I've come to Stirling Castle
to uncover the lost history of a great Scottish prince.
And the greatest king we never had.
When Henry Frederick Stuart was born here at Stirling Castle
in 1594, he was destined to become
one of the most powerful and influential of all royal princes.
But despite all the promise of youth and his ambitions,
he's disappeared from history.
Before he was lost to memory,
this forgotten prince was on a clear path to greatness.
He was schooled in the art of warfare,
and was a fearful exponent of the martial arts
and could wield a sword and a spear with deadly accuracy.
But my quest also discovers a man
keen to push the boundaries of science,
a Renaissance prince embedded in the arts and knowledge.
My journey even takes me to Virginia where our Scottish prince
backed the first permanent British settlement on American soil.
But who was this Renaissance prince?
Why has he been forgotten?
And what happened to the best king we never had?
On a cold February morning in 1594,
James VI and his Danish wife Queen Anne
welcomed the arrival of their first-born child -
Prince Henry Frederick Stuart.
The nation rejoiced at the birth of a male heir,
nigh-on guaranteeing the succession of the Stuart bloodline.
A bloodline with a bloody past.
With the slaughter of the Reformation just a generation old,
and James VI, the first Scottish Protestant monarch,
the country was still divided
and many Catholics longed for a return to the old faith.
Relations with England, which had been a running sore for centuries,
were still tense.
Only seven years before Henry's birth,
the then Tudor monarch Queen Elizabeth I
imprisoned and then executed her own cousin, Mary Queen of Scots,
Henry's grandmother.
The history of the Stuarts and the Tudors was both bitter and violent.
And the new prince had to be protected from this hostile world
if he were ever to accede to the throne.
I find what happened next hard to understand.
But, as was the tradition,
Henry was taken away from his mother at days old
and fostered into the custody of the Mar family,
the hereditary keepers of Stirling Castle -
and historically, the guardians of royal Scottish princes.
Indeed, Henry's father James had been fostered out at Stirling
under identical circumstances.
But Henry's mother, Queen Anne,
took this enforced separation from her first-born son bitterly.
As a result, the Mars became her sworn enemies,
and the fostering engendered severe marital hostility
between Anne and James
as Henry grew up within the walls of Stirling Castle.
VOICE-OVER: The historian and author Sarah Fraser is an authority on our lost prince.
The thing I can't really get my head around is where his parents were in
all of this. They'd given up their son, their treasured heir,
to another family to bring up, for his safekeeping.
But where were they? What was James doing? What was his wife Anne doing?
Well, this rift between them -
very soon the English were talking about two mighty factions,
because Anne set her will - she is a heartbroken grieving mother
and she set her will on getting him back.
So you've got the Queen's men,
the King's men and around the Queen you've got all the disenfranchised,
the politically alienated, discontented Catholic earls,
anyone with a grudge to air finds a place with her.
On the King's side, you've got the Mars, the keepers of Stirling,
they get perks and patronage and power.
And these two tussle for the next ten years.
I imagine that this place, the fabric of this castle,
would have made a really strong impression
on the young prince and stayed with him all his life.
I mean, to me, this place is a visual statement
of the kind of king they are wanting to create.
It is yes, it's impregnable.
That's its chief quality for James.
It is ancient, on the crag.
But it is also the most sophisticated Renaissance building in Scotland.
I mean, the frieze around the ceiling here
could have come from anywhere - in a chateau in France,
or an Italian palazzo, it's incredible.
CHORAL SINGING
This is the royal chapel in Stirling Castle.
To help launch Prince Henry onto the European stage,
King and Queen suspended marital hostilities just long enough
to present a united front to their counterparts in Europe.
With the right marriage,
Henry could become a powerful and truly European king.
James demolishes,
redesigns and rebuilds this royal chapel for his son's baptism.
He even pawns some gold cups to pay for it.
