‘Sacred Vessels’: Stuart Maternity, Infertility and Dynastic Politics at the Stuart Court

Abstract

The queens, queens consort and princesses who determined the Stuart succession were conceptualised as ‘sacred vessels’, their reproductive bodies carrying personal and public, dynastic and state, political and confessional ambitions. This comparative study considers the dynastic pressures and reproductive experiences of these women, offering both quantitative and qualitative analysis. The first section, ‘Measuring Dynastic Success’, charts their reproductive experiences through statistical patterns: the ages of marriage and first birth, the known number of conceptions and births as well as rates of mortality. The second section, ‘Scrutinising and Embodying Fertility’, examines the courtly optics of female fertility. The final section, ‘Treating Infertility’, considers their efforts to manage their bodies through physic, diet, prayer and patronage.

Keywords:

• Stuart queens
• fertility
• pregnancy
• childbirth
• women’s health
• succession

In the deeply contested political landscape of 1688, all eyes were on James II’s queen consort, Mary Beatrice (also known as Mary of Modena), who was pregnant. The poet Aphra Behn anticipated the birth with a Congratulatory poem to her most sacred Majesty, on the Universal Hopes of all Loyal Persons for a Prince of Wales. Here, Behn insists on the gender of the unborn child — ‘Hail, royal BOY’ — and likens Mary of Modena to a ‘sacred Vessel, fraught with England’s STORE / Guard safe our Treasure to the wish’d for Shore’.¹ Mary is thus positioned as a ‘vessel’ whose primary role is to safely deliver a male heir for the good of the dynasty and country. For Behn, this is not Mary’s child or indeed solely the Stuarts’, but ‘our treasure’, embedding the embryo with import that crossed personal and public, dynastic and state, political and economic, if not ‘sacred’ value. All queens were expected to produce heirs to the throne. Thus, from a purely dynastic perspective, birth was inherently political. For James II and Mary of Modena in 1688, their Catholic faith imbued their son’s birth with enormous consequence, inciting a crisis that would result in James’s forced abdication. Indeed, this ‘vessel’ — the Stuart maternal womb — held a deep store of political consequences.

The Stuart dynasty in England was born and died by crises precipitated by childless queens regnant: Elizabeth I and Anne.² A relatively short-lived dynasty in comparison to the Habsburgs or the Bourbons, the Stuarts reigned in England from 1603–1714. After the death of Elizabeth I and the accession of James VI of Scotland onto the English throne in 1603, the stakes could not have been higher. Without a healthy family of heirs to provide dynastic security, James would never have been crowned; but James already had three healthy children — two sons and a daughter — and a consort who, aged twenty-eight, was still fertile.³ The memory of Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon, who after over twenty years of marriage had provided only a single (surviving) daughter, was further evidence that royal births did not just matter but had the power to completely change the political landscape. Queen Mary I, too, had been unable to bear a child. The birth of two more daughters shortly after arriving in England was exploited by the Stuarts to its full propagandistic potential, and when they died, impressive monuments to them were built in Westminster Abbey.

The pressure on European royal consorts to produce heirs was compounded by a patrilineal system that gave precedence to legitimate males. The execution of Charles I and the Exclusion Crisis generated by Charles II’s lack of a legitimate heir showed just how vulnerable the Stuart dynasty was to political and reproductive circumstances. Although England was not restrained by Salic Law, which prohibited women from inheriting the throne, as in France, the two Stuart queens regnant, Mary II (r. 1689–94), who ruled jointly with her husband William of Orange, and Anne (r. 1702–07), were acceptable only because there were no stronger legitimate, male heirs.

The patriarchal values of the succession and politics of fertility at the Stuart court have been examined by historians.⁴ Literary and visual efforts to support or undermine the dynastic narrative at the time demonstrate the extent to which both the court and the public were invested in Stuart queens’ fertility.⁵ Generally, scholars’ focus has been on individual births with particular import to the succession, in particular the birth of James Edward Francis in 1688, and Anne’s many losses and ultimate childlessness.⁶ While the 1688 controversy has been widely discussed, and the reproductive problems of Catherine of Braganza, Queen Mary II and Queen Anne regularly mentioned, a comparative analysis is needed to underscore the reasons for and the circumstances of reproductive anxiety that are so often generally assumed.

This study examines a single dynasty from its rise to its fall and considers the experiences of the women charged with its reproductive continuation over a century: Anna of Denmark, Henrietta Maria of France, Catherine of Braganza, Anne Hyde, Mary of Modena, Mary II and Anne. Despite their diverse national backgrounds, these are the experiences of a very small segment of the population — the most senior women at court. They were all relatively young brides whose reproductive health was the subject of close scrutiny, overt pressure and medical treatments. They all actively sought to conceive and most experienced reproductive struggles. Their struggles were individualised and yet the physical and cultural experiences of conception and pregnancy are broadly applicable to European queens in this period.

Given its temporal sweep, the article is structured thematically to facilitate comparisons. The first section, ‘Measuring Dynastic Success’, charts the reproductive experiences of the Stuarts through statistical patterns: the ages of marriage and first birth, the known number of conceptions and births as well as rates of mortality. The second section, ‘Scrutinising and Embodying Fertility’, examines the courtly optics of female fertility. The queens’ efforts in managing the affairs of their bodies through physic, diet, prayer and patronage is the focus of the final section, ‘Treating Infertility’. While there was a strong presence of physicians who managed the reproductive care of Stuart women, there is limited surviving medical documentation related to their pregnancies and births. The case notes that survive from the physician Theodore de Mayerne for Henrietta Maria from 1626–30, for example, provide tangible access to one Stuart queen’s experiences and the medical investment in her fertility. But given the relative paucity of such evidence across the dynasty, this article is not a systematic investigation of the medical histories of each woman. Instead, the focus is on general patterns and points of distinction, providing a framework for an evidence-based analysis of fertility, as a shared experience for Stuart queens and a cornerstone of their role.

Measuring Dynastic Success

A dynasty depends on deep roots and regular growth. This is visualised in royal portraits that depict the monarch and consort positioned alongside genealogical trees, such as one produced in 1604 to commemorate the new Stuart dynasty and its paterfamilias James VI of Scotland/I of England and his consort, Anna of Denmark (fig. 1). At the apex of the dynastic tree is a portrait of their eldest son, Prince Henry, singled out as the heir to the throne. Further bolstering their dynastic health are the names of other children as well as a blank space for a new one. After all, children were essential to preserve the dynasty, and the promise of more needed to be calculated and promoted.

Figure 1 Nicolaas de Bruyn, James I and Anne of Denmark with a family tree, 1604

(Royal Collection Trust / © His Majesty King Charles III 2024)

Stuart women held their reproductive experiences in common not only with each other, but with a broader population. Demographic studies of early modern England may provide some guidance as to where queens’ experiences of childbirth and infant mortality sat in relation to their era. The court had its own ecosystem in terms of access to medical care and healthy living. Intriguingly, however, work by Peter Razzell and Christine Spence has identified little difference in mortality rates amongst social classes.⁷ Although the data is limited and does not account for differences in maternal and childcare, it provides an interesting comparison with fertility and birth at the Stuart court. Demographic studies have charted rising fertility rates in the early modern period and underscored the high rates of miscarriage, stillbirth, infant deaths and child deaths.⁸ Infant mortality was very high in London, accounting for around one-third of the dead in the early modern period, with infant and child death doubling from the sixteenth to mid-eighteenth centuries.⁹ Roger Finlay’s analysis of London and Chris Galley’s study of York show that only around half of live births survived to the age of fifteen.¹⁰

In comparison to the data on individual families from different parishes in London at this time, the rates of infant and child morality were much higher for the Stuarts and their consorts. This does not allow us to confirm that consorts experienced higher death rates; individual circumstances and the fact the records on queens are far more complete than for average women could skew this data. However, this information does allow us to map their experience on a broader scale. T. H. Hollingsworth’s study indicates that the peerage experienced a slow and steady decline in fertility from around 1590 to 1740, alongside higher mortality rates.¹¹ Moreover, the period of Stuart rule coincided with a peak in general fertility during the reign of James I, while Charles II’s reign was a period of high mortality, including a virulent outbreak of the plague in 1665–66.¹² Although no Stuart children died of plague, they did succumb to several contagious diseases including smallpox, typhoid and tuberculosis. The point here is that no one was immune to deadly disease and Stuart queens bore the anxiety of such concerns alongside mothers of other social standings. Even if not all of the women discussed in this article were queens consort during all of their pregnancies, all of them would have understood their place in the dynastic succession from early on in their marriages.

Stuart princes’ marriages were secured with young women, a practical step taken to provide an extended period for multiple childbirths. Table 1 presents the Stuart royal women’s ages at the time of their marriage alongside that of their first birth. They married between the ages of fourteen and twenty-three, with a mean of 17.9 years. Anna of Denmark was fourteen years old when she married James VI of Scotland, and Henrietta Maria and Mary of Modena were both fifteen when they married Charles I and James, duke of York, respectively. James, duke of York’s daughters, Mary and Anne, married at ages fifteen and eighteen. It is evident from their ages that fertility was a priority. Menstruation was expected around the age of fourteen, and fifteen was regarded as the best age for its inception since it boded high fertility.¹³ Early modern Galenical medical theory identified the period of adolescence, roughly between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, with hot and moist qualities characteristic of the sanguine humour.¹⁴ This life stage was considered the height of a woman’s health, fertility and beauty, the ultimate triumvirate for any royal bride.

