Book Review – When the Stones Held by David E. Owen

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Born into poverty in the remote valleys of South Wales, William grows up in a world shaped by hard labour, dangerous rivers, and communities struggling to survive. Education is rare. Opportunity is rarer still. Yet from childhood, William becomes fascinated by stone, by balance, and by the dream of building something that will outlive him.

David E. Owen’s When the Stones Held is a thoughtful novel about endurance and the forces that connect people across time. The stones of the title become more than part of the setting. One of the novel’s most compelling ideas is the metaphor of building bridges. 

David Owen uses it to explore the possibility of connection where there has previously been distance or division. A bridge depends upon foundations, patience and careful construction. The image becomes a natural reflection of the characters’ attempts to understand one another and come to terms with the past.

What makes this effective is avoiding turning reconciliation into a sentimental process. The emotional foundations must to be laid first, and the consequences of earlier choices remain present. The novel recognises is often something painstakingly constructed rather than suddenly discovered.

David Owen’s writing is engaging when these themes emerge through the story, rather than being explained. There is a tangible sense of place, and the landscape becomes bound to memory and identity. The result is a novel that feels grounded while still reaching towards larger questions about loss, belonging and the possibility of renewal.

Tony Riches

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About the Author

David E. Owen spent decades teaching around the world—from the UK to the Caribbean, Africa, and the Middle East.  Now retired, he divides his time between writing, photography, and keeping fit. Find out more at David's website: https://davideowen.uk/ and find him on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter/X and Bluesky: @dai-owen.bsky.social

Secret Numbers and Royal Betrayal: Queen Henrietta Maria’s Coded Letters to King Charles I in 1642

How a queen’s secret correspondence helped sustain the Royalist cause as England descended into civil war.

One of the challenges in writing about the English Civil War is the number of ‘rabbit holes’ to distract me. One example is exploring the wealth of secret correspondence between the king and queen. 

In the summer of 1642, England faced catastrophe. King Charles I and Parliament reached an impasse, armies gathered, and Queen Henrietta Maria was in The Hague, working to raise money and secure the weapons her husband desperately needed. The problem was a letter could be intercepted, its contents exposed, and the information used against the Crown.

Henrietta Maria and Charles relied on secret codes or ‘ciphers’. Their letters were more than messages between husband and wife. They were full of information about money, military supplies, diplomatic negotiations and people whose loyalties might determine the outcome of the coming war.

As part of my research into this I bought a copy of the original letters from Queen Henrietta Maria to Charles I, including correspondence written in ciphers. These letters provide a fascinating glimpse into a secret world, hidden behind an apparently meaningless string of numbers.

A secret language of numbers

One historical account describes the introduction of a new cipher in a letter written shortly before King Charles I raised his royal standard at Nottingham on 22 August 1642. The explanation is remarkably precise:

It consists of figures only. The system was more sophisticated than a simple substitution cipher, in which each letter is replaced by a number. According to the description, numbers up to 77 represented the letters of the alphabet, while higher numbers, extending to 379, stood for the names of people and a selection of frequently used words.

These included terms such as money, peace, treaty and rebels. This was a practical solution to a serious problem. A letter discussing a loan, a proposed treaty or a named political ally could be dangerous even if its individual sentences appeared harmless. 

Queen Henrietta Maria's cipher example 

By assigning frequently used names and politically sensitive words their own numerical codes, the correspondents could make their messages harder to interpret. The cipher also contained a secondary system in which a letter combined with a number represented short, common words such as will, be, of and from. Such devices reduced the need to spell out every word individually and made the code more efficient to use.

To an enemy who intercepted the letter without the key, the page looked like little a jumble of figures. To its intended recipient, it could convey a message about the survival of the monarchy.

Why Henrietta Maria needed secrecy

Henrietta Maria was not a queen who could safely leave political affairs to her husband. In 1642, she was in the Dutch Republic, ostensibly to hand over her ten-year-old daughter Mary to her new ‘husband’, William of Orange. 

Her real plan was buy arms and ammunition for the Royalist cause, using - by trying to sell and obtain loans against several of the Crown jewels, as well as the best of her own jewels, smuggled out of England.

She needed to keep Charles informed of her progress, while receiving news from England and coordinating decisions with him. A letter had to travel through several hands before reaching its destination. Couriers could be questioned, ships delayed or searched, and correspondence seized by political opponents.

The secret cipher offered protection, although no system was entirely secure. The more important the information, the greater the incentive for an adversary to break the code.

Cracking the royal cipher

The remarkable feature of the numerical system is that the key used to decipher the queen's letters helped unlock passages in Charles I's correspondence. The historical account explains that some of the king's letters, previously printed in contemporary pamphlets without their coded passages being understood, could be deciphered using the queen's key.

