A Prince Unboyed

CHAPTER 1

"How much longer?" asked Henriette. 

"Not long now, your majesty, the baby's head will crown with the next contraction, so when I say, just give a small push," reassured her French midwife, Madame Peronne. Seated upon the end of the bed facing the Queen, her strong fingers pressed down upon the dark triangle of the baby's head. It was demanding entry from her vagina, and the midwife's other hand grasped one, small, wide-flung thigh, splayed out on the bed like soft, white meat.

In the gloom, the twenty year old, buck-toothed Queen of England focused her vision on her midwife, to stop herself from staring furiously at her spectators. A sense of self-disgust stunned her as sweat and amniotic fluid seep out of her. Decency was a sacrifice a queen suffered when she was in child-bed. Never in her life has the rest of humanity seemed as remote to Henrietta Maria as it did at that moment. Only the little Duchess de Thours was weeping, grieving as though she was already destined for a tomb. Jerking an arm she clasped the locket circling her neck. Like her unborn child, the threat of losing it gnaws away at her mind. Her mother, Marie De Medici, the Queen Mother of France had posted it upon hearing of her pregnancy, and throughout the months she had borne it, hopeful it might help her carry her baby to term this time. In spite of being married to King Charles I for five years, her adopted country still despised her, not only because she seemed to be more papist than the Pope, but because, so far, she has proved barren. Childless Queens were often fodder for any old scoff until they could prove themselves otherwise.

Crossing herself with a bare movement, she prayed to Saint Margaret, before her next contraction. "I beg you not to let me fail again!"  

With eyes as bright as a bird's she caught the expectant faces of her witnesses, the King's black-gowned officials, her Catholic priests, the French Ambassador, as well as her Ladies-in-Waiting, all pressing in around her bed, and crammed into an old-fashioned chamber in St James's Palace. As daylight is believed to be detrimental for women in childbed the sunshine's glare has been banished along with fresh air by the heavy, window-curtains. Fragrances from burning spices and sprinklings of sweet waters sickened the warm air as it struggled to mask the smell of candlewax, sweat and closely packed bodies. With only the shimmering shine from candles the room resembled the sundown of summer.

Recognizing her husband thrived upon regularity and considered the more humdrum a day was, the better he liked it, Henriette imagined him sick with fear as he prowled the galleries of the Palace upon his rickety legs, biting his fingernails and praying, for a live infant, a son. Her unborn child was expected to be an enormous size. Emphasized by a physique as petite as any child's, she had swelled so even her belly button had burst out as if she was going to pop. It had made a painful pregnancy, and never had she felt so bossed about before. Behind her back she believed gossipmongers speculated how such a small specimen could never sustain such an infant to full-term, or deliver the baby live? It would be like making a mouse to go through the eye of a needle? In a place such as the royal Court, naturally tongues wagged, for some it is their only exercise. If Henriette ever seized these scaremongers, she would threaten to have their tongues sliced out. Assumptions amongst her French ladies focused on the prospect of her carrying a child with water-on-the-brain, like one of her brothers,' the Duke d'Orleans had been. With a shudder she recollected his three-cornered head impaled upon a puny body, pacing the galleries of the Louvre, looking as proud as a dog in a doublet. In spite of her having one shoulder higher than the other, to her, physical excellence seemed essential for royalty. Throughout her pregnancy, the worse dregs of her imagination had plagued her sleep causing nightmares. Often they were copies of stories she had heard of women in childbed having the skulls of their babies bored open and the contents wrenched out, before their dead bodies could be delivered. It did not help remembering only a year ago her firstborn son had died, born betimes after a breech delivery and blamed by her walking too much. He was buried with full royal honours in an oak coffin lined with lead, no larger than a loaf of bread. Even for coddled royalty, childbirth took a terrible toll for both mother and child.