Table 1: Ages at Marriage, First Birth and Final Birth

Name	Birthday	Marriage	Age at marriage		First birth	Age at first birth	Final birth	Age at final birth
Anna of Denmark	12/12/1574	20/08/1589	14.7		19/2/1594	19.2	22/6/1606	31.5
Henrietta Maria of France	25/11/1609	01/05/1625	15.4		13/3/1629	19.3	16/6/1644	34.6
Catherine of Braganza	25/11/1638	21/05/1662	23.5
Anne Hyde	03/12/1637	03/09/1660	22.8		22/10/1660	22.9	9/2/1671	33.2
Mary of Modena	05/10/1658	20/09/1673	14.9		10/01/1675	16.3	28/6/1692	33.7
Mary II	30/04/1662	04/11/1677	15.5
Anne I	06/02/1665	28/07/1683	18.5		12/5/1684	19.3	24/1/1700	34.9
Mean			17.9			19.4		33.6
Median			15.5			19.3		33.7

These brides were considerably younger than the average woman at first marriage in early modern London, which statistically took place in her early twenties.¹⁵ Although the reasons for this distinction are myriad, it is worth hypothesising that this is because of the need for them to reproduce — and the need for their marriages to secure political alliances — was so carefully considered. For the four London city parishes studied by Roger Finlay, the mean age of first marriage for women was between 21.3 and 24.7 years.¹⁶ British daughters of peers married somewhat younger, from an average of around twenty in the early seventeenth century to twenty-three in the early eighteenth century.¹⁷ At the Stuart court, many aristocratic women also married young. Elizabeth Stewart married Henry Howard in 1626, aged sixteen and seventeen respectively, and she was pregnant within a year. They went on to have nine sons and three daughters that would secure the family line for generations; Charles II would later re-fortify this family as the premier noble family of the Kingdom by re-creating the dukedom of Norfolk for Henry’s eldest son, Thomas. One couple who married particularly young was Isabella Bennet, daughter of Henry Bennet, first earl of Arlington, and Elisabeth of Nassau, and Charles II’s illegitimate son, Henry FitzRoy, later duke of Grafton, in 1672, at the ages of five for her and nine for him. Their first and only child, a male heir, was born in 1683, when she was around sixteen. This emphasises that securing political alliances, financial inheritances and hereditary titles were motivations shared by kings and queens and the wider nobility, concerns that did not have as significant an impact on other partitions of society.

It is also worth noting that Stuart kings and dukes were generally married to women much younger than themselves, with the consorts of James I, Charles I and Charles II being between seven to nine years their junior. James II’s marriage as duke of York to Anne Hyde, four years younger and already pregnant, was succeeded by his union in 1673 with an Italian princess twenty-five years younger than he, a union whose importance was heightened when it was clear that his elder brother would not have a legitimate child with his wife, Catherine of Braganza. James II’s daughters princesses Mary and Anne also married significantly older men (William was twelve years Mary’s senior and George eight years older than Anne). Royal Stuart males’ choice of younger wives is consistent with Vivien Brodsky Elliott’s analysis of age differences in London marriages from 1598–1619, in which more socially elite couples tended to have the higher age differences, suggesting that fertility may have indeed been the reason Stuart men sought younger wives.¹⁸

At the time of their first live births, Stuart women were aged between sixteen and twenty-two, with a mean of 19.2 years old. Besides Anne Hyde, who was pregnant at her marriage, Mary of Modena, Princess Mary and Princess Anne were all pregnant within the first year of marriage; of these pregnancies, only Anne Hyde had a live birth. The efforts of Mary of Modena and the princesses to get pregnant quickly should be seen in the context of the succession question current in the 1670s and 1680s, with Charles II having no legitimate heirs and James II having only daughters. Anna of Denmark and Henrietta Maria had been married for a few years before their first pregnancy; however, this delay too was a subject of much consternation at court. Both would ultimately go on to have several children.¹⁹

The mean age of final birth for Stuart women was 33.6, well before the normal onset of menopause.²⁰ In some cases this can be attributed to the physical distance between husband and wife, such as Henrietta Maria, who went into exile aged thirty-three, just after the birth of Henrietta Anne in 1644, and never saw her husband again. In other cases, difficult pregnancies resulting in miscarriage, stillbirth and child mortality may have made these women reluctant or unable to conceive more children. Although details are scant, this may have been the case with Princess Mary, who had two miscarriages early in her marriage. It is less clear at what point Catherine was considered past conceiving, although the last known reference to her being with child is in the early 1670s.²¹ Anne’s final pregnancy, which led to a stillbirth in 1700, was at age thirty-four. There were no further pregnancies and her husband died in 1708. Nevertheless, despite her many losses and ongoing health problems, one of Anne’s physicians, Sir David Hamilton, did record in 1710 that she was still menstruating. Yet alongside Anne’s many losses were ongoing health problems, with Hamilton frequently recording her gout and related feelings of ‘disquiet’.²²

With a focus on marrying young to maximise multiple births, Table 2 testifies to this set of royal women’s reproductive successes and losses. The relatively short intervals between births would have been achieved through the use of wet nurses, a common practice amongst the elite.²³ While all of the women became pregnant, the viability of these pregnancies varied, as charted in Table 2, which calculates the numbers of known pregnancies, miscarriages, stillbirths and live births. Even though queens’ (and potential queens’) bodies were closely scrutinised at court, evidence is patchy in some instances of pregnancy and miscarriage. Of the known pregnancies, over half resulted in live births. All queens experienced conception and loss, some enduring the latter with devastating frequency through miscarriage, stillbirth or infant death (see Tables 2 and 3). Catherine of Braganza and Mary II never experienced a live birth. The others had between five and eight live births, with each providing both sons and daughters. The mortality rates for the live births are also illuminating. Only twenty-one of the thirty-five live births survived the first year, and only twelve lived until the age of sixteen. Fewer of these surviving married — just nine, eight of whom would have children of their own to bolster the dynasty. Five became Stuart sovereigns.

Table 2: Pregnancies, Miscarriages, Stillbirths and Live Births

Consort/Queen	Pregnancies	Miscarriages	Stillbirths	Live births
Anna of Denmark	9	2	-	7: three sons and four daughters
Henrietta Maria of France	9	-	1	8: three sons and five daughters
Catherine of Braganza	Possibly 3	Possibly 3	-	-
Anne Hyde	8	-	-	8: four sons and four daughters
Mary of Modena	12	2	3	7: two sons and five daughters
Mary II	At least 1	At least 1	-	-
Anne I	18	8 (including twins)	5	5: two sons and three daughters as well as at least one hysterical pregnancy
Total	60	15	9	35

Table 3: Related Fertility Data

Average number of pregnancies	8.7
Total births who died within a week	5
Total perinatal mortality (stillbirths + infants who died within a week)	14
Total live births who survived the first week	30
Total deaths from birth through the first year	16
Total deaths from ages 1 to 16	7
Total infant mortality rate (up to age 1)	45.7% of live births
Total child mortality rate	11.5% of children who survived to age 1 died before age 16
Number of issue who married	10
Number of issue who survived to adulthood and married – borne of a Catholic consort*	6, three of whom were male

*Henrietta Maria of France, Anne Hyde and Mary of Modena

Considered as a whole, around half of the legitimate Stuart children were stillborn or died in infancy and only around one-third survived to their sixteenth birthday. Admittedly, this figure is distorted by Anne’s many losses. Pregnant seventeen times (once with twins) in sixteen years, Anne was in a constant state of reproduction from the age of eighteen, just months after her marriage, until age thirty-four. The medical assessments of Anne in her lifetime and what is known of her obstetric history have led to a modern diagnosis of lupus.²⁴ The reproductive problems faced by Anne as well as Catherine of Braganza, Mary of Modena and Mary II compromised not only the security of the dynasty but their own physical and mental health.²⁵ Having lost a child to miscarriage in April 1678, Mary II, then princess-consort of Orange, was sick in July; by September plans were underway for Mary of Modena and Princess Anne to visit her in Holland due to another supposed pregnancy, which also resulted in miscarriage.²⁶ The interest and concern about Princess Mary’s pregnancies underscores just how fraught the succession question was at this time. It is worth acknowledging, too, that Princess Mary’s husband was her first cousin, which is known now to increase the possibility of birth defects and early death.²⁷

The loss of children took its toll on Stuart parents. Mary of Modena’s ‘great affliction’ at the death of her only living child at that time, Isabella, ‘one of the dearest things I had in the world’, is tangible in a letter she wrote to her sister.²⁸ Anne’s physician Hamilton also refers to the Queen’s ‘disquiet’ at the death of the duke of Gloucester, who died aged eleven in 1700.²⁹ Fathers, too, suffered, with a clergyman describing James, duke of York, at the death of his son Charles, duke of Cambridge, in December 1677, aged just thirty-five days, as ‘never known to have grieved so much at the death of his other children’.³⁰ Given this baby was James’s only living male heir, his emotions may have been rooted in both his grief as a father but also fear for the dynasty.