To celebrate Henry's birth,
the scholar and hardline Protestant reformer,
Andrew Melville, wrote this text.
"With his father's genius,
"the child is destined for the ancestral throne.
"From birth and with the highest right
"he is destined to be king to both the celebrated Britons
"and the ancient Caledonians."
Now, that sounds innocent enough.
But it absolutely infuriated Elizabeth I of England.
Because it not only imagined the next reign,
but it also imagined her death.
And of course, THAT was treason.
With all this family history it's sometimes easy to forget
that the royal bloodlines of England and Scotland
were in fact closely related.
Henry VIII of England was the great-great uncle
of King James VI of Scotland.
He was also the father of the childless Queen Elizabeth I of England.
This fact was enormously significant because it gave the Scottish
House of Stuart a claim to the English throne.
And with the Virgin Queen extremely unlikely to produce a Tudor heir,
the Stuarts could afford to play a waiting game.
James is quite relaxed,
because he's getting a pension from Elizabeth and as his favourites ride
up and down with their bags of gold,
they're also taking letters from him to her leading courtiers.
And these are treason.
They are planning the takeover of the Tudor thrones by the Stuarts.
And how do you think the rest of England felt about the possibility
of Scottish kings on the throne in the United Kingdom?
I think what they assumed was
that it would be the takeover they'd planned for centuries.
Basically they would get the Stuarts in London
and they would anglicise them pretty quickly
and they would get hold of this king
and then get hold of this little prince and they could mould them.
But it didn't work out that way, did it?
Because this little prince was educated in a different way.
No, no, completely. He was educated here,
partly by the King, his father,
a bit remotely. But he definitely was closely interested.
And then by a group of very intelligent,
very particular kind of people.
They created a...they were creating a premier perfect Protestant prince.
So, he had to be educated.
He had to have beautiful handwriting
because you insult foreign rulers if you write in a scrawl.
He had to be master of equestrianism,
he had to master ballistics,
mathematics, Latin, because that is the lingua franca.
French, of course.
Music, dancing - it's a very rounded education.
And it started when he was very young?
Four, he's four.
The age of four? Yeah, they said the skirts were put from him.
But what's important to remember about them
is they are very particular men.
Half of them have seen active service on behalf of Protestant rebels
against the might of Catholic Spain.
Half of them have lived and worked abroad.
His tutor Newton has taught at a French Protestant university in France,
so, they are cosmopolitan.
But they also, the phrase that historians use is,
"godly, militant internationalists," which is a hell of a mouthful.
But what it comes down to is, godly means Puritan,
militant means they are the kind of soldiers who will put boots on the
ground, they are interventionist.
Where? They're internationalist.
And they foresee a kind of European union
of Christian Protestant states.
And Henry will take on the mantle of Elizabeth I as the bulwark of
Protestant Christendom.
That's his job.
A great insight into King James's hopes for his son and heir
can be found in the Basilikon Doron,
a book of instruction that he wrote
for the infant Prince Henry on the nature of kingship,
and the proper methods for being an effective ruler.
"For ye must consider that God ever looketh
"to your inward intention in all your actions.
"Walke always so, as ever in his sight, who guards the godly,
"plaguing the profane, so ye shall in princely virtues shine,
"resembling right your mighty King divine."
So, it's all about being like God on Earth,
and reflecting his Divine Majesty
in the day-to-day business of being a king.
So, no pressure, then!
It wouldn't be long before these theories of kingship
would need to be put into practice, not by Henry, but by James himself.
In March 1603, news came to Stirling that shocked the world.
England's greatest queen, Elizabeth I, was dead, and on her deathbed,
she had signalled that Henry's father, James, was to be her successor.
This was an historic moment.
James VI of Scotland was about to be crowned James I of England,
creating for the first time in history a union
of the crowns of Scotland and England.
James's intention is for him and his queen to leave Scotland,
and travel south to take up the throne as soon as possible.
