On a sweltering summer day in Westminster, a royal prince comes bawling into the world. Crowds of city-dwellers gather outside the palace gates, jostling for a glimpse. Rumors and gossip spread. The Royal Family is being tight-lipped, and in the vacuum left by the absence of official information, the newspapers make a killing.
The year is 1688, and the birth of young Prince James has just set in motion the chain of events that would lead to the overthrow of the Stuart line and the accession of the current British Royal Family.
From the moment of his birth, James Francis Edward Stuart sparked wild speculation. Newspapers and street criers announced that he was actually an impostor baby who’d been secreted into the palace in the dead of night. Palace officials feared for the baby’s life. The problem was this: King James II and his wife, Mary of Modena, were both practicing Catholics in an era when anti-“Popish” sentiment among the English populace had reached a fever pitch. By bringing a “Popish prince” into the world, the Stuarts had ensured the survival of a Catholic dynasty ruling over a predominately Protestant nation.
The London mob, backed by powerful elements at court, began to advocate for a Protestant monarch. And as the Yale historian Steven Pincus has shown, this popular rebellion neatly coincided with Dutch ambitions to seize the reins of British government. Prince William of Orange, the husband of James II’s eldest daughter Mary, was either invited to take the throne (if you believe contemporary English accounts) or seized it with a brilliant mixture of military posturing and political acumen (if you believe Pincus and the Dutch).
Royal births have often been focal points for historic upheavals. But even in their more prosaic form as celebratory pageants (and its looking like the current House of Windsor has little to fear from the Dutch this time around), the history of how royal infants entered public life has much to tell us about the changes and continuities in popular understandings of birth, childhood, and public view.
Images of infants in the ancient world are exceedingly rare, but some depictions of the progeny of powerful figures do exist. Egyptian funerary monuments, for instance, occasionally commemorate royal or aristocratic infants who died young:
A statue of the high official Senenmut protecting the royal daughter Neferure, the daughter of the female pharaoh Hatshepsut. Neues Museum Berlin
The French historian Phillippe Aries famously argued that “childhood” was an invention of modernity. Medieval people, he claimed, tended to envision even the youngest children as miniature adults, capable of laboring from a young age. Medieval children were rarely sheltered from the facts of life (whether sex or violence) and they did indeed live appallingly harsh lives by modern standards. Skepticism continues to prevail about Aries’ core claim, but it is true that medieval depictions of royal births (and children in general) tend to focus on the adult figures. The 19th and 20th century fascination with “cuteness” isn’t much in evidence here.
An unusually vivid late-medieval depiction of the birth of Caesar (via Caesarean section) from a French manuscript c. 1473. British Library, Royal 16 G VIII.