Other sources are emotionally mute but underscore the importance attached to births and deaths. A small notebook made for James as duke of York recorded the births of seven of his eight children by Anne Hyde and his first three with Mary of Modena (fig. 2).³¹ The records are short but precise, measuring births to the minute in most cases, and also detailing events of marriage, death and burial place. An otherwise innocuous list, it can be seen as a commemoration of James’s and his wives’ children, the legitimate heirs to the Stuart throne, in particular as it also includes a lock of hair sewn into the book alongside the entry to Anne Hyde’s death, presumably her own. Though only daughters survived, Anne Hyde had provided two potential Stuart sovereigns (and as fate had it, both indeed succeeded to the throne), and this notebook’s commemoration of her memory and of all the children born and lost points to both the growth of Stuart dynastic branches and also their loss.

Figure 2 The Births, ages & deaths of Their Royall Highnesses Children, c.1677–78.

(Royal Collection Trust / © His Majesty King Charles III 2024)

This very personal book, along with the wider statistics for the women charged with the Stuart succession, reveal that while there were many successful live births, the number of those who had children of their own to continue the dynasty was low. Despite access to an army of doctors, apothecaries, midwives, nursery staff, clean rooms, fresh air and bountiful food, as in lower social echelons, many Stuart pregnancies nevertheless failed and many children died. The accounts and the data demonstrate that the Stuarts, like other royal dynasties, had good reason to be worried about succession. While studies have described general anxieties around succession, this data provides evidence for these concerns in concrete terms. Conceiving was only the first step in having a child, and the government of their body once pregnant was equally fraught, with doctors offering extensive advice about suitable diet, moderate exercise, fresh air, sensible sleep and emotional equilibrium. Notwithstanding all the infrastructure and advice, women were also expected to ‘govern themselves’ appropriately to ensure the health of their unborn child.³² In 1678, James, duke of York, sent letters to the prince of Orange about his daughter Mary’s pregnancies, advising her ‘to be careful of herself, and she would do well to not stand too much, for that is very ill for a young breeding woman’.³³ If Mary never ‘bred’ a new branch of the House of Stuart, she certainly tried.

Scrutinising and Embodying Fertility

Since royal marriages were a political investment in dynastic succession, it was essential to have a healthy — that is to say, fertile — wife. There were physical traits associated with fertility which were measured and scrutinised from the moment a woman was considered as a possible royal bride and which continued to be surveyed throughout their childbearing years.

Genetic factors were a consideration. The Stuart dynasty seemed built on fertile foundations; the ‘Roots of these royal branches’ were promising.³⁴ One measure of a queen’s fertility was her mother’s own reproductive experiences. Anna of Denmark’s mother, Sophia of Mecklenburg, was upheld for her fertility, which would align with the experiences of her daughter and granddaughter.³⁵ Indeed, James I and Anna of Denmark’s offspring proved very fertile, with Princess Elizabeth (the ‘Winter Queen’) ultimately having thirteen live births. In turn, Charles I fathered nine pregnancies with Henrietta Maria, eight of which led to live births. These successes may have exacerbated the pressure faced by Catherine of Braganza, who was not able to carry a pregnancy to full term. No one could doubt Charles II’s virility; he flagrantly engaged in sexual affairs and sired children with seven different women. This was not, however, fatherhood that could be shaped into the Stuart pater patriae persona cultivated by his father. Instead, this made Charles II vulnerable to moral opprobrium and ridicule.³⁶ John Wilmot, second earl of Rochester subverts precisely this image in his Satyr upon the Mistresses:

The truest Pater Patriae e’re was yet,

For all, or most of ‘s subjects, does beget.

[Distaff] and Scepter are about a length,

In thy hot [humour] lies thy wit and strength.³⁷

Yet if morally compromised, the King’s health certainly was not. The Privy Councillor George Savile, marquis of Halifax, interpreted Charles II’s many illegitimate children as ‘the effects of good health and good constitution’.³⁸ By contrast, observers remarked on Catherine’s recovery from a brief although severe illness in 1663 as a renewed opportunity for her to become pregnant if she followed instructions regarding her diet and routine.³⁹ This perceived relationship between fertility and health explains why healthy young brides were sought for Stuart matches.

Reproductive success was attributed to God’s grace as well as to overall bodily health.⁴⁰ Galenic medicine assessed fertility in terms of the healthy balance of the body’s humours.⁴¹ Citing Hippocrates, the physician John Pechey explains: ‘If the hot answer not the cold, and the dry the moist, with measure and quantity; that is, if there meet not in the Womb two Seeds, the one hot, the other cold, the one dry, the other moist, extended in equal degree, there can be no generation.’⁴² Note how Charles II is described in the above poem as ‘hot’, a humoral temperament associated with youth and health. For women, infertility could be regarded as humorally based. One of the supposed problems with Catherine of Braganza, for example, was that she was perceived to have a particularly hot and dry humoral constitution. This was rooted in her Portuguese heritage and exacerbated by dietary choices that were also deemed hot and dry. For the Florentine writer Lorenzo Magalotti, who visited England in early 1668, there was a connection between her hot and dry homeland, her diet, and her reproductive health.⁴³

Fertility was also read in a woman’s physical appearance. In marriage negotiations, the appearance of the bride was closely scrutinised. Visible signs of healthy fertility included body shape (not too fat nor too thin) and skin colouring (‘fair’, i.e, white skin with rosy cheeks), precisely the same features identified at the time with ideal physical beauty.⁴⁴ All of the Stuart foreign-born consorts were praised for their beauty and fecundity in the course of marital negotiations. The face, in particular its colour and texture, was closely examined, being considered ‘the Looking-Glass, especially of the Liver, Spleen and Lungs: for what Humour bears sway in the bowels, the same shews it forth in the Face’.⁴⁵ This humoral reading of outer appearance was indicative of the health of the body. The ideal skin colouring (‘good colour’), was a ‘lilies and roses’ complexion, displaying vigorous good health.⁴⁶ These details were of serious state import.⁴⁷ The English courtier James Howell reported on the comparative complexions of the Spanish Infanta Maria Anna during marriage negotiations with Charles, then prince of Wales, in 1612, and the Bourbon princess Henrietta Maria whom he ultimately married in 1626, claiming of the latter that she had ‘a more lovely and lasting complexion’.⁴⁸ Catherine of Braganza’s lily whiteness was also extolled, as was her body, described by John Evelyn as ‘prettily shaped’.⁴⁹

The importance of appearance is abundantly clear in the accounts of Henry Mordaunt, second earl of Peterborough, who travelled to Europe ‘to get sight and knowledge’ of potential brides for James, duke of York: ‘a Marriage being his chief business, and a probability of Children.’⁵⁰ He described Princess Maria Anna of Württemberg as ‘middle Stature, fair Complection … her Looks Grave, but Sweet … But above all, she had the appearance of a Maid in the ripeness of Youth, of a Sanguine and Healthful Constitution, fit to bring strong Children, and such as might be like to live and prosper’.⁵¹ This was a strong endorsement of her fertility, even if it is rather lacklustre in its assessment of her beauty. Although this match was not pursued, it speaks to the interest in a potential royal bride’s fecundity and in assessing that fertility through physical features. The Earl’s meeting with Mary of Modena occasioned a stunning description of her physical virtues: ‘tall and admirably shaped, her Complexion of the last fairness … there was all the Features, all the Beauty and all that could be great and charming in any human creature’.⁵² In her shape and colour, she was beautiful, and this boded well for her powers of attraction and conception.

This helps to contextualise the centrality of a bride’s fertility in the traditional poems written to commemorate Stuart marriages.⁵³ George Marcelline’s epithalamium for Charles I and Henrietta Maria conceptualises their union as ‘the Treasure and Store-house of our hopes’ in a comparable manner to Behn’s poem about Mary of Modena’s maternity. Henrietta Maria’s form — outside and inside — is presented as ‘a well-framed Engine’: lineage, virtue, beauty and health are all mutually interdependent and make her an appropriate vessel for Stuart dynastic hopes.⁵⁴

After marriage, observations of the bride’s physical appearance continued to be made in the context of fertility. Charles II observed in a letter to his sister, Henriette-Anne, that Anne Hyde’s body ‘shape’ facilitated an easy birth, by contrast with hers, which ‘is not so advantageously made for that convenience’.⁵⁵ Princess Mary’s former chaplain reported receiving a letter in February 1678 saying that ‘the princesse was grown somewhat fatt and very beautifull withal’, at a time in which she had recently been announced as pregnant.⁵⁶ By contrast, in September 1685, the Tuscan ambassador Francesco Terriesi reported to the Grand Duke about Mary of Modena’s ‘pallid looks and want of flesh’, at a time in which her health was the subject of concern, having lost all five of her children.⁵⁷ Pale skin and a thin body shape were associated with reproductive problems.⁵⁸