He will leave Henry in the continued custody of the Mar family
at Stirling Castle, an act which will perpetuate Anne's pain
of a mother still separated from her son.
It's all change, obviously.
The Scottish king will leave,
and there will never be another Scottish king
who lives and rules from Scotland.
And off James goes.
Anne is pregnant, so she can come at a more gentle pace.
But, no sooner has the dust settled behind James's disappearing hoofs,
she comes galloping over here to Stirling, and demands her son.
She's waited ten years - ten years on this custody battle,
ten years of Henry being this rope in a dynastic, political war.
They try to deny her,
but you cannot deny the Queen's Majesty in an interesting condition.
And she goes ballistic.
She beats her belly, and starts to bleed.
She starts to bleed, and she has a miscarriage.
She's inducing a miscarriage?
She has induced a miscarriage.
I don't think she meant to, I'm sure she didn't mean to.
But, how typical.
How typical. She gave birth to a child here and it was taken from her,
and now she's lost a child in miscarriage because of this.
By this time, the English are in a state of high alarm.
But, quite soon, Anne recovers, and they set off,
and they make a wonderful stately progress.
She puts the lost foetus in a little white coffin and takes it with her
because, naturally her enemies...
Why? Her enemies say that she was faking it, she was never pregnant.
So, this is proof, this is her passport, in a sense, to England,
to join her husband at the court in London?
Well, certainly, that's the image she's going with.
She's going with the fertile, the Mother of the Nation.
And England is given a chance now to reconfigure its national myth.
We've had the blessed Virgin Queen Gloriana, Elizabeth,
and now we've got the new, the holy royal family, a fertile couple,
and a full nursery.
Job done.
The journey takes a month and,
as they progress south,
the royal party is joined by 5,000 loyal subjects showing their support
for Henry, who will become the first Prince Of Wales of the newly-formed
United Kingdom.
But they're stopped 25 miles short of the capital.
Plague is rife, and London has been quarantined.
So, to protect Henry,
the royal party seek shelter and wait for the plague to pass.
BELL TOLLS
1603 is a busy time for the plague doctors.
Over 33,000 people died in that one year alone.
And, spread by fleas on the backs of millions of rats,
the plague spreads like wildfire and fighting it is a war.
"Death hath pitched his tents, being nothing but a heap of winding-sheets
"tacked together.
"Plague is marshal of the field.
"Burning fevers, boils, blains and carbuncles are his troops."
In these deadly times, and as the royal heir,
Henry was precious property
so he was kept safe in royal castles outside London
until the plague had subsided.
After the Union of the Crowns, he was Protestant Europe's great hope,
and was key to the Stuarts retaining the thrones of England and Scotland,
and his safety could not be risked.
It took nine months before he was allowed to travel into London
with the rest of the royal family,
giving their new subjects a chance to see them for the first time.
It was a justified cause for celebration.
It must have been an unimaginably exciting moment
for this Scottish royal family, arriving here for the first time
in the bustling heart of one of Europe's biggest and richest cities.
After centuries of conflict,
ever since Edward I had exerted his right over the Scottish throne,
English monarchs had tried to unite the two kingdoms.
And now, it was a Scottish king who had finally done it,
and the Stuarts were set to become the first all-British royal family.
Despite the joyous celebrations in the streets,
the political reality of this new union was complicated.
To find out more,
I've come to a pub that actually predates the Stuarts' arrival in London.
The Olde Mitre dates from the days of Henry VIII.
Sarah, can you tell me what the political and religious
atmosphere was like in London at the time?
Um, unsettled, and they want to settle it as fast as they can.
And when they look at James, they say, hurray, continuity, peace.
They praise - very interesting the way they praise him,
because they praise James but they're looking over
his shoulder the whole time.
So, they praise "the fair inheritance
"of the loins of OUR ancient kings, YOUR princely offspring."
So, they're kind of doing a Henry-to-Henry leap,
almost as if they can just emphasise that continuity.