This is an important clue to how the system worked. The two correspondents needed compatible methods of encoding and decoding their messages. Once a complete key had been recovered, it could reveal more than one letter and sometimes more than one correspondent's contribution to the exchange.

A cipher key was a valuable political document, and King Charles carried his with him in his pocket. In the wrong hands, it could expose the meaning of letters that had been considered secure. 

On 22 August 1642, Charles raised his royal standard at Nottingham, formally committing himself to military resistance against Parliament. The king's decision followed months of escalating confrontation. 

King Charles I Raising His Standard at Nottingham Castle, 1642

(Wikimedia Commons)

The raising of the standard was a public declaration of royal authority. Henrietta Maria's coded letters belonged to the secret struggle behind it: the effort to obtain the money, arms and foreign support needed to sustain the king's cause.

The contrast is striking. While Charles made his intentions visible before the people gathered at Nottingham, his queen was engaged in a clandestine campaign of negotiation and procurement, communicating through letters whose most important passages were hidden in numbers.

The human cost behind the numbers

There is something poignant about a letter reduced to figures. Behind every encoded name or reference to money lay a human relationship and a political calculation. A trusted messenger had to carry the paper. Someone had to copy the numbers accurately. The recipient needed the right key, and both correspondents had to hope that no one else had acquired it.

Henrietta Maria's numerical cipher shows a queen working actively to defend her husband's cause, and a royal couple attempting to maintain their partnership when ordinary communication had become perilous. The figures on the page may look cold and impersonal. Their purpose was anything but. They carried the hopes of a monarchy under siege, at the moment when England's political crisis was becoming a civil war.

Tony Riches

Further reading

The British Library, Egerton MS 2619: original letters from Queen Henrietta Maria to Charles I, 1642–1645, including correspondence partly written in cipher.

Mary Anne Everett Green (ed.), Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria, including her Private Correspondence with Charles the First (1857).

The Folger Shakespeare Library catalogue, The Queens Majesties Message and Letter from the Hague in Holland, a contemporary pamphlet published in October 1642.

My new book, Queen Henriette, the second in my Stuart Queens trilogy, wiill be released in spring next year, subject to not falling down more 'rabbit holes' In the meantime I'm please to see the first book, Queen Anna, about Anna of Denmark, doing well, see: https://mybook.to/QueenAnna

Special Guest Post by Brenda K. Thompson: The Child Who Was Stolen: Writing A Feed Sack Dress for Sadie

Available from Amazon UK and Amazon US

Sadie Lockhart grew up on the Lockhart farm, where silence was expected and usefulness passed for affection. Hidden deep in the hills, she was raised far from the world, and the Lockharts made certain no one knew she existed.

 

Some characters begin with a face. Some with a place. Sadie began with a story my mother carried home from her work with hospice. After my father died, my mother volunteered with hospice. One of the women she cared for had an old black-and-white photograph on her mantel. It showed a barefoot little girl wearing what looked like a feed sack, crudely cut with openings for her head and arms.
The woman told my mother the little girl in the photograph was her.
She said she’d been stolen as a child.

The people who took her dressed her that way, and she grew up never knowing where she’d come from or who her real family was. I never forgot that story. But I kept thinking about the child. What would it mean to remember being taken? What happens to a child when the adults around her give her another name, another family, another version of who she is? And what happens when that child grows up?

Those questions became the beginning of A Feed Sack Dress for Sadie.
Sadie Lockhart is fictional. Her life is not the life of the woman in my mother's care. But once I began writing, Sadie became her own person, with her own childhood, her own choices, and her own way of moving through the world.

In the novel, Sadie is stolen and kept on an isolated farm in rural Appalachia. She grows up in a place where silence and usefulness pass for affection. Her world is small, but Sadie remembers enough to know that once her life was different, better.

Sadie hadn’t forgotten everything. Something inside her remained her own. A memory. A question. The knowledge that before she was Sadie Lockhart, she’d belonged somewhere else. The story is set in the Appalachian world of The Glens, the fictional mountain range where several of my novels take place. 

In Sadie’s world, readers walk the roads with her, enter the houses, sit at the tables, and feel how easily a person could disappear into a place where families lived miles apart and much of life remained private. That world also has to belong to its time.

I researched the world around Sadie closely: the work people did, the clothes they wore, the distance between farms and towns, the way news travelled, and the things a family could buy or had to make for themselves. By the time those details reach the page, they are no longer research. They are simply part of Sadie’s life.

The feed sack dress came from the photograph my mother described, and eventually it gave the novel its title. But the dress was never the story. The child wearing it was. As Sadie grows older, the question becomes larger than what was done to her.