Visible evidence of fertility was widely reported. Discussions of menstruation, missed periods, possible pregnancy and fears of miscarriage were not only a matter for private consultation with physicians but discussed in personal correspondence with intimates — and the subject of speculation at court. The physician Theodore de Mayerne’s case notes for Henrietta Maria from 1626–1630, the period in which she first became pregnant, suffered a stillbirth, and became pregnant a second time with the future Charles II, demonstrate just how closely he monitored her health and fertility.⁵⁹ Mayerne documented her menstrual cycles, urine and faeces, pulse and temperature, thirst and appetite, sleep and wakefulness, sites of pain, skin condition, energy levels and humoral constitution. On 18 June 1627, Mayerne recorded that the Queen expressed ‘a desire to have children’, and his efforts were to make this happen.⁶⁰ While she did become pregnant, she lost the baby at about six months in May 1629. Mayerne describes a few notable events in the lead-up, suggesting these may have had an impact, including a frightening dog, a playful encounter with her husband, a tumultuous boat journey and heavy walking. He then details the events of the stillbirth ‘So that everything is recorded, and the causes of the stillbirth known and thus avoided in future when God bestows the conception of a new child’. In a breech position, Mayerne extracted the ‘well-formed male child’.⁶¹ His prescriptions to heal her postpartum body, including a delicate diet, a plaster for her breasts and a clyster to expel the lochia are recorded, showing the intense focus on restoring her health. If the King and Queen lost their first baby, Henrietta Maria nevertheless succeeded in showing she was capable of conceiving a boy. Within months, she would be pregnant with the future Charles II, and again Mayerne’s notes are forensic in charting her sexual encounters with the King and possible conception dates.⁶²

In addition to the hands-on role of physicians, a queen’s fertile body was the subject of attention amongst members of the royal family, courtiers and the public. There was scrutiny about Catherine of Braganza’s reproductive body from the onset of her marriage to Charles II in May 1662. On 7 September 1662, Samuel Pepys observed the King, Queen and Queen Mother at Somerset House, where in a teasing encounter, the King ‘would have made the Queen Mother believe that his Queen was with child, and said that she said so. And the young Queen answered, “You lye”’.⁶³ Even if Pepys presents this as a ‘very merry’ occurrence it illuminates the pressure on a queen who had only recently arrived at court. Accounts of Catherine’s pregnancies are very limited, but they indicate a close watch on signs of her fertility. She was deathly ill throughout October 1663, at one point apparently experiencing a delirium in which she believed she had given birth to two boys and a girl.⁶⁴ A miscarriage was reported in 1666, with the physician William Quatremaine informing Sir Joseph Williamson: ‘the evidence of fecundity must allay the trouble of this loss: since the field appears fertile there is noe doubt.’⁶⁵ The aforementioned Magalotti describes Catherine’s menstrual flow and frequency of sexual intercourse with Charles II.⁶⁶ While this was clearly not based on first-hand information, it demonstrates this as a subject of interest in a year in which the Queen again suffered a miscarriage. This happened in May 1668, with the King confiding in his youngest sister, Henriette-Anne:

And though I am troubled at it, yet I am glad that ‘tis evident she was with child, which I will not deny to you till now I did fear she was not capable of. The physicians do intend to put her into a course of physic which they are confident will make her hold faster next time.⁶⁷

The ‘evidence’ is important — the presence of a foetus — showing that the Queen was not imagining the pregnancy. Pepys similarly lamented that this miscarriage ‘of a perfect child, being gone about ten weeks, do shew that she can conceive, though it be unfortunate that she cannot bring forth’.⁶⁸

Just a year later, Catherine appeared to have been pregnant again. Charles II divulged details about his consort’s menstruation to Henriette-Anne, offering her ‘a particular account of my wife with the plainness you desire’:

She has missed those [her courses] almost, if not altogether, twice about this time she ought to have them … The midwives who have searched her say that her matrix is very close, though it be a little low; she has now and then some little shows of them, but in so very little quantity as it only confirms the most knowing women here that there is a fair conception.⁶⁹

Pepys reported on 11 May 1669 on ‘some trouble at Court for fear of the Queen’s miscarrying’.⁷⁰ On 19 May 1669, he waited on the King and Queen at dinner in the Queen’s lodgings at Whitehall and saw her ‘in her white pinner and apron, like a woman with child’.⁷¹ This sartorial presentation as a pregnant mother — in a place where she could be seen at dinner alongside the King — speaks to the importance of the optics of pregnancy.

But just weeks later, on 7 June, Charles lamented in a letter to his sister that ‘after all our hopes’, Catherine had miscarried again.⁷² His feeling ‘troubled’ and fearful reveals how closely the personal and political were intertwined in the case of royal births. The desolation was widely felt, as evident in a 17 June 1669 letter Richard Watts wrote to Joseph Williamson that ‘A great fit of melancholy has possessed the gentry and good subjects, by the news of her Majesty’s miscarriage’.⁷³ Both the King and ‘the gentry and good subjects’ watched for signs and news of the Queen’s pregnancy and were impacted emotionally by the loss.

If menstruation signalled health and fertility, there were other physical signs that pointed to pregnancy. In the case of Mary of Modena in 1688, the bodily evidence was contested. The English politician Sir John Wildman sought to discredit her pregnancy by presenting the ‘Proofs and Evidences’, claiming that ‘her menses … continued their usual uncertain course’.⁷⁴ Wildman further insisted that her breasts did not swell or produce milk and that the shape of her belly was suspect.⁷⁵ The obsessive interest in the physical markers of pregnancy can be discounted as the exaggerated claims of a dissident, but it also demonstrates the relatively public knowledge about a queen’s reproductive status. As the shared ‘vessel’, the Queen’s body was laboured over by physicians and midwives, courtiers and commoners. The intimate details of her body circulated as a kind of shared barometer of the nation’s health. Several women who waited on the Queen in her bedchamber testified after the birth of the prince of Wales in June that they had in fact seen evidence of pregnancy, including milk (colostrum) on her smock and seeing and feeling her belly.⁷⁶ One of these, Sophia Bulkeley, described seeing the milk when she changed her smock, again a reminder of the access to a queen’s pregnant body amongst chamberers.

Another sign of pregnancy that was monitored was the moment of ‘quickening’, when a woman felt the baby move in her womb, perceived as a sign of a viable pregnancy. This, too, was not just a medical milestone but the subject of wider court and public interest.⁷⁷ References to quickening are found in medical case notes, correspondence and eulogistic poems. Mayerne excitedly documented Henrietta Maria’s feeling of foetal movement in her 1629 pregnancy with the future Charles II.⁷⁸ Such reproductive signposts could be broadcast widely. Sir Charles Scarburgh, First Physician to James II, gave testimony at a special meeting of the Privy Council on 22 October 1688, about Mary’s quickening, and it was also mentioned in a poem about her pregnancy.⁷⁹ The fact that quickening is not mentioned in accounts about Princess Mary or Catherine of Braganza’s pregnancies suggests that their miscarriages happened early. If Behn’s poem positions the queens as ‘sacred vessels’ to carry Stuart heirs, the accounts that survive point to the active participation of the community, court and the royal women themselves in their fertility.

Identifying and Treating Infertility: Physic, Diet, Prayer and Pilgrimage

Despite their youth and apparent health at the time of marriage as well as their ability to conceive, many queens faced reproductive problems. Barrenness was generally understood as ‘an impotence to conceive’.⁸⁰ As Marisa N. Benoit has demonstrated, defining infertility in early modern England necessitates considering a ‘spectrum of infertility’ of reproductive challenges and failures and not solely childlessness.⁸¹ The term could also refer to those who ‘bear … but seldom’ and other that ‘breed but Weak and Tender Children’.⁸² The Stuarts faced all of these reproductive problems. Barrenness was attributed to a range of factors, including the lack of a companionable relationship between the couple — emotionally and humorally — as well other medical reasons, whether an inherited physical defect or resulting from an accident.⁸³ Typically women were seen as the sources of barrenness.⁸⁴ Pechey identified the sources as ‘coming from defect either of the Genitals, or of the blood, or of the menstruous blood’ in the woman.⁸⁵

Infertility was not solely privately disappointing but the source of diplomatic speculation and public humiliation. In the summer of 1663, just a year after their marriage, there were rumours of the ‘Queen’s [Catherine of Braganza’s] barrenness’.⁸⁶ Her infertility was the subject of demeaning jokes, such as Pepys’ description on 14 June 1667 of a neighbour’s gate being graffitied with: ‘Three sights to be seen; Dunkirke, Tanger and a Baren Queene.’⁸⁷ Such was the threat to the Stuart succession in the face of Catherine’s inability to bear a child that Charles II was pressured to divorce her. The Anglican preacher Gilbert Burnet advised the King that if she was ‘Naturally Barren’, she should be ‘declared incapable of Marriage … And so the Marriage is to be annulled’.⁸⁸ If Charles II ultimately accepted his wife’s infertility, there was intense anxiety about the succession, which controversially settled on his Catholic brother, James, duke of York. However, Catherine was not alone in her reproductive struggles; her Protestant nieces were plagued with problems and Anna of Denmark, Henrietta Maria and Mary of Modena endured painful — although less politically significant — maternal losses.