So, Prince Henry is there, he's right at the centre of this, really,
this is about him as much as anyone else?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And he's a crowd-pleaser.
James is not a crowd-pleaser. He does not like working the crowd.
Elizabeth did, and Henry does and he's very good at it.
And they need him to do that because, along with the thrones,
of course, James has inherited Elizabeth's armada war.
So, they're still at war with Spain, although he's trying to make peace.
But, in terms of how the English establishment regard the Stuarts,
are they comfortable with it?
Are the people comfortable with it?
Yeah, I think they are.
I mean, they expected some form of uprising somewhere,
and they didn't get it. It was peaceful.
And they remark on how unusual that is.
And, as long as James doesn't offend anybody, then they're happy,
they're happy with the handover.
Everything is hunky dory, it's a honeymoon period, which you would expect.
I mean, a government, anyone gets a honeymoon period.
And then what happens is he does two things.
In Parliament, he addresses this question of the union again.
And the terms in which he does so alarm people because he says,
"I am the union, I am Britain, I am the head, the whole isle is my body.
"I am the husband, it is my wife."
And if you're a wife in 1600s England or Scotland,
submit - you know what to do.
So, the whole island should submit to the absolute king.
And that sets off a political furore.
Then, he has to decide the religion of the countries
and the state religion.
And he calls everybody, and Henry's there,
he calls him to a conference.
The Anglicans, effectively, come along,
the Catholics, and the Puritans.
And the Anglicans and the Puritans are sure, each of them,
that they will become the state religion.
Anglican already is.
Puritans, James is basically a Calvinist Puritan king of Scotland,
so they are sure that he's simply going to change
the religion of the country.
And the Catholics, he has implied that he will lift penal laws.
He has promised everyone everything before he actually gets here.
And what he says is, I'm not going to change anything.
The official religion will stay Anglican.
Right. And the Puritans are furious because they believe this is heresy,
and they don't like the flummery of the Anglican church, the bishops,
the music, all of that.
And they go to Henry.
A lot of them, they start filtering off,
and will gather around Henry with that more Puritan-tinged court.
The Catholics are furious and disappointed and, of course,
we know where they go.
FIREWORK WHOOSHES
"Remember, remember the 5th of November,
"Gunpowder, treason and plot.
"I know of no reason why this gunpowder treason
"should ever be forgot."
Just a year after the plague epidemic ended, Guy Fawkes,
a Roman Catholic activist, described all Scots as a dangerous disease.
Now, his intended cure was a desperate remedy,
as he described it -
"to blow you Scotch beggars back to your native mountains."
When Guy Fawkes tried to blow up Parliament on the 5th of November 1605,
King James wasn't his only target.
It was also Henry Frederick Stuart.
It was crucial to murder the young prince who promised a potentially
endless Protestant future.
After the Catholic plot had failed and Guy Fawkes had been executed,
Henry realised that he'd have to learn to become a strong king
to keep himself safe and his kingdoms united.
So, how does a young prince achieve that in the early 17th century?
The Royal Armoury in Leeds can provide us with a few clues.
All his life, Henry preferred weapons training to scholarship,
and was passionate about anything connected to the martial arts.
In fact, he even had an infantry manual dedicated to him in 1608.
He and his followers obsessively practised the military skills
to help them defend the Protestant Reformation in Europe.
VOICE-OVER: To understand more about how Prince Henry's martial skills would have been developed,
Leeds Armoury's Andy Deane is going to take me through the finer points
of 17th-century armour, and hand-to-hand combat.
I'm thinking of young Henry Frederick Stuart.
Now, he would have been, what age,
when he started to learn the martial arts?
It depends on his...
..on his stature and his strength,
but usually around the age of 10, 11,
something like that. Right. It's a statement,
whether you can ride a horse or you can fly a falcon, draw a bow,
fight in armour - it's all a statement of your manhood.