If a child’s family, name, and history are taken from her, what remains that is still her own? Sadie survives much of her childhood by being useful. Later, that same instinct becomes part of the woman she grows into. She sees what needs doing. She helps before someone has to ask. People come to know her through the things she does, without knowing the truth of how her life began.

 
The reader carries that truth. Sadie’s past is always there, even when no one around her can see it. What was done to her shapes her life, but it doesn’t become the whole of who she is.
That’s one of the things I return to often in my writing. People live through circumstances they didn't choose. Families give us names. Communities give us places. Other people may decide what they think we are.

Still, somewhere inside all of that is the person who has to live the life. When I write, I don’t stand outside my characters and watch them. I step inside them. It’s much like an actor taking on a role. While I’m writing, their world becomes the one I live in.

 
I see what they see. I hear what they hear. I can feel the roughness of wood beneath a hand, the bumps in a road, the cold in a room. The story follows me long after I’ve stopped writing for the day. I lie awake thinking about the character, the place, what’s happened and what comes next. I stay there until the world feels real to me. I cry with them. I cry for them.

 
That was especially true with Sadie. The stolen child could never remain simply an idea at the beginning of a story. She had to become a whole person whose life I could enter and live beside. The farther I went with Sadie, the question became less about where she’d come from and more about who she would become. What happened to her began the story. It didn’t have to define the rest of her life.

A Feed Sack Dress for Sadie is part of Stories from The Glens, my growing collection of standalone Appalachian novels. Alice Anyway, Ivaleena, and Child H belong to that same imagined world, although each book tells a separate story.

 
I was grateful when A Feed Sack Dress for Sadie recently received an Honorable Mention in the 34th Annual Writer's Digest Self-Published Book Awards in Mainstream/Literary Fiction.
Awards are wonderful things for an author to receive. But they aren’t where a story begins.

Sadie began with a stolen child and a question I couldn’t put away. What happens to someone when so much of who she was has been taken from her? I followed that question until Sadie became more than the child who was stolen. She became Sadie.

Brenda K. Thompson

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About the Author

Brenda K. Thompson is an award-winning author of historical and literary fiction. Through plain language and the small details of ordinary life, she brings her characters’ worlds close enough for readers to step inside them and remember the people they meet there. Her Appalachian novels are part of Stories from The Glens, a growing collection of standalone books set in an imagined mountain world. Her debut novel, Alice Anyway, received the 2026 Next Generation Indie Book Awards Grand Prize for Fiction and won the First Novel category. Brenda and her husband, Jim, live on the North Carolina coast. Learn more at brendakthompson.com.

Book Launch Spotlight: The Queen's Tears: A Novel of Choices, Courage, and the Cost of Love by Elizabeth St.John

Available from Amazon UK and Amazon US

A stolen crown jewel and an enigmatic portrait force two women to confront the devastating choices they made for love—and summon the courage to live with the truth.

1619: Barbara, Lady Villiers, at the bidding of her brother-in-law, the Duke of Buckingham, has stolen the dying Queen Anna’s jewels—and kept the greatest prize for herself. The Queen’s Tears, a brooch of extraordinary value, torments her: too dangerous to sell, too priceless to discard, and possibly her only means of securing her children’s future. When the family fortunes are shattered, Barbara faces an impossible choice: remain loyal to Buckingham—or betray him by confessing the theft to King Charles.

Present Day: Julia Darke opens her Cotswolds bookshop to start life over peacefully. Instead, a Van Dyck portrait of Barbara’s daughter, with tantalising signs of the missing Queen’s Tears hidden in plain sight, brings her face-to-face with Oliver Villiers, the Oxford art conservator she once loved and walked away from.

Reluctantly drawn together to uncover Barbara’s secret, Julia and Oliver follow the trail of the Queen’s Tears—and the closer Julia comes to Barbara’s truth, the harder it becomes to hide from her own.

Inspired by the true stories of Queen Anna of Denmark’s stolen jewels and a missing Van Dyck painting, The Queen’s Tears weaves history, fiction, and family research across the centuries. Readers of The Lydiard Chronicles will find old favourites—and a new heroine following in their footsteps.