Therapeutic approaches to fertility at court were overseen by physicians who could offer practical advice about diet and exercise and prescribe physic, including medicines, bloodletting and/or purges as well as hydrotherapy.⁸⁹ The full scope of these prescriptions, however, only survives for Henrietta Maria and the case notes from Mayerne over her first two pregnancies. Charles II assured his sister that after Catherine’s miscarriage in 1668, the physicians would advise on a ‘course of physic’ to treat her ability to carry a pregnancy to term.⁹⁰ While these details do not survive, advice and recipes for avoiding miscarriages suggest that this would have involved oral and topical medicines as well as advice about diet and exercise, fresh air and rest.⁹¹

Medical texts warn against excessive exercise, and this advice seems to have been heeded by Henrietta Maria after the loss of her first son. Her mother, Marie de Medici, sent her a chaise to ensure she travelled safely, showing how she supported the medical advice.⁹² Henrietta Maria, for her part, put her faith in God and promised to take ‘all possible care’ of herself.⁹³ Under medical advice, Mary of Modena was prescribed bloodletting to prevent miscarriage after getting pregnant in 1687.⁹⁴ Similarly, Sarah Churchill recounts how Anne adhered to physicians’ warnings to stay still on a couch to prevent miscarrying.⁹⁵ Anne was advised to take the waters at Tunbridge Wells for the same reason.⁹⁶

Diet, too, was carefully regulated. Certain foods were considered particularly wholesome, including meats and broths. To Edmund Cooper, a physician and poet who commemorated the miraculous deliverance of Catherine of Braganza from her ‘late grievous and deplorable fit of sickness’ in 1663, the Queen’s foreignness was also problematic. For Cooper, her illness provided an opportunity to consider her overall health, i.e., her fertility:

Now seeing I have happened upon the word Fertility, give me leave to tell your Majesty, that I have a strong Presumption, that this your late Sickness will conduce much thereto in your own temperament. Your Body of Portugall is all wasted and consumed. If you shall now betake you to an English Dyet, so brave an alteration will be made in your Majesties Constitution, that we shall have a Prince built out of You like His Father, to make Us up a long lasting happyness here, and to wait upon your Majesties old Age, to that which lasts for ever hereafter.⁹⁷

This aligns fertility and health but also Catherine’s hopeful fecundity with purging her body ‘of Portugall’ and replacing it with ‘English Dyet’ to change her ‘constitution’ or humoural temperament. This, he claims, will make her conceive a prince, ‘built out of You’. Here again is the Queen as vessel for a building, a son, ‘like his Father’. And, as with Aphra Behn’s rapturous elision of the Queen’s maternal body with ‘us’, our ‘happiness’, Cooper underscores how this is a communal child who ‘lasts for ever hereafter’ in the succession. The poem proceeds to tell us what she needs to eat: English ‘Beefe’, to provide her with the all-important ‘English Spirit’.⁹⁸ This advice points to the role of diet in conception but also considerations of her acclimatising to England and her husband. Scrutiny of Catherine’s diet and humoral constitution persisted. Magalotti related that the Queen was regarded as having an exceptionally hot and dry constitution, avoided excessively salty and dry foods and took a very temperate approach to wine, which was considered to be inherently hot and dry.⁹⁹

Medical advice included hydrotherapy, which was widely embraced by Stuart women to promote fertility, heal postpartum bodies and improve overall health, as Susannah Lyon-Whaley has discussed.¹⁰⁰ This came in the form of both taking spa waters that were rich in iron — orally, topically applied to particular parts of the body, and/or immersing the body — as well as medicinal baths prescribed for private use.¹⁰¹ Mayerne insists in his case notes on Henrietta Maria that ‘there is nothing better to aid conception than sulphurous and iron-rust waters’.¹⁰² Wellingborough (Northamptonshire), Tunbridge Wells (Kent) and Bath (Somerset) frequently received royal Stuart visitors during the summer for a period of around a month. All three waters were promoted for fertility.

Anna of Denmark was the first royal Stuart visitor to an English spa with her 1613 visit to Bath for gout. Mayerne recommended this spa visit, and directed Henrietta Maria to take the waters at Wellingborough just a year after she arrived in England. Henrietta Maria spent the summers of 1626, 1627 and 1628 at Wellingborough. This seems to have been for general health reasons but also specifically for her reproductive health. The Venetian ambassador to England, Alvise Contarini, reported several times that Henrietta Maria was taking the waters in order to conceive a child, writing on 23 July 1627, ‘The queen has gone to Wellingborough … to drink some mineral waters which facilitate generation, as with no signs of anything in more than two years people naturally begin to comment on the matter’.¹⁰³ Again, in 1628, her trips to the spa were aligned with fertility, with the ambassador documenting on 22 August 1628 that ‘The king remains hunting, 50 miles away, and the queen is drinking mineral waters to facilitate child bearing, which is desirable and necessary’.¹⁰⁴ The waters must have been seen to have the anticipated effect, since she gave birth, as discussed above, to a son on 3 May 1629. Although a stillbirth, it was proof that she was fertile. She recuperated that summer at Tunbridge Wells and gave birth to a healthy son, Charles, on 29 May 1630.¹⁰⁵ Even though she had taken Tunbridge and not Wellingborough waters before this successful pregnancy, Edmund Gayton’s The Art of Longevity connects Wellingborough’s miraculous springs with the fertility of Henrietta Maria:

I like the wells in Wellingborrough-ground;

Whose spring’s renoun’d for vertue uterine,

And still is famous for our pregnant queen.¹⁰⁶

Catherine of Braganza was a regular visitor to Tunbridge Wells and Bath in the 1660s to treat her infertility. Pepys regularly mentions her visits, which attests to the public interest — and visibility — of such health treatments. The King, too, accompanied his wife at Tunbridge Wells and Bath and this may have helped to promote their shared commitment to conceiving — if not active efforts to conceive during his visit.¹⁰⁷

Mary of Modena and Princess Anne also frequented the waters for their fertility problems. Mary of Modena was treated for infertility at Bath and conceived James Edward Francis when James II visited her there in early September 1687.¹⁰⁸ Anne was a frequent visitor to Tunbridge Wells, especially in the early years of her marriage to Prince George of Denmark. The physician John Radcliffe advised her to take the waters for her reproductive ailments.¹⁰⁹ After the stillbirth of her first child, a daughter, in May 1684, Anne spent the summer taking the waters at Tunbridge Wells, returning over the next few years.¹¹⁰ She was at Bath convalescing after a miscarriage when Mary of Modena gave birth in the summer of 1688.¹¹¹ Princess Anne and Prince George spent July and August 1691 at Tunbridge Wells, too, likely conceiving a child there, George, who died soon after birth on 17 April 1692.¹¹² In 1692, the royal couple went to Bath in August and September. Even as late as 1703, just a year after her coronation, Anne wrote to the duchess of Marlborough that she was planning ‘to take physick in order to drink the Spaw waters, which my Doctors have adviced me to do & I have a great inclination for them my self, hopeing they may make my Lady Charlott [menses] return’.¹¹³ But Anne would not get pregnant again.

The taking of medicinal waters was more than the passive acceptance of medical advice, but demonstrates the royal women’s own active investment in their reproductive success. Mayerne’s notes on Henrietta Maria shows that she did not adhere to all of his advice and took charge of governing her body herself: in August 1627, he writes, ‘She decided on bathing to bring her health back into perfect balance’.¹¹⁴ Similarly, Anne’s explanation to the duchess of Marlborough cited above insists that she was taking the waters not solely on medical advice but due to her own ‘great inclination’.

Physic, however important, was part of an integrated approach to infertility that also involved prayer and, in some cases, pilgrimage and offerings. There was a strong religious framework for understanding and treating fertility, which was regarded as a sign of God’s favour. Women perceived their reproductive success or loss as an act of divine providence, and given God’s active role they put great store in prayer and considered effective medicine a manifestation of God’s grace.¹¹⁵ Writing to her mother to thank her for the new chaise to safely transport her after the loss of her first child in 1629, Henrietta Maria invoked God’s favour: ‘I hope God may grant me the favour to go to the end of my term, and as to what depends on me, I shall take all possible care of myself.’¹¹⁶ She was also taking some personal responsibility. Clearly, Henrietta Maria sought an integrated approach to her reproductive health. Queen Anne, too, embraced the full range of efforts to conceive, disclosing in the aforementioned letter of 1703 her ‘hopes of ye unexpressible Blessing of another Child … I would leave no unreasonable thing undone’.¹¹⁷ Anne shows both a deference to God’s will as well as the importance of physic and her own dedication.

