Fairy Tale Queens: Representations of Early Modern Queenship by Jo Eldridge Carney

private thoughts of early modern queens, and all women, as they approached their lying-in have been largely lost to history, though some tracings surface in occasional writings. 38 Women experienced the double apprehension that they might not deliver a healthy child and that they themselves might die in the process. 39 For a queen, the anxiety surrounding childbirth was exacerbated because the security of her own position as well as the monarchy depended on her success. The fear of miscarrying or of delivering an imperfect or stillborn child cannot be underestimated. Sara Mendelson points out that early modern women’s diaries and memoirs reveal considerable anxiety “about the child to come, especially the oft-expressed fear that it might be born misshapen.” 40 One woman recorded her gratitude when her child was born “not onely free from deformity but a goodly lovely Babe” while another thanked God for her child “which was born with all itts parts and limbs.” 41 The Countess of Bridgewater, who wrote so movingly about the loss of an infant daughter, also articulated concerns shared by all mothers when she prayed that her child would be “born without any deformity, so that I and its father may not be punished for our sins, in the deformity of our babe.” 42
    That divine retribution for one’s sins would be visibly manifest in the child was not merely a belief provincial or lower-class women internalized. Without diminishing the fears of all early modern women, queens would have felt this anxiety even more keenly because of the public expectations for their reproductive lives.
    If the first wish was for a healthy baby, the second was overwhelmingly for a son. 43 Still, some monarchs could rejoice in the birth of a healthy daughter, Henry VIII and James V notwithstanding. The birth of Mary, Queen of Scots was said to disappoint her father James’s dynastic hopes, as he commented wryly—and incorrectly—upon her arrival that the Stuart line “came with a lass, it will pass with a lass.” 44 On the other hand, Mary’s mother, Mary of Guise, showed off her infant daughter to Sir Ralph Sadler, the English ambassador dispatched to the northern realms to view the latest addition to the royal network. The queen mother asked the nurse to unwrap her infant and display her naked for Sadler’s approval, who duly reported back to Henry, “I assure your majesty, it is as goodly a child as I have seen of her age, and as like to live, with the grace of God.” 45 Weeks later the proud queen mother repeated the demonstration, declaring “that her daughter did grow apace and soon she would be a woman if she took of her mother.” 46
    In addition to claiming some family pride in height and hardiness, the need to prove—especially to official emissaries—that a child was without deformity or imperfection was paramount. Even Henry indulged in paternal boasting about his healthy daughter. Chapuys reported that when Elizabeth was not yet a year old, the proud king displayed her to the French ambassadors: “On Tuesday Catillon and La Pommeraye went to visit the King’s bastard, who was shown to them first in very rich apparel, in state and triumph as a princess, and afterwards they saw her quite naked.” 47 Admiration for a healthy body, free from malformation, followed monarchs throughout their lives: even as an adult, Mary Tudor was described by the Venetian ambassador as having “no personal defect in her limbs, nor is any part of her body deformed.” 48 At times, however, a healthy child alone was not satisfaction enough. Charles I’s queen consort, Henrietta Maria, gave birth to a hardy young son, James, but when she visited the infant in the royal nursery, she lamented, “He is so ugly that I am ashamed of him” although she acknowledged that his robustness was important, allowing that “his size and fatness supply the want of beauty.” 49
    Indeed, a healthy child was not taken for granted and fear of the