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About the Author

Elizabeth St.John’s critically acclaimed historical fiction novels tell the stories of her ancestors: extraordinary women whose intriguing kinship with England's kings and queens brings an intimately unique perspective to Medieval, Tudor, and Stuart times. Inspired by family archives and residences from Lydiard Park to the Tower of London, Elizabeth spends much of her time exploring ancestral portraits, diaries, and lost gardens. And encountering the occasional ghost. But that’s another story. Living between California, England, and the past, Elizabeth is the International Ambassador for The Friends of Lydiard Park, an English charity dedicated to conserving and enhancing this beautiful centuries-old country house and park. As a curator for The Lydiard Archives, she is constantly looking for an undiscovered treasure to inspire her next novel. Find out more at Elizabeth's website http://www.elizabethjstjohn.com/ and follow her on Facebook, Twitter @ElizStJohn and Bluesky @elizabethstjohn.bsky.social‬

Special Guest Post by Rosemary Griggs, Author of Queen Elizabeth I's Governess: The Real Kat Ashley

Available from Amazon UK and Amazon US

The name ‘Kat Ashley’, Queen Elizabeth’s ‘Governess’, is well-known to fans of Tudor history. Katherine Champernowne, later John Astley’s wife, joined Elizabeth’s household before the future queen turned three. Later she became Elizabeth’s ‘governess’, trusted with the upbringing of the King’s younger daughter. Formidably well-educated for a woman of her time, reports suggest Katherine did an excellent job. When Elizabeth came to the throne, one of her first actions was to name Katherine as Chief Gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber, a highly influential position within the court of a female monarch.

Although they served at the court of Henry VIII, the Champernowne family are not well known to those who study Tudor history. However, anyone interested in the early life of Elizabeth I will have come across Katherine Champernowne, later the wife of John Astley. She is widely known as Elizabeth’s childhood governess, Kat Ashley. I prefer to call her Kate, partly because the evidence that Elizabeth actually used the short form ‘Kat’ is not overwhelming, but also to reinforce that I have found a woman who differs from the Kat of popular culture.

Kate appears briefly in many learned biographies of Henry VIII’s younger daughter. It’s often been supposed she came from a minor gentry family. Writers and filmmakers often portray her in fiction and on screen as a rather foolish, gossipy nanny figure, a minor supporting character in the fascinating drama of Elizabeth’s fraught early years. My research tells a different story.

Far from being from a rural gentry background, Kate was close to people at the heart of the Tudor Court. By the early 16th century, the Champernownes of Devon had expanded their lands well beyond the west country, into Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire. Over many generations, through dynastic marriages, they forged alliances with powerful families, including Poyntz, Carew, and, most notably, Courtenay.

Like many women of her time, the historical record remains stubbornly silent about Kate’s early life. She first comes to notice when appointed to the household of three-year-old Elizabeth in 1536. Exploring her family connections and the people she was close to places that appointment in context.

Kate was the eldest daughter of Sir Philip Champernowne, a close relative of Henry Courtenay, Marquess of Exeter, first cousin and companion of the young Henry VIII. The Marquess’s father was Sir Philip’s first cousin. Sir Philip served as squire of the body to the king for a time, mixing with other well-known courtiers, before he retired to the west country, where he often deputised for the Marquess. Kate may have gained her formidable education among her powerful Courtenay relatives.

Through her maternal grandmother, Kate also had connections to the Poyntz family, who held prominent positions in Catherine of Aragon’s household. Kate’s great aunt married Sir Anthony Poyntz. She is likely the Elizabeth Poyntz who had care of Henry VIII’s short-lived son, Henry Duke  of Cornwall. Also on the maternal side, Kate’s uncle, Sir Gawen Carew married Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk’s sister. 

Brandon was a close friend of the king and married Mary Tudor, the king’s sister, after the death of her first husband, the King of France. Sir Gawen became a prominent courtier, soldier and diplomat. Sir George Carew, ill-fated captain of the Mary Rose, and his brother Sir Peter, were Kate’s cousins. 

Kate’s sister, Joan, was one of Catherine Parr’s ladies and shared her interest in the reformed religion. Joan married Sir Anthony Denny, a man so close to King Henry VIII that he was the only one brave enough to tell the dying king that his end was near. Kate’s brother, John, also had a place at court. According to Sir Richard Carew of Anthony, writing in the early years of the  seventeenth century, John was popular with King Henry ‘for his pleasant conceits’.  So Kate moved in circles close to the royal court. She also knew many Cambridge-educated intellectuals.

Not long after Anne Boleyn’s execution, Kate was one of a group of serving gentlewomen appointed to serve Anne’s three-year-old daughter. Their role was to keep company with the little girl, to entertain her, and at all times to model the behaviour and manners expected of a noblewoman in the sixteenth century.  Soon after this appointment, Kate made her first known appearance in the historical record with an extraordinarily bold letter to Thomas Cromwell. That letter, dated 5 October 1536, made me stop and think about the way historians and writers have traditionally portrayed Kate’s character.