As Mary Fissell has shown, in the late medieval tradition, the Virgin Mary was both the ultimate role model and the most important intercessor for the expectant mother, and relics and prayers played key roles in the birthing experience.¹¹⁸ If the Reformation complicated the relationship between Catholic saintly intercession, the situation at the Stuart court was even more complex. For Catholic consorts including Henrietta Maria, the Virgin Mary remained omnipresent as an intercessor and role model — in prayer, in the visual imagery of the birthing rooms and in the religious offerings presented in the context of the birth. Iconoclasm may have erased the visual optics of Catholic conception and motherhood in churches, but this did not apply to royal palaces, which housed rich stores of artworks depicting the Virgin and Child. There is strong documentary evidence for this for Henrietta Maria at the birth of her daughter Catherine in 1639.¹¹⁹

Intercession through pilgrimage and offerings also featured in the reproductive aspirations of Mary of Modena. In the hopes of his wife conceiving, on 29 August 1687, while Mary was at Bath, James visited Winifred’s Well at Holywell, in north Wales, to seek the Virgin Mary’s intercession for a son.¹²⁰ The site of St Winifred’s martyrdom, the spring’s miraculous healing powers were attributed to the intercession of the Virgin Mary. With a chapel rebuilt over the well in the 1490s by orders of Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry VII, the well also had become a site of dynastic significance.¹²¹ Here, James brought offerings, most significantly, a sacred Stuart relic, ‘the very shift in which his great-grand-mother, Mary Stuart, lost her head’.¹²² Given the shared Catholic faith of Mary, Queen of Scots and James, the offering is confessionally potent. James may also have bathed in the polygonal well, saying prayers.¹²³ Mary of Modena, too, recognised the potency of the site, and had recently requested the adjacent chapel from James as a personal gift to be overseen by Jesuits.¹²⁴ After their son’s birth the following year, Mary seems to have commissioned a mass in thanksgiving at the shrine, acknowledging its role in her conception.¹²⁵ Mary’s mother, too, the duchess of Modena, purportedly travelled to the most significant Marian shrine, at Loreto, and offered up prayers for Mary to have a son.¹²⁶

These visible actions were seized upon by anti-papists as evidence of nefarious efforts for the Queen to conceive a son. An anonymous 1688 ballad, LORETTO and WINIFRED. OR, A New Way of Getting of Children, viz. By Prayers and Presents, lambasts the use of ‘physic’, ‘prayer’ and ‘presents’ to secure a Catholic male heir. To another source of 1689, these ‘Processions and Pilgrimages, Offerings and Supplications’, as well as the taking of the waters, are ‘the practices of the Pagan Religion, that the greatest Villanies and Rogueries they intend to commit’.¹²⁷ In a 1696 treatment of the ‘whole intrigue’ of this ‘Imposture’, the three events are paraded out as evidence of the efforts to deceive: Mary’s mother’s offerings to Loreto, James’s pilgrimage to Winifred’s Well and Mary’s visit to Bath.¹²⁸

Since trips to healing waters in the hopes of pregnancy were made in the warmer summer and early autumn months, one would expect to see a cluster of conceptions after such visits. In some cases kings and queens travelled together or convened while taking the waters, while in other cases they did not. The documentation is limited, but there are some interesting concordances. James visited Mary at Bath from 6–16 September 1687, and this timing indicates that the baby was likely conceived then.¹²⁹ A number of other conceptions seem to have occurred after Stuart women had taken the waters, including Henrietta Maria, Catherine of Braganza and Anne. Henrietta Maria was at Tunbridge Wells in the summer of 1629 and was back in London by 6 August. Since she gave birth on 29 May 1630, she seems to have conceived just weeks after returning. Moreover, conceptions did occur after taking the waters, which is significant because it would have inspired successive women to have confidence in them.

Other considerations may have informed the timing of conception, according to contemporary sensibilities, including the related issues of humoral complexion and seasonality. The English translation of the Italian physician Giovanni Sinibaldi’s sex manual, Rare Verities, advises that ‘Women are most lustful in the Summer, but men in the Winter’, and so for the ‘commodity of both sexes the Spring is to be chosen as the best season of the year for generation’.¹³⁰ Analysis of Stuart live births and likely conception dates by quarter of the year indicates that conception extended throughout the year but with a notable increase in the warmer quarters of Midsummer (April-June) and Michaelmas (July-September).

With the importance of the liturgical calendar at court, and the Catholicism of three of the Stuart consorts, it is worth considering if the patterns suggest abstinence at certain times of the year, such as Lent. The subject merits research beyond the scope of this article, since it would involve finding out each of the kings’ movements during these periods, but it seems that a number of royal children were conceived during Lent and just after Easter, even for Catholic queens including Henrietta Maria. Nevertheless, with only six live births in Lady Day quarter in contrast to ten each in Midsummer and Michaelmas quarters, this suggests that in general royal couples heeded Sinibaldi’s advice and those months in which conception was considered to be optimised (Spring) and women most lusty (Summer). Moreover, a statistical approach may also tell us things that we might not have expected to find in terms of conceiving around Catholic feast days and in Spring and Summer.

Conclusion

When Charles I married Henrietta Maria in 1625, an epithalamium issued the expectations for her bluntly:

so Shee may bee the happie Mother of many children, and Hee the fortunate Father and Progenitour of many Princes, that Shee being like a fruitfull Vine vpon the wall-side, his children may bee like Oliue Branches round about his table; and that in his Posteritie, not onely his Highnesse, but all the world may bee happie.¹³¹

Citing Psalm 128, it promises that God will bless his followers with wives who will be like fruitful vines, his children like olive branches around the table. True to its prediction, Charles I’s children’s children did ‘flourish’ in his palaces, including King Charles II and James II, but reproductive problems still vexed the ‘posterity’ of the dynasty. With James’s conversion to Catholicism and the birth of a baby boy to his second wife Mary of Modena in 1688, claims to the throne were splintered, and James’s daughters were crowned in succession. The reproductive struggles and child losses of Queen Mary and Queen Anne were met with sadness and resignation. Despite their successive efforts, the dynasty died out with Anne’s death in 1714.

The queens, queens consort and princesses who determined the Stuart succession were conceptualised as ‘sacred vessels’, their reproductive bodies carrying personal and public, dynastic and state, political and confessional ambitions. In charting a comparative study of the statistics, this essay provides a solid foundation for understanding general anxiety over the succession. It shows that queens — and those around them — had good reason to be anxious. It is unlikely that a Stuart queen, princess or duchess ever felt at any point in her marriage that she could take her fertility for granted. Literary efforts to control the dynastic narrative, including Behn’s poem, demonstrate the court and the public’s investment in Stuart fertility, which extended to practical involvement in conception and pregnancy. Stuart women’s physicians oversaw their reproductive health with physic and hydrotherapy, their mothers endeavoured to influence matters through practical gifts and holy offerings, and their husbands and courtiers closely monitored signs of fertility and barrenness.

The women were not, however, passive objects in the goal of succession. Their minds and bodies were central to the rituals of physic and bathing, diet and exercise, prayer and intercessory images. The Stuart queen or princess likely had scant choice but to fulfil the expectations given the pressure she encountered from every quarter, but ultimately Stuart women themselves consciously undertook actions deemed to facilitate a healthy conception, pregnancy and birth. These royal women were involved participants in the continuation of dynasty, bearing the pressure and blame for failure, while their bodies bore its success.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Erin Griffey

Erin Griffey

Erin Griffey is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Auckland. She is the author of On Display: Henrietta Maria and the Materials of Magnificence at the Stuart Court (Yale, 2016), as well as many other publications on women at the early modern court.

Notes

1 Aphra Behn, Congratulatory poem to her most sacred Majesty, on the Universal Hopes of all Loyal Persons for a Prince of Wales (London, 1688), A1v.

2 See Susan Doran and Paulina Kewes (eds), Doubtful and Dangerous: The Question of Succession in Late Elizabethan England (Manchester, 2014); Andreas Gestrich and Michael Schaich (eds), The Hanoverian Succession: Dynastic Politics and Monarchical Culture (Farnham, 2015); Paulina Kewes and Andrew McRae (eds), Stuart Succession Literature: Moments and Transformation (Oxford, 2018).

3 Two more children were born in England: Mary (1605–07) and Sophia (1606).

4 Malcolm Smuts, ‘Royal Mothers, Sacred History, and Political Polemic’, in Kewes and McRae, Stuart Succession Literature, pp. 282-302.

5 Toni Bowers, The Politics of Motherhood: British Writing and Culture 1680–1760 (Cambridge, 1996); Mary Fissell, Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2004); Catriona Murray, Imaging Stuart Family Politics: Dynastic Crisis and Continuity (Aldershot, 2017); Daphna Oren-Magidor, Infertility in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2017).

6 See Smuts, ‘Royal Mothers’, pp. 295-302; Rachel Weil, ‘The Politics of Legitimacy: Women and the Warming Pan Scandal’, in Lois G. Schwoerer (ed.), The Revolution of 1688–89: Changing Perspectives (New York, 1992), pp. 65-82. For Mary of Modena and her commitment to a Catholic succession, see Susannah Lyon-Whaley, ‘Contesting (Catholic) Motherhood: Mary Beatrice of Modena, The “Glorious Revolution”, and Queenly Agency’, in Eilish Gregory and Michael Questier (eds), Later Stuart Queens, 1660–1735: Religion, Political Culture, and Patronage (Cham, 2023). For Anne, see H. E. Emson, ‘For the Want of an Heir: The Obstetrical History of Queen Anne’, British Medical Journal 304 (23 May 1992), pp. 1365-6.

7 Peter Razzell and Christine Spence, ‘The History of Infant, Child and Adult Mortality in London, 1550–1850’, The London Journal 32, no. 3 (2007), pp. 271-92.

8 For the English context, see Roger Finlay, Population and Metropolis, The Demography of London, 1580–1650 (Cambridge, 1981); T. H. Hollingsworth, ‘The Demography of the British Peerage’, Supplement to Population Studies 18 (November 1964); E. A. Wrigley, ‘Explaining the Rise in Marital Fertility in England in the “Long” Eighteenth Century’, The Economic History Review, New Series, 51, no 3 (1998), pp. 435-64. See p. 441 for the definition of stillbirth as death after twenty-eight weeks of pregnancy in modern medicine. Wrigley defines perinatal deaths as stillbirths and first week infant mortality.

