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| | | From: Greensleeves (Original Message) | Sent: 5/12/2008 10:56 AM |
I told you the appendices in the Arbella book were interesting....there's this bit where the royal tombs are discussed. Historian J.A. Froude (most famous in Tudor circles for his mid-1800s books Divorce of Catherine of Aragon & History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada) apparently was invited to go spelunking in such at Westminster Abbey in 1867 & got the creeps as ya would upon the discovery of "a chaos of royal mortality". MQOS wasn't spending eternity all by her lonesome  There was a plethora of extra coffins piled up (literally) in her tomb, where son James I had her moved many years after her execution. Some were small ones of short-lived royal Stuart infants. Others belonged to Henry, Prince of Wales, son of James; Elizabeth the "Winter Queen", his daughter; Prince Rupert of the Rhine, the "Winter Prince", one of Elizabeth's children who fought on the Royalist side in the Civil Wars; at the bottom of this heap of remains, snuggled up next to MQOS's sturdy sarcophagus, was the less well-built coffin of her niece Arbella Stuart, her skull peeking out of the lid, which had been crushed by the other ones being piled atop And you thunk royalty got special accommodations even in the afterlife Had no clue they tucked peeps in together like that (except for dumping poor old Charles I & his head in with the supreme headchopper, Henry VIII, which I've always found amusing). |
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Methinks Anne was pregnant a total of 17 times, with only one resulting in a child who survived infancy.....William Duke of Gloucester, who died aged 9 or 10 & was said to have been hydrocephalic. Had this sole survivor been healthy, the Stuarts could well have been still on the throne today. Can you imagine so many pregnancies & NONE of them producing a viable heir? At least she tried, poor thing. The James II thing....there was all that brouhaha about "the baby in the warming pan" when The Old Pretender was born, making it seem as if this was indeed some sort of miracle birth that took place in isolation after James & Mary of Modena had been married quite a while with no other heirs, but that wasn't true at all. There were at least 2 infant sons both named Charles Duke of Cornwall who failed to thrive, & there were 2 reasonably healthy daughters, Isabella & methinks another Mary, who died within a few days of each other of the plague, around the ages of 3 & 4. There may have been more, I disrecall, before James was born, with Louisa to follow him after the Glorious Revolution. Was it just all that inbreeding by this point?  It seems like the Stuarts had an awfully high child mortality rate. Catherine of Braganza couldn't carry to term, William & Mary never seem to have conceived at all, only 3 of James Is children reached adulthood. Charles II seems to have been the luckiest in that respect, though Elizabeth died as a child & Henry & Minette rather young. |
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So few heirs to the throne, yet the commoners had child after child...It has to be the inbreeding of the royals.  |
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| | From:  MarkGB5 | Sent: 5/15/2008 7:18 PM |
Aparently the Stuarts had "sticky blood" which is a condition that affects pregnancy. Prince James, born to James II in 1688, was his first child in four years; so not a surprise birth, but after a sufficiently long gap to arouse suspicion in those who wanted an excuse to get rid of him. Before that Mary of Modena had a pregnancy more or less every year since 1674. |
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Is "sticky blood" akin to what we'd call "Rh factor" nowadays? As I liked that notion for Anne Boleyn, because usually a mother will bear one healthy child then have difficulty carrying to term ever again if the Rh incompatibility's not diagnosed. |
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Greensleeves, I also strongly lean toward the RH factor explanation of Anne's childbearing traumas. Seems the most probable reason. |
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