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
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