To paraphrase the letter — there’s a full transcript in my book — Kate thanks Cromwell for recommending her to the king for her new post. She then asks him if he could speak to the king about payment for her services. Unfortunately, we only have half of this fascinating correspondence. Many of Thomas Cromwell’s papers were destroyed at the time of his downfall, and his response has not survived. In 1536, Cromwell was the most powerful man in the land, after the king. He was not a man who acted without a purpose.

Political considerations influenced his every decision, including Kate’s appointment.  I found it very hard to reconcile the author of that letter to the great man with the foolish character traditionally given to Kate. Would a girl, however well educated, from a minor gentry family, really have dared to write to him in those terms? And would Cromwell have even considered appointing someone so lacking in judgement?

I

n 1536, Lady Margaret Bryan was Elizabeth’s Lady Mistress, having overall oversight of the child’s upbringing and early years education. Lady Troy, working with Lady Bryan, was Elizabeth’s governess, and likely introduced the child to her letters using a hornbook. At that time, no one expected Elizabeth would become queen. Rather, as the king’s daughter, even though declared illegitimate, she was a valuable commodity in the marriage market. In her early years, she must gain all the attributes that would make her attractive as a bride.

Sometime after Lady Bryan took charge of the nursery of Edward VI in 1537, and Lady Troy became Lady Mistress to Elizabeth, Kate was promoted to Elizabeth’s governess. More than ten years later, in a letter to Protector Edward Seymour, dated 31 January 1549, Sir Robert Tyrwhitt, who was questioning Elizabeth about her involvement with Thomas Seymour, confirmed that it was King Henry VIII himself who promoted Kate to be Elizabeth’s Lady Mistress. That means she became Lady Mistress before King Henry died in 1547.  It also tells us that Kate not only had the support and trust of Cromwell but also of Elizabeth’s father.

Many assumptions and myths have grown up about Kate Astley, repeated so often that people consider them facts. She’s been called jolly and kind, with unconventional teaching methods, and given credit for single-handedly introducing the little girl to a long list of subjects. These statements are not confirmed in primary sources. As a royal governess, her remit was much broader than that of a Jane Eyre-style Victorian governess. Kate also had to be a mentor, adviser, and protector. She did not deliver all the academic lessons herself but had oversight of input from a range of tutors, music masters, dance teachers, riding instructors and a chaplain, who covered a wide-ranging curriculum.

From nineteenth-century scholars to more recent historians, the focus has been on the events of 1548-49 when Elizabeth was under the roof of her stepmother, the Dowager Queen, Catherine Parr, and her new husband, Thomas Seymour. Kate’s deposition, taken in the Tower of London in January 1549, gives all the salacious details of Seymour’s behaviour towards the fourteen-year-old girl, which appear to modern eyes beyond inappropriate. As a result, Kate has been declared negligent, a gossip, and even considered to have herself been infatuated with the dashing Admiral. 

These assessments do not seem to fit with the view of Elizabeth’s tutors, William Grindal and Roger Ascham, who both praised Kate for her care of the young princess. In my book, I explore an alternative scenario, placing Kate’s testimony in a different light as part of a strategy designed to protect the young princess. Interpretations of that difficult period have largely defined what people think about Kate Astley, while her later years have often been overlooked. Closer study reveals Kate as a political actor, staunchly loyal to Elizabeth.

In 1554, after the Wyatt rebellion against Queen Mary’s Spanish marriage, Kate suffered a long period of house arrest. She was suspected because her cousin, Sir Peter Carew, was a prime mover in the failed plot. Mary eventually allowed Kate to rejoin her mistress briefly, but clearly considered Kate a dangerous influence on Elizabeth and a threat. Only a few months later she held Kate in the Fleet Prison on suspicion of involvement in another plot and then banished her from Elizabeth’s service.

After Elizabeth came to the throne, she made Kate her Chief Gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber, a pivotal role with unique, intimate access to the queen. Kate was Elizabeth’s eyes and ears, listening out for damaging gossip and keeping Elizabeth in touch with how her policies were being received at court and beyond. Anyone who wanted to approach Elizabeth talked to Kate. She gave advice on what sort of gifts might be welcome at New Year.  An Italian news sheet described her as ‘Patroness of all England’ in 1562.  A year after Kate’s death, Hugh Fitzwilliam wrote to the queen saying, ‘Now that Mrs Ashley is gone he has no friend to make his moan to.’

Kate acted as a highly political female courtier at the court of a female monarch. Her death in 1565 left the queen devastated. The two women shared a close bond of mutual love and respect for nearly 30 years. Kate Astley arguably had more influence on the young Elizabeth I than anyone else. She deserves our further consideration.