9 Finlay, Population and Metropolis, pp. 83-110.

10 Finlay, Population and Metropolis, pp. 100-03; Chris Galley, ‘A Never-ending Succession of Epidemics? Mortality in Early Modern York’, Social History of Medicine 7, no 1 (1994), pp. 29-57, esp. p. 39.

11 Hollingsworth, ‘Demography of the British Peerage’, esp. pp. 29-31.

12 Hollingsworth, ‘Demography of the British Peerage’, pp. 53, 61.

13 Will Fisher, ‘The Renaissance Board: Masculinity in Early Modern England’, Renaissance Quarterly 54 (2001), pp. 155-87, at p. 121. See also Sara Read, Menstruation and the Female Body in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2013), pp. 57-8, 175-6. For the age of menstruation, see Aristotle’s Master-Piece, Or, the Secrets of Generation Displayed in all the Parts Thereof (London, 1694), pp. 2-3.

14 For Galen’s humoral typology, see Galen, Works on Human Nature, volume 1, Mixtures (De Temperamentis), ed. and trans. by P. N. Singer and Philip J. van der Eijk (Cambridge, 2018). For early modern English deployment of humoral language for ages, see Thomas Elyot’s Castel of helth (London, 1539), 10v, which categorises adolescence as the period until age 25 and as constitutionally hot and moist, in contrast to old age’s cold and dry constitution. N. H., Ladies Dictionary (London, 1694), p. 30, positions adolescence between the ages of 14 and 22.

15 Vanessa Harding, ‘Families and Households in Early Modern London, c. 1550–1640’, in R. Malcolm Smuts (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Age of Shakespeare (Oxford, 2016), pp. 605-06; Finlay, Population and Metropolis, pp. 133-50; Vivien Brodsky Elliott, ‘Single Women in the London Marriage Market: Age, Status and Mobility, 1598–1619’, in R. B. Outhwaite (ed.), Marriage and Society: Studies in the Social History of Marriage (London, 1981), pp. 81-100, esp. 82-7.

16 Finlay, Population and Metropolis, p. 137.

17 Hollingsworth, Demography of the British Peerage, p. 18. See also Linda Pollock, ‘Embarking on a Rough Passage: The Experience of Pregnancy in Early Modern Society’, in Valerie Fildes (ed.), Women as Mothers in Pre-industrial England (London, 1990), pp. 39-67, at p. 54.

18 Brodsky Elliott, ‘London Marriage Market’, pp. 84-5.

19 For Anna, see Alan Stewart, The Cradle King: A Life of James VI & I (London, 2003), pp. 139-40; for Henrietta Maria, Mayerne, Opera medica, highlights the urgency and necessity of the queen conceiving, as in pp. 131-32.

20 Aristotle’s Master-Piece, p. 3, determines that women are ‘capable of conceiving … generally to Forty-four’.

21 This was from Abbé Rizzini in Paris reporting a rumour that she was pregnant. Cited in Martin Haile, Queen Mary of Modena (London, 1905), p. 51.

22 Hamilton attended the Queen from late 1708 until her death and kept a diary of his encounters with her from 1709 to 1714. See The Diary of Sir David Hamilton, 1709–14, ed. Philip Roberts (Oxford, 1975), pp. 3-4; for her menstruating, see p. 6.

23 Finlay, Population and Metropolis, pp. 146-8.

24 Emson, ‘For the Want of an Heir’.

25 See for example Anne’s response to her eleventh pregnancy in a letter to Lady Marlborough, cited by Edward Gregg, Queen Anne (London, 1980), pp. 99-100.

26 My thanks to Holly Marsden for discussing Mary’s pregnancies with me and the scant accounts that survive. See Calendar of State Papers Domestic [hereafter CSPD], Charles II, 1 March–31 December 1678 (London, 1913), pp. 126, 421-2. See also Henri and Barbara van der Zee, William and Mary (London, 1975), pp. 134-6, 141-3.

27 Eamonn Sheridan et al., ‘Risk Factors for Congenital Anomaly in a Multiethnic Birth Cohort: An Analysis of the Born in Bradford Study’, The Lancet 382, no 9901 (2013), pp. 1350-59.

28 See Haile, Mary of Modena, p. 102.

29 Hamilton, Diary, p. 3.

30 Diary of Dr. Edward Lake … in the Years 1677–1678, ed. George Percy Elliott (London, 1846), p. 15.

31 Royal Collection Trust, RCIN 1006014.

32 As outlined in Aristotle’s Master-Piece, pp. 123-8.

33 CSPD, 1678, p. 422.

34 George Marcelline, Epithalamium Gallo-Britannicum … for the most Happy Vnion, and Blessed Contract of the High and Mighty Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, and the Lady Henriette Maria (London, 1625), p. 138.

35 Marcelline, Epithalamium, pp. 134-8.

36 See Hammond, ‘King’s Two Bodies’, p. 17, who cites part of the satire below.

37 Cited in Elizabeth Lane Furdell, The Royal Doctors, 1485–1714: Medical Personnel at the Tudor and Stuart Courts (Rochester, 2001), p. 162.

38 Cited in Furdell, Royal Doctors, p. 162.

39 See Susannah Lyon-Whaley, ‘Catherine of Braganza and the Culture of Nature’ (PhD thesis, University of Auckland, 2023), p. 113.

40 On this point, see Marisa N. Benoit, ‘Attitudes towards Infertility in Early Modern England and Colonial New England, c. 1620–1720’ (PhD thesis, University of Oxford, 2014), pp. 44-52. On providence, see Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2001); and in relation to infertility, Oren-Magidor, Infertility, pp. 6-7, 17, and Smuts, ‘Royal Mothers’, pp. 283, 288.

41 Humoral assessment of reproductive problems is found throughout John Pechey, The Compleat Midwife’s Practice (London, 1698); see pp. 200-01, 222.

42 Pechey, Midwife’s Practice, pp. 273-4.

43 As in Lorenzo Magalotti at the Court of Charles II his Relazione d’Inghilterra of 1668, ed. and trans. W. E. Knowles Middleton (Waterloo, Ontario, 1980), p. 30.

44 For body weight and reproduction, see Sarah Toulalan, ‘“To[o] Much Eating Stifles the Child”: Fat Bodies and Reproduction in Early Modern England’, Historical Research 87, no 235 (2014), pp. 65-93. On beauty, see Erin Griffey, ‘The Rose and Lily Queen: Henrietta Maria’s Fair Face and the Power of Beauty at the Stuart Court’, Renaissance Studies 35, no 5 (2021), pp. 811-36; Erin Griffey, ‘Beauty’, in Erin Griffey (ed.), Early Modern Court Culture (Abingdon, 2022), pp. 406-27.

45 Jean Riolan, Sure Guide … to Physick and Chyrurgery, trans. Nicholas Culpeper (London, 1657), p. 195.

46 See for example Thomas Jeamson’s description of this in Artificiall Embellishments (Oxford, 1665), p. 85.

47 For accounts of Henrietta Maria, see Cabala, Sive, Scrinia Sacra. Mysteries of State and Government (London, 1663), pp. 276-81.

48 For ‘good colour’ and ideals of beauty especially in relation to Henrietta Maria, see Griffey, ‘Rose and Lily Queen’.

49 Sir Thomas Ireland, Speeches Spoken to the King and Queen, Duke and Duchesse of York, in Christ-Church Hall, Oxford, Sept. 29, 1663 (London, 1663), p. 5; my thanks to Susannah Lyon-Whaley for this reference. The Diary of John Evelyn (Woodbridge, 2005), p. 128.

50 In Robert Halstead, Succint Genealogies of the Noble and Ancient Houses (London, 1685), pp. 415-29, with the quotations on pp. 417 and 419.

51 Succint genealogies, p. 419.

52 Haile, Mary of Modena, p. 19.

53 For Henrietta Maria, see Marcelline, Epithalamium; for Catherine, see Samuel Holland, The Phaenix, Her Arrival & Welcome to England: it being a Epithalamy on the Marriage of the Kings Most Excellent Majesty with the Most Royal and Most Illustrious Donna Katharina of Portugal (London, 1662); Lancelot Reynolds, A Panegyrick on Her Most Excellent Majestie, Katharine, Queen of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland (London, 1662); William Cottrell, Britannia Iterum Beata (London, 1662); To the Queens Majesty on her happy arrival (London, 1662).

54 Marcelline, Epithalamium, pp. 92-100, quotation on p. 92.

55 Bryant, Letters of Charles II, p. 178; letter of 9 February 1665.

56 Diary of Dr. Edward Lake, p. 26. For the pregnancy, see Van der Zee, William and Mary, p. 134.

57 Cited in Haile, Mary of Modena, p. 136.

58 For pale skin, sees Pechey, Midwive’s Practice, p. 201; for a slender body, see Lorenzo Magalotti, p. 30.

59 The case notes were transcribed and published by Joseph Browne, Opera Medica (London, 1703), pp. 99-142. For Mayerne’s case notes on the medical management of Henrietta Maria’s reproductive body, see Erin Griffey, ‘Blooming Fertility: Henrietta Maria and the Power of Plants as Physic and Iconography’, in Susannah Lyon-Whaley (ed.), Floral Culture and the Tudor and Stuart Courts (Amsterdam, 2024), pp. 153-76.