But also, your intentions as a prospective leader,
that you are adept, not only at the martial arts,
but also the gentler arts,
so dancing and singing and playing chess, would
be just as important, and knowing your history, as the martial stuff.
But, today, obviously, Paul, we're going to get you to do
some of the martial stuff.
I'm going to be engaging in foot combat over barriers,
a 17th-century test of prowess and strength.
Not only would this have built up the young Henry's physique
and fighting skills, it was also a chance to look impressive.
The armours reflect the fashions of the time.
So, not only are you doing a practical thing but you look fabulous doing it.
So, these armours very much do that
with this peascod shape in the breastplates, and broad shoulders.
And strange pantaloons underneath.
Yes, the trunk hose. But it makes your legs look fabulous.
As the last part of the armour goes on,
I'm starting to realise just how hard this is going to be,
and how strong that young prince must have been.
It's not a natural thing to wear, is it?
No. Who on earth came up with this idea?
But it only becomes natural when 16,000 arrows
are raining down on top of you, or...
I can't see. ..angry Frenchmen or angry Spanish people are trying to
decapitate you or take bits of you away with them.
So, what I'll do is I will get my spear.
Right. And we'll have your first-ever lesson
at fighting over the barriers. How does that sound?
Are you going to protect yourself because I might be deadly?
Oh!
You've dropped the spear!
You won.
Ah. That's better.
How was it for you?
Well, it was hellish, to be quite honest with you, Andy.
I mean, I'm so hot and I feel so constrained.
And being inside this helmet is really quite claustrophobic,
you just don't get your breath. No, exactly. It can be.
That was only a 20-second round!
Let's get this helmet off you.
But, yeah. But the thing is, it's like any piece of equipment,
whether you're in a diving bell or an astronaut,
the first time you do all of this stuff, it is alien,
that's the point of practising again and again and again,
so that it becomes second nature.
Yeah. My ears are ringing as well.
You were extraordinary. For your first-ever go in armour,
that was extraordinary. It was very good.
Thank you very much. Well done.
But I think I took a hell of a beating, a hell of a beating.
My ears are ringing,
Oh!
Fighting in armour isn't easy in any way,
and I have a new and profound respect for Henry and his contemporaries.
The training he underwent would be crucial in preparing him to be king.
Waging war is actually the bottom line of kingship.
Knowing when to take up arms
and, perhaps, more importantly, when not to.
Now, Henry loved showing off his skills as a ruthless fighter
to visiting foreign dignitaries
and to daunt his enemies for the time when he would become king.
But Henry's interests were not all on the battlefield.
As a sophisticated and ambitious Renaissance prince,
he must develop his mind in harmony with his body.
His father set him up in his own court
where the young prince expanded his passions and interests
to add to his princely credentials.
17TH-CENTURY MUSIC PLAYS
17th-century courts made use of a particular form of entertainment -
masques - elaborately staged and often harsh satires of court life,
with music, poems and dance.
Beneath the superficial pomp were hidden political statements.
Henry actually commissioned his own masque to show himself
as a beneficent prince who would bestow order and fairness
when he took to the throne.
Henry's masque was based on Oberon, King of the Fairies,
a regular character in Medieval and Renaissance literature,
including Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream.
To learn more about that masque and what it meant,
I've come to meet Dr Emma Whipday, an expert in early modern drama.
Emma, the Masque Of Oberon, what exactly was it?
It was a sort of multimedia court entertainment that involved singing,
dancing, really elaborate and beautiful costumes and sets,
as well as poetry spoken by actors.
But it was commissioned by Henry to be a showcase for him,
and to give him the chance to show the kind of king
he was going to be in a sort of performance art form.
So, he brought together the playwright Ben Johnson
and the designer Inigo Jones
to create this gigantic event.