I hope that Queen Elizabeth’s Governess: The Real Kat Ashley will encourage further debate about a remarkable woman.

Rosemary Griggs

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About the Author

Author and speaker Rosemary Griggs has been researching Devon's sixteenth-century history for years. She has discovered a cast of fascinating characters and an intriguing network of families whose influence stretched far beyond the West Country. She loves telling the stories of the forgotten women of history — the women beyond the royal court; wives, sisters, daughters and mothers who played their part during those tumultuous Tudor years: the Daughters of Devon. Her novel A Woman of Noble Wit tells the story of Katherine Champernowne, Sir Walter Raleigh’s mother, and features many of the county’s well-loved places. The Dartington Bride, published March 2024, is the extraordinary tale of Lady Gabrielle Roberda Montgomery who travelled from France to Elizabethan England to marry into the prominent and well-connected Champernowne family. Rosemary creates and wears sixteenth-century clothing, a passion which complements her love for bringing the past to life through a unique blend of theatre, history and re-enactment. Her appearances and talks for museums and community groups all over the West Country draw on her extensive research into sixteenth-century Devon, Tudor life and Tudor dress, particularly Elizabethan. Out of costume, Rosemary leads heritage tours of the gardens at Dartington Hall, a fourteenth-century manor house and now a a historic visitor destination, events venue and thriving community of businesses, colleges and more. You can find out more on Rosemary’s website:  https://rosemarygriggs.co.uk/ and follow her on Bluesky and Twitter @RAGriggsauthor

Prince Henry Stuart: The Best King We Never Had?

One of the most intriguing characters in my new book, Queen Anna, was the story of her eldest son, Prince Henry Stuart, heir to the crown of three kingdoms.  Brave, ambitious and a devout Protestant, Prince Henry Stuart seemed destined to become one of Britain's most remarkable kings. His sudden death at eighteen left a grieving nation wondering what might have been.

Imagine a different beginning to the seventeenth century. Instead of Charles I inheriting the English throne in 1625, it should have been his elder brother Henry who became king. A confident young ruler, devoted to Protestantism, fascinated by military affairs and eager to strengthen the navy, might have taken Britain down a very different path.

It is an intriguing possibility. Henry Frederick Stuart, Prince of Wales, was more than the heir who died too young. During his short life, he became a symbol of national ambition, Protestant hopes and the promise of a new generation of Stuart rule. His death in November 1612, aged just eighteen, deprived his father, James I, of his eldest son and left the future of the monarchy in the hands of a very different young prince.

Henry was born at Stirling Castle in Scotland on 19 February 1594, the eldest surviving son of James VI of Scotland and Anne of Denmark. His birth was celebrated as a moment of great importance for the Stuart dynasty. James had no guarantee that his Scottish crown would pass smoothly to his descendants, and a healthy male heir offered the prospect of continuity.

When Elizabeth I died in March 1603, Henry's father inherited the English throne, becoming James I of England while remaining James VI of Scotland. For the first time, the crowns of England and Scotland rested on the same head. Henry was now heir to a monarchy whose future would eventually encompass both kingdoms, although they remained separate states with their own laws and institutions.

The new royal family attracted enormous interest. Henry represented the future: a young prince who might inherit his father's kingdoms and provide the strong, stable Protestant succession many people desired. His younger brother Charles, born in 1600, stood behind him in the line of succession, with little reason to expect that he would one day become king.

Portrait of Prince Henry Frederick Stuart (the eldest son of King James VI of Scotland and Anne of Denmark) painted around 1596 when he was about two years old,

Henry's childhood was not spent entirely in the company of his parents. He was brought up under the care of tutors and household officers, first in Scotland and later in England. One important figure in his life was Adam Newton, his tutor, who supervised an education intended to prepare him for the responsibilities of kingship. 

Henry's education was designed to prepare him for power. He studied Latin, French and Italian, alongside history, geography and the practical knowledge required of a Renaissance prince. He was particularly interested in military matters and seems to have responded more enthusiastically as his lessons became relevant to his future responsibilities.

He was athletic, enjoying tennis, hunting, hawking and other sports. Unlike the rather reserved reputation that later attached to his brother Charles, Henry cultivated an image of energy, discipline and action. His interest in military exercises and elaborate armour helped establish him as a prince who could lead his subjects rather than merely inherit their obedience.

In 1610, aged sixteen, Henry was formally created Prince of Wales in a magnificent ceremony. The occasion confirmed his position as heir to the English throne and provided an opportunity to present him as the embodiment of chivalric virtue.

Portrait miniature of Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, 

painted around 1610–1612 by Isaac Oliver 

Yet Henry's public image was not simply the result of court propaganda. He demonstrated a genuine appetite for learning and a remarkable interest in the world beyond his father's court. His contemporaries saw in him a young man with the potential to become an unusually active and capable monarch. 