60 Mayerne, Opera Medica, p. 112.

61 Mayerne, Opera Medica, pp. 128-9.

62 Mayerne, Opera Medica, pp. 134-6.

63 The Diary of Samuel Pepys, eds Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols (London, 1970–82) [hereafter Pepys], vol. III, p. 191.

64 See Pepys, vol. IV, pp. 337-58; for the delirium about children, see pp. 348-53.

65 5 February 1666; CSPD, Charles II, October 1665–July 1666, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green (London, 1864), p. 232.

66 Lorenzo Magalotti, pp. 70-71.

67 Arthur Bryant (ed.), The Letters, Speeches and Declarations of King Charles II (London, 1935), p. 219.

68 9 May 1668, Pepys, vol. IX, p. 191.

69 Bryant, Letters, pp. 235-6.

70 Pepys, vol. IX, p. 552.

71 Pepys, vol. IX, p. 557.

72 Bryant, Letters, p. 239.

73 CSPD, Charles II, 1668–1669, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green (London, 1894), p. 369.

74 An Account of the Reasons of the Nobility and Gentry’s Invitation of His Highness the Prince of Orange into England (London, 1688), p. 10.

75 Account, pp. 18-20.

76 England and Wales Privy Council, At the Council-Chamber in Whitehall, Monday the 22th. of October, 1688 this Day an Extraordinary Council Met … by His Majesties Desire and Appointment (London, 1688).

77 See Cathy McClive, ‘The Hidden Truths of the Belly: The Uncertainties of Pregnancy in Early Modern Europe’, Social History of Medicine 15, no 2 (August 2002), pp. 209-27, esp. 212.

78 Mayerne, Opera Medica, p. 135.

79 The Several Declarations, together with the several depositions made in council on Monday Oct. 22, 1688 (London, 1688), pp. 34-5. My thanks to Susannah Lyon-Whaley for this reference. The poem commemorates Mary of Modena’s quickening in 1682: A Rapture Upon the Report of Her Royal Highness being with Quick-Child (Edinburgh, 1682); discussed in Smuts, ‘Royal Mothers’, p. 296.

80 Thomas Chamberlayne, The Compleat Midwifes Practice (London, 1656), p. 66.

81 Benoit, ‘Attitudes towards Infertility’, esp. pp. 46-52.

82 William Salmon, Systema medicinale, a compleat system of physic (London, 1686), p. 237.

83 See Benoit, ‘Attitudes Towards Infertility’, pp. 212-13. Nicholas Culpeper treats the range of ‘what hinders Conception, together with its Remedies’, in A Directory for Midwives Or, a Guide for Women, in their Conception, Bearing, and Suckling their Children (London, 1651), pp. 81-113. This includes ‘natural barrenness’, ‘accidental barrenness’, and ‘barrenness against nature’. See also Aristotle’s Master-Piece, pp. 74-86.

84 As in Aristotle’s Master-Piece, p. 5.

85 Pechey, Compleat Midwife’s Practice, p. 243. He acknowledges, though, that men can also be the cause of infertility, pp. 58-9.

86 Catsley [Lady Catherine Stanley?] to James Strange [Charles Stanley, 2^nd Baron Strange?], 10 August 1663; CSPD, Charles II, 1663–1664, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green (London, 1862), p. 234.

87 Pepys, vol. VIII, p. 269.

88 Cited in Jennifer Evans, Aphrodisiacs, Fertility and Marriage in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 2014), pp. 20-21.

89 For a range of treatments, see Pechey, Midwife’s Practice, pp. 243-6. On treatments for infertility, see also Oren-Magidor, Infertility, pp. 121-62.

90 Bryant, Letters, p. 219.

91 See for example Salmon, Systema medicinale, pp. 236-45.

92 See her undated letter to her mother thanking her for the chaise as well as an added note from Charles I, in Mary Anne Everett Green (ed.), Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria (London, 1857), pp. 14-16.

93 Green, Letters, p. 15.

94 Narcissus Luttrell, A Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs from September 1678 to April 1714 (Oxford, 1857), vol. I, p. 422. My thanks to Susannah Lyon-Whaley for this reference.

95 Conduct, pp. 104-05

96 Beatrice Curtis (ed.), The Letters and Diplomatic Instructions of Queen Anne (London, 1968), p. 38. With thanks again to Susannah Lyon-Whaley for this reference.

97 On the Recovery of our most Gracious Queen Katharine from Her Late Grievous and Deplorable Fit of Sicknesse a Vision (London, 1664).

98 Recovery of our most Gracious Queen Katharine, p. 7.

99 Lorenzo Magalotti, pp. 31-2, 70.

100 Susannah Lyon-Whaley, ‘Queens at the Spa: Catherine of Braganza, Mary of Modena and the Politics of Display at Bath and Tunbridge Wells’, The Court Historian 27, no 1 (2022), pp. 24-41.

101 As in the case of a bath prescribed by Mayerne for Henrietta Maria; Mayerne, Opera Medica, p. 116.

102 Mayerne, Opera Medica, p. 131. On Tunbridge Wells and claims to fertility, see Patrick Madan, A Phylosophical and Medicinal Essay of the Waters of Tunbridge (London, 1687), pp. 6-7. On the city of Bath and fertility, see Robert Pierce, Bath Memoirs: Or, Observations in Three and Forty Years Practice, at the Bath what Cures have been there Wrought (Bristol, 1697), pp. 195-205.

103 Calendar of State Papers, Venice [hereafter CSPV], 1626–1628, ed. Allen B. Hinds (London, 1914), p. 297.

104 CSPV, 1626–1628, p. 342.

105 On Henrietta Maria’s subsequent visits to mineral spas in England and France, see Hembry, English Spa, pp. 58-60.

106 Edmund Gayton, The Art of Longevity (London, 1659), p. 20. Gayton studied medicine but was not a practicing physician; in 1659 he was a beadle at the University of Oxford and a writer.

107 For her visits, see Pepys, vol. IV: 22 July (p. 240), 27 July (p. 251) and 11 August 1663 (p. 272) at Tunbridge Wells; Pepys, vol. IV, 31 August 1663 (p. 292) at ‘the Bath’; and Pepys, vol. VII, 22 July 1666 (p. 214), with the King there on 31 July 1666 (p. 228). See also Thomson, Illustrated Guide, pp. 9-11, for the visit in 1669, including a reference to a warrant of 19 March 1669 to erect tents there for her use.

108 Haile, Mary of Modena, pp. 168-88.

109 Gregg, Queen Anne, p. 158.

110 For Anne’s visits to the spa, see Gregg, Queen Anne, p. 36; Thomson, Illustrated Guide, pp. 16-17.

111 Gregg, Queen Anne, p. 54

112 Gregg, Queen Anne, p. 82.

113 James Anderson Winn, Queen Anne: Patroness of Arts (Oxford, 2014), p. 244.

114 Mayerne, Opera Medica, p. 116.

115 On the integrated medical-religious framework for understanding fertility, see Oren-Magidor, Infertility, pp. 121-63.

116 Green, Letters, p. 15.

117 Cited in Winn, Queen Anne, p. 244.

118 Fissell, Vernacular Bodies, pp. 14-52.

119 See Erin Griffey, On Display: Henrietta Maria and the Materials of Magnificence at the Stuart Court (New Haven and London, 2016), pp. 96, 115.

120 Alexandra Walsham, ‘Holywell: Contesting Sacred Space in Post-Reformation Wales’, in Will Coster and Andrew Spicer (eds), Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 211-36, at p. 230.

121 Oman, Mary of Modena, p. 102; Walsham, ‘Holywell’, p. 213.

122 Thomas Pennant, The History of the Parishes of Whiteford and Holywell (London, 1796), p. 230; Mary Hopkirk, Queen Over the Water: Mary Beatrice of Modena, Queen of James II (London, 1953), pp. 112-13.

123 See Pennant, History, for a discussion of what pilgrims did at the well, p. 230.

124 Walsham, ‘Holywell’, p. 230.

125 Walsham, ‘Holywell’, p. 230.

126 This is cited in numerous sources, such as Guy Miege, A Complete History of the Late Revolution …  (London, 1691), p. 23; Catholic Hymn on the Birth of the Prince of Wales (London, 1688).

¹²⁶A Compleat History of the Pretended Prince of Wales from His Supposed Conception by the Late Abdicated Qeen [Sic] (London, 1696).

127 ‘Woman of Quality’, The Amours of Messalina Late Queen of Albion (London, 1689), p. 26.

128 A Compleat History of the Pretended Prince of Wales from His Supposed Conception, p. 3.

129 Hopkirk, Queen Over the Water, p. 114.

130 Rare Verities. the Cabinet of Venus Unlocked, and Her Secrets Laid Open: Being a Translation of Part of Sinibaldus, His Geneanthropeia (London, 1658), p. 23.

131 Marcelline, Epithalamium, p. 53.