An Official Inaccuracy Respecting the Death and Burial of the Princess Mary, Daughter of King James I

Abstract

If any present or future historian consults the official Burial Register of Westminster Abbey for the date of the interment of the Princess Mary, third daughter and sixth child of King James I. and the Princess Anne of Denmark, he will find it to be the 16th of December, 1607. If he pursues his search, and resorts to the monument erected to her memory in Henry VII.'s Chapel, he will find it distinctly recorded on the marble that she died on that day. If he then examines the contemporaneous histories of that period, and especially the minute details and social gossip contained in certain trustworthy correspondence, which has been preserved and become a part of history, he will inevitably, and with perfect justice, arise from their perusal with the conviction that the royal parents were, as parents, devoid of the ordinary instincts of humanity, and as sovereigns lost to all sense of common decency; and that the Court by which they were upheld, and the nation by which their conduct was tolerated, must have been in a state of the most gross and outrageous immorality.