Henry VIII and Henry IX: Unlived Lives and Re-written Histories

Summary

In 1612, with the sudden death of Henry Frederick, King James I and VI’s oldest son and heir, a potential future was cut short. Henry Frederick had been an icon of futurity, a ‘champion of Protestant and national interests, promoted in the context of a neo-chivalric revival’. As J. W. Williamson shows in his study of the prince’s mythology, ‘the quality of Protestant symbology as it applied to Prince Henry was unusually relentless’. He was, to the Scots poets who eulogized his birth, a ‘Hercules’ who offered a future free from vice. With his death, these hopes were ended. Henry Frederick, who fashioned himself as a far more militant figure than his father, could be mourned only for the battles he might have won. In a letter to Lady Carleton, dated 19 December 1612, Isaac Wake describes Henry’s armour being paraded before his mourners, ‘every parcel whereof, to his very gauntlet & spurs was carried by men of quality’. His funeral was punctuated by military music: ‘Henry’s obsequies, which buried him with the trappings of a Protestant warrior-king, were more reflective of what might have been than of what was.