off as “a weedy child”.

Still, this is a life of Prince Henry and not his better-known brother who actually did become king. He also held the title Prince of Wales, first bestowed on the heir to King Edward I in 1301 and still in use today and Fraser’s account of the investiture in June 1610 is one of the highlights of her story. In truth, the elaborate event was more like a coronation than a state ceremonial – Henry’s ermine-lined gown cost £165,000 in today’s values – but it achieved its purpose. Not only did it cement Henry’s power base but as Fraser argues the ceremony itself produced tangible evidence of the benefits of the union which had come about as a result of the Stewarts succeeding to the English throne: “the presence of Irish peers and favoured Scots at a very English ceremony to celebrate a Scottish-born Prince of Wales created a spectacle of closer union”.

There are other links which tie Henry’s world to today’s world. The investiture revealed the young man as “a prince of Protestant Europe” who was regarded by other northern European leaders as the great hope of creating a Protestant bulwark against resurgent Catholic militancy. His sister Elizabeth (to whom he was devoted) married the Protestant Elector Frederick, an event which prompted the poet Thomas Campion to proclaim, “let the British strength be added to the German: can anything equal it? One mind, one faith, will join two peoples, and one religion and simple love.” On this score, Henry’s support for the reformed church was very much in keeping with the spirit of the age and echoed his own preferences – one close courtier remarked that he was “a reverent and attentive hearer of sermons” – but it was also born of recent experience. In November 1605 while still a little boy he and his family survived the Gunpowder Plot, the Catholic attempt to destroy the Houses of Parliament and to “blow you Scotch beggars back to your native mountains.”

This is another near contemporary echo which Fraser wisely does not pursue. Neither does she make anything of the fact that had Henry lived he might have been encouraged to embroil Great Britain in the European conflict which broke out in 1618 and which as the Thirty Years War was the longest and bloodiest war until the outbreak of the First World War three centuries later. There are already enough imponderables in a life which was cruelly cut short at the end of 1612 when Prince Henry contracted what sounds as if it might have been typhoid and for which he was treated by applying an eviscerated cockerel to the soles of his feet.

Instead, Fraser has concentrated on what is known about the prince’s life and in so doing has created an attractive picture of a young man in a hurry who was as at home in the hunting field as he was in a library reading Tacitus. No one really knows how he would have turned out but Fraser’s summary seems perfectly fair and balanced. Shortly before his death, she writes, Henry was “guarded in public but a good man to know in private” which was not “a bad way for the prince to strike people at this stage of his life.”