One of the most interesting aspects of Henry's life was the breadth of his ambitions. He was fascinated by the sea, exploration, military strength and the position of Protestant powers in Europe.

Henry supported the development of England's navy and took an interest in navigation and maritime technology. The celebrated shipwright Phineas Pett built a magnificent vessel known as the Prince Royal, launched in 1610. It was among the most ambitious royal naval projects of the period and reflected the prince's enthusiasm for maritime power.

Henry also supported exploration, including an expedition intended to find the Northwest Passage, the hoped-for sea route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. His name was associated with English colonial ambitions in Virginia, where the settlement of Henricus was named in his honour. He often visited Sir Walter Raleigh in the Tower of London to share ideas on exploration and ship design. These interests were connected. A stronger navy could defend the realm, protect trade, challenge rival powers and support England's expanding overseas ambitions. Henry appeared to understand that England's future would depend partly on its ability to project power beyond its shores.

His religious convictions also shaped his political outlook. Henry was an ardent Protestant, and his views were considerably more hostile towards Catholicism than those of many who favoured religious compromise. In an age when European politics were deeply entangled with religious conflict, this mattered enormously. A future King Henry might have pursued a more assertive Protestant foreign policy, although we cannot know how far his practical decisions would have matched the expectations placed upon him. 

For all his military interests, Henry was no narrow-minded soldier. He was an enthusiastic collector, a patron of artists and architects, and an important figure in the cultural life of the Jacobean court. His library contained more than a thousand volumes added to an already impressive collection. He commissioned architectural and garden projects, including a new library and riding school at St James's Palace and ambitious gardens at Richmond Palace. These projects reflected the intellectual curiosity and cultivated tastes expected of a European Renaissance prince.

Court entertainment was another important part of his public identity. In January 1610, Prince Henry's Barriers combined a masque with an elaborate tournament. The performances celebrated princely virtue through allegory, music, dance and spectacular costumes. The architect and designer Inigo Jones helped establish the visual splendour for which Stuart court entertainments became famous.

In the autumn of 1612, the Stuart court was preparing for a major royal celebration. Henry's younger sister, Princess Elizabeth, was to marry Frederick V, Elector Palatine, a prominent German Protestant prince. Their marriage, which took place in February 1613, promised to strengthen Protestant alliances across Europe. Frederick arrived in England in October 1612, and Henry spent time with his future brother-in-law. The atmosphere at court should have been one of excitement and anticipation. Instead, the celebrations were overtaken by a sudden and devastating illness.

Henry had apparently been suffering from periods of lassitude and headaches before becoming seriously ill in October. He continued to take part in physical activities, including tennis, despite his deteriorating health. Contemporary accounts describe fever and the increasingly desperate attempts of his physicians to treat him.

A later account associates his illness with swimming in the Thames after playing tennis, although the precise circumstances and significance of the swim remain less certain than some popular retellings suggest. What is clear is that his condition worsened rapidly, despite the efforts of the royal doctors.

On 6 November 1612, Henry died at St James's Palace. He was only eighteen. The loss was almost impossible to comprehend. The prince who had seemed to embody the future of the Stuart monarchy was gone, leaving his family and country to confront a future nobody had expected to arrive so soon. 

The sudden death of a popular heir naturally provoked suspicion. Rumours circulated that Henry had been poisoned, and speculation later attached itself to rivalries at court and to his father's relationship with his heir. There was no evidence that he was murdered. A post-mortem examination was ordered, in part to address fears and rumours surrounding his death. The surviving medical accounts have led historians to regard typhoid fever as the most likely explanation. The diagnosis is not based on modern laboratory testing, of course, but on the recorded symptoms and the historical evidence.

The poisoning stories reveal something important about Henry's place in the public imagination. His death was so unexpected, and his promise so widely celebrated, that many people struggled to accept an ordinary illness as the explanation. For a nation that had invested so much hope in him, it was easier to imagine that the future had been stolen than to accept that it had simply ended. 

The grief following Henry's death was extraordinary. His body lay in state at St James's Palace before his funeral at Westminster Abbey on 7 December 1612. The funeral procession was a magnificent and solemn affair, with around two thousand official mourners and crowds lining the streets.

The ceremony reflected not only the importance of the heir to the throne but also the emotional investment people had made in him. Poetry, sermons and music commemorated his life, while writers struggled to express the scale of the loss.

King James was devastated. Accounts of his grief suggest that the death remained a painful preoccupation, even when the king was occupied with affairs of state. Queen Anne of Denmark also lost a son whose position within the dynasty had made him central to the family's future.

