The Lost Prince: The Life and Death of Henry Stuart, National Portrait Gallery, WC2 - review

It may be unlikely that the heir to James I would have presided over an English Renaissance had he lived beyond the age of 18, but it’s a seductive idea
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11 December 2012

In terms of constitutional history not much is to be said for our Stuart dynasty, come from Scotland in 1603 and, if we discount Mary and Anne, the hapless daughters of James II, gone into oblivion in 1688 (though its wretched tail wagged feebly for a full century until the death of Bonnie Prince Charlie, soak and lecher, in 1788, another century later). Consider James I, son of Mary, Queen of Scots, and Henry, Lord Darnley, for whose murder she was almost certainly responsible, much given to sloppy, fond relationships with ambitious and beautiful young men. Consider Charles I, inclined towards Catholicism and so devout a believer in the Divine Right of Kings that Parliamentarians beheaded him. Consider Charles II, exquisite philanderer, and James II, blindly fervent Catholic, and consider his son, the Old Pretender, banished to Urbino by the Pope, there to indulge so much in “clecking” (Old Scots for random sexual conjugation) that an independent Scotland might well look for the descendant of a Stuart bastard in Urbino to set upon its Stone of Scone. It is no wonder that we got rid of them, preferring Protestant German bores with almost no claim to our ancient throne.

I raise the ghosts of these deplorable Stuarts because the National Portrait Gallery has mounted The Lost Prince, an exhibition devoted to Henry Frederick, elder son of James I, who would have succeeded him as King Henry IX had he not expired three months short of his 19th birthday, the victim of typhoid fever and the enfeebling interventions of his doctors. Henry, we are instructed to believe, would have saved the reputation of the Stuarts and changed the course of history. With the extreme grief of his parents we can sympathise, but that the grief of the populace too should be extravagant, the streets of London lined with weepers and wailers mourning their loss, from poets an outpouring of threnodies and from musicians their requiems and dirges, seems, if not improbable, the fearful obedience of a regime akin to that of North Korea now. The funeral was a prodigious European event,with 2,000 official and invited mourners to establish Prince Henry as a paradigm of princely virtue, but he was swiftly forgotten, swept away by the turbulence of English and European politics — within six years of his death in November 1612 the Thirty Years War was to involve every European power in a welter of death and destruction. By Trevelyan and other revered historians of my schooldays Prince Henry was hardly even mentioned and, in error, I thought him the Prince Henry after whom the great early racing Vauxhalls had been named, but in 1986 Sir Roy Strong, that irrepressible romantic, revived his memory with his book Henry, Prince of Wales and England’s Lost Renaissance, and the short-lived Hal has ever since been eulogised as the king who should have been crowned in 1625 and the great What If? of English history.

Born at Stirling Castle in February 1594, Henry was nine when, in March 1603, his father inherited the throne of England from his cousin twice removed, the Great Eliza (both were directly descended from Henry VII). He was to live apart from his parents, having his own court near but away from London, surrounded by the “masters and tutors” (both English and Scottish) who were to educate him in matters academic, courtly, athletic and sporting. We are expected to believe that this child, this boy, this adolescent, was architect enough to be an enthusiastic remodeller of palaces, connoisseur enough to be a collector of great paintings (a collection taken over by his brother Charles I and vastly expanded), an informed patron of the sciences, an adventurous supporter of exploration for the Northwest Passage through the frozen oceans of arctic Canada, elegantly skilled as a huntsman, swordsman and dancer, and so shrewd an adversary of Catholicism that he would unite all the Protestant princes of Europe against the Papacy and its creature, the empire of Spain.

Much of this nonsense is supported by documents and even letters but how reliable are these? It is quite probable that the politicians of the day, recognising the haplessness of the uncomely James (his rule in Scotland had been chaotic and unstable, and Elizabeth’s execution of his mother was almost certainly done with his assent), foresaw unpopularity and as successor to this pedant of ungenerous temperament, this dogmatic bigot, boozer and (possibly) sodomite, chose to construct an altogether wiser prince, as shrewd as Solomon, but that Henry was ever old, mature or experienced enough to be the conjured paragon, I doubt.

It was, perhaps, one of his bedchamber grooms who described Henry as broad-shouldered, his face “scorched by the sunne … comely and beautifull … swete, smyling and amiable … full of gravity and Princely majesty …”, but the painted portraits tell a different story of a pallid, even sickly, child at ten or so, of a pallid boy at puberty, and a pallid adolescent, always with something mean and petulant about the mouth; only Isaac Oliver in miniatures made a moderately handsome man of him. Robert Peake, an old-fashioned, almost primitive, painter well into his fifties when given the propaganda task of promoting Henry, depended on heraldry and Holbein to lend the boy some grandeur, the more than faintly absurd results exaggerated by the life-size canvases. For all its being the first equestrian portrait in the history of English art, its references to French courtly precedents and Dürer’s prints, its now obscure symbolism, Henry the horseman dragging a naked old Father Time by the forelock is no match for the masterpieces of old Titian and young Rubens. This exhibition is, however, concerned with the invention of an historical figure at a time when painting was in the doldrums here and we must not expect art that reflects the High Renaissance or presages the Baroque — most of it is ludicrous inn sign stuff, the stuff of drudgery for art historians.

Isaac Oliver’s miniatures are worth a gasp of awe and Peake’s obsequious flatteries a belly laugh; the three small masterpieces here are all by Michiel van Mierevelt, a minor Dutchman popular with English diplomats and other worthy visitors to The Hague and Delft, whom Henry’s courtiers strove to bring to England. Other exhibits are masque drawings by Inigo Jones, prints, documents, Henry’s extravagant armour and the wooden core of his funeral effigy — memorabilia to conjure the wretched boy. All this makes, in its way, a thoroughly enjoyable little exhibition. Encouraged by it to remind myself of what, at school, I knew, I turned to my schoolbooks and found a letter of 1623 from James to his substitute heir, Charles, then in Spain with James’s young favourite, the Duke of Buckingham: “… my sweet boys,” he wrote, confessing that he wore a beribboned miniature of Buckingham next to his heart, and goes on to beg Charles not to tilt in hot weather, “for I fear my Baby may take fever by it. My sweet Baby, for God’s sake, and your dad’s, put not yourself in hazard by any violent exercise …” This mawkish mush to a young man of 23 in Madrid to find a wife suggests that more than a decade on, the early death of Prince Henry Frederick still affected James. It also tells us why the politicians of the day had been so anxious to establish that his successor should be of entirely different character, heroic, chivalrous and purposeful. What if? What if? — no Civil War, no Cromwell, no Interregnum, no Dutchman on the throne, no Hanoverians, no Irish battles with their legacy of religious spite, and Catholic Emancipation within the 17th century?

The Lost Prince: The Life and Death of Henry Stuart is at the National Portrait Gallery, WC2 (020 7306 0055, npg.org.uk) until January 13. Open Sat-Weds, 10am-6pm; Thurs-Fri, 10am-9pm. Admission £11.80 (concs available).

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