An extravaganza. An extravaganza, yes, exactly,
as part of the New Year's Day celebrations,
but he commissioned it so that he could get Johnson to tell the kind
of story and the kind of myths he wanted to tell about himself.
And that included him being this fairy prince
who is talked about by other characters.
The Fairy Prince Oberon.
Yes, exactly. So, is he playing Oberon?
He was playing Oberon.
I see. Yeah, and that's quite interesting as a choice because,
of course, Elizabeth I was written about as a Fairy Queen in her period.
And so you could say he was being, some critics have suggested,
he was showing himself as a spiritual heir to Elizabeth.
As a fairy prince.
Yeah, exactly.
And they spent six weeks choreographing and rehearsing the dancers.
So, it was a really expensive production.
It cost £2,000 then,
which is hundreds of thousands of pounds into today's money. Wow.
This is a very privileged occasion.
This is the jet set of the times, I guess? Yes, exactly, yes,
it was a chance to show people within the court how power play is going on
by who he chooses to perform in the masque with him.
Now, I understand that you've prepared something for me from Oberon... Yes!
..to read? Yes.
So, on the note of describing what it looked like, so,
I would like you to read the speech just before Oberon enters.
I am going to read you a stage direction first
where two of the flaps move back
to reveal a chariot with Henry sitting in it,
drawn by two white bears - polar bears, we believe.
Real live polar bears?
Yes, there were definitely polar bears gifted to King James
by the Muscovy Company after an expedition to Greenland.
There, the whole palace opened and the nation of fairies were revealed,
some bearing lights, some with instruments, others singing.
At the further end of all, Oberon in a chariot which,
to a slow triumphant music, began to move forward,
drawn by two white bears.
Give place and silence.
You were rude too late.
This is a night of greatness and of state.
Not to be mixed with lightness and sport,
a night of homage to the British court.
And ceremony due to Arthur's chair,
from our bright master, Oberon the Fair.
What do you think?
In 1610, Parliament gives its consent
for Henry's investiture as Prince of Wales.
Now, they do this partly because they see Henry
as a good way of curbing and controlling the excessive corruption
and profligacy of his father's court.
And the investiture ceremony, when it finally comes,
is a quasi-coronation
and it demonstrates Henry's rising power and status.
A £100,000 loan is secured from the City of London to pay for it.
That's £10 million in today's money.
This is a major moment.
At the age of just 16,
Henry is to be the first Prince of Wales of Great Britain.
There are massive celebrations for this,
the single greatest symbolic act of union in the history of our islands.
Henry also became a man of science,
his interests nearly always leading to ways of making money,
even funding a failed attempt to make silver from lead.
Some pursuits were more successful -
studying time, mapping and navigation.
And one object in particular brings me to the clock room
in the British Museum.
VOICE-OVER: I've come to meet Oliver Cooke to uncover more about Henry's aspirations and ambitions.
Oliver, what is this extraordinarily beautiful and ornate object?
Well, this is an astrolabe which was made by Humfrey Cole in 1574.
And it is a multifunctional scientific instrument.
It helps us with navigation,
it helps us with astronomy,
it helps us with astrology.
Uh-huh. And it can tell us the time as well.
How does it work? OK, what we have here, various parts,
we have what's called the rete,
which is a map of the stars. Each pointer...
Wow! ..points to a star in the sky.
There's 13 on this particular astrolabe.
Each point represents a star
that you'd see, what, just in the northern hemisphere?
In this case, the northern hemisphere.
Wow. This is designed for the northern hemisphere.
And then if I start to take the thing apart...
It's beautifully made, isn't it?
That's real precision engineering.
Oh, it's beautifully made. Indeed.
This 16th-century device is not just a timepiece,
it's also a calculator
and by using its maps of the heavens and position
of the North Star, it's a primitive but effective sat nav.
And with astrology being recognised as a serious science at the time,
astrolabes also became a popular tool
to help predict when best to go into battle or even make investments.
There's a fascinating inscription, here, Oliver, look.
