Henry Prince of Wales: England's Lost Stuart King
An embryo patron of the English Renaissance and a lost Protestant hero? Roy Strong examines aspirations and might-have-beens in a major new study of Charles I's elder brother.
Scarcely a decade after the death of Queen Elizabeth I in March 1603 the streets of London echoed once again to sounds of grief as a cavalcade bore the body of a king-to-be. James I's eldest son, Henry, Prince of Wales, was eighteen when he died on November 6th, 1612. The sense of tragic loss at the time was such that he was to remain for long an ideal monarch England never had. And what a procession it was. Over a mile long, with some two thousand mourners in black, including all the members of his household and friends, it took no less than four hours to marshal. Out of the Prince's red-brick Tudor palace at St James's it wended its way to Westminster Abbey amidst an 'Ocean of Tears'. Isaac Wake, secretary to ambassador Dudley Carle- ton, describes the climax: a chariot drawn by six horses, preceded by armorial banners and insignia, over which knights carried a mighty canopy:
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