Henry's younger brother Charles was now the heir apparent. He had to assume a position for which he had not been expected to prepare so soon, and the shadow of his elder brother's reputation would follow him for the rest of his life.

Henry was buried in the vault of his grandmother, Mary, Queen of Scots, in Henry VII's Chapel at Westminster Abbey. His funeral effigy, once richly dressed, has survived in fragmentary form, a poignant reminder of how the physical traces of even the grandest royal lives can gradually disappear. 

It is tempting to imagine Henry ascending the throne in 1625, when James I died. He would have been thirty-one: an experienced prince, familiar with government, military affairs and international politics, with a reputation for energy and strong Protestant convictions.

Would he have avoided the conflicts that engulfed his brother Charles I? Would he have worked more successfully with Parliament? Might he have strengthened the navy, pursued a more forceful Protestant policy in Europe or approached the relationship between Crown and country differently?

Henry had not yet ruled a kingdom. We can't know how he would have responded to financial pressures, religious divisions, parliamentary resistance or the competing demands of his subjects. His apparent confidence as a prince does not prove that he would have been a successful king.  Nevertheless, his death changed the course of the Stuart dynasty. Charles inherited the crown in 1625 and eventually faced the crisis that led to the English Civil Wars and his execution in 1649. Henry's life ended before he could encounter any of these challenges.

The contrast between the brothers is striking. Henry was remembered as a vigorous, idealised young prince, while Charles became associated with the bitter divisions of his reign. It is possible that Henry would have faced many of the same problems. It is equally possible that his personality, priorities and political choices might have produced a different outcome.

What matters is that the possibilities disappeared with him. Prince Henry Stuart lived for only eighteen years, yet he left a considerable mark on the culture and politics of his age. He supported the arts, took a serious interest in maritime power, embraced a strongly Protestant identity and inspired hopes that he would become an exceptional king.

His story also reminds us how history can turn on events that seem, at the time, almost unbearably arbitrary. A fever in the autumn of 1612 changed the succession, altered the future of the Stuart family and left the English monarchy to a younger brother whose reign would become one of the most turbulent in British history.

Perhaps that is why Henry continues to fascinate us. He belongs to that small group of historical figures whose lives are inseparable from the future they never lived to shape. We can admire the promise without pretending to know the outcome. We can mourn the loss without turning him into a flawless hero - and we can wonder what might have happened if the young Prince of Wales survived to wear the crown.

Tony Riches

See: Author Anna Belfrage Reviews Queen Anna, Book One of the Stuart Queens Trilogy

Blog Tour Spotlight: The Roll Of the Dice Series: We Who Endure, by J. A. Quarles

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As the fires of war spread across a divided nation, three brothers from Louisiana are swept into the storm that will decide the fate of the Confederacy-and perhaps the future of America itself.

In the bloody aftermath of Fredericksburg, young Confederate officer Johan Lutze escapes Union captivity through courage, cunning, and sheer determination. Returning to General Robert E. Lee's army just in time for the Battle of Chancellorsville, Johan performs an act of heroism that saves the life of the legendary General Stonewall Jackson and thrusts him into the inner circle of Confederate power.

Now, with Vicksburg under siege and the Confederacy teetering between survival and collapse, Johan's bold strategic ideas begin to influence President Jefferson Davis himself. But in Richmond, ambition and politics can be as deadly as bullets, and not everyone welcomes the rise of the young officer from Louisiana.

While Johan helps shape daring military campaigns alongside Generals Lee, Beauregard, and Johnston, his brothers wage battles of their own. Paul Lutze Jr., maimed at Shiloh and fitted with a prosthetic leg, enters the shadowy world of Confederate espionage, where secrets and sabotage may alter the course of the war. Meanwhile, sixteen-year-old Jacques Lutze marches north with the ferocious Louisiana Tigers, consumed by grief, vengeance, and a burning desire to kill Yankees before they kill him.

From the fields of Pennsylvania to the banks of the Mississippi, from the halls of Richmond to the courts of Europe and the rising empire in Mexico, the war expands into a conflict of global consequence. Armies maneuver. Governments scheme. Brothers bleed.

And as the summer of 1863 approaches its reckoning, the Lutze brothers will stand at the center of history-where triumph and tragedy walk hand in hand.

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About the Author

Born and raised in New Orleans, Justin has always had a passion for storytelling. This writing process has always been important to Justin, a lifelong history nerd, who received a Bachelor’s in History from the University of New Orleans. After he is done with his day job, Justin loves to come home and play with his two wonderful kiddos and watch movies with his wife. Find out more at www.jaquarles.com