It says, "Henry Prince..."
what is it, "Magi Britannicus"?
"Henr, Princ, Magni Brittan"
which is short for "Prince Henry of Great Britain".
Of Great Britain. That's absolutely fascinating.
It really is an inspiring instrument.
When you look at it, you can imagine a young teenager being given this,
and thinking, "Wow, that's incredible..."
Absolutely. ..what it can do and just shows you
what could be possible in the right hands. Absolutely, yes.
It tells us about astronomy, astrology,
which was considered a science at this time, navigation, surveying.
See, navigation, at that particular period in British history,
that's really the beginnings of empire building.
Science served Henry's greater purpose
to further his growing ambitions.
Global trade would generate money
to prop up the creaking finances of his court.
And that leads on to another chapter of this forgotten history -
the story of the first permanent British settlement in the Americas.
And Henry's part of that too.
My journey to uncover the best king we never had
brings me to the southern state of Virginia,
on America's Atlantic coast,
where there's an unexpected legacy of Prince Henry Frederick Stuart.
Sir Walter Raleigh told Henry that Britain must acquire
an overseas empire to provide wealth from colonial trade.
A wealth that would let Henry fulfil Protestant Europe's expectation that
he would become the leading prince and defender of Protestant Christendom.
And it was here in Virginia that Henry hoped to find that fortune.
When Henry's father gave him permission to back a flotilla of ships to
settle the Americas, Henry became the driving force behind it.
As previous British attempts to settle on this coast had failed,
Henry's venture was under real pressure to succeed.
As the flotilla approached the coast,
a new undiscovered land opened up before the crew.
To them, this was a nameless place
that needed new titles to make it familiar
and who better to annotate the blank map of this terra incognito
than the prince who had sponsored the expedition?
Henry.
The first permanent British settlement was established
on this coast at a place called Henricus, named after Henry himself.
And that's ten years and more before the Mayflower sets sail
with the Pilgrim Fathers.
Having crossed the James River, named after Henry's father,
I'm back on the road south.
I'm on my way to a reconstruction of Henricus.
I have not been here before but I understand it's a palisaded fort
and looks pretty much as it would have done 400 years ago
when the British first arrived.
And the people who run Henricus take their job very seriously,
and even dress up in the appropriate 17th-century costumes.
So that should be quite interesting, I shouldn't feel too out of place.
The journey to America by the newly-formed Virginia Company
took over two months.
The 300 soldiers and artisans who formed the expedition
were led by Sir Thomas Dale.
The story of the early days here at Henricus is taken up
by John Daniel Pagano, who leads the historical team here.
So, Thomas Dale, he is to come here, expand Virginia,
create a new seat of government to make it prosperous
and he accomplishes those things in a very short amount of time.
The centrepiece of that is Henricus.
Amongst the soldiers, there must've been lots of skilled tradesmen.
What would they be doing on a day-to-day basis?
Yeah, what you're going to have is a cadre of tradesmen,
ones that have skills that are above unskilled labourers.
In fact, Sir Thomas Dale's very clear about not wanting
those unskilled people here.
You're going to need sawyers.
Sawyers are the first people you need
to clear out spaces in the woods.
And it would become a key strategic component to the vision
of a bigger British Empire as well.
That's right. Not only is it more easily defensible
if the Spaniards were to go against England again,
that defensive position is Henricus
here in this narrow bluff of land with a narrow neck
but it's also heading westward into what would be the hills of Virginia,
which is where they see the expansion, the profit.
Every Englishman that comes here is going to see a gigantic woodlands,
an ancient woodlands, where the trees -
you can't stretch your arms wide enough
to put your arms through that tree.
They will look at the forest, they will go,
"My goodness, this is a place that we can harvest,"
which is going to put them at conflict, of course, with the Indians.
The Indians live in the woodlands.
The Indians don't want to get rid of the woodlands so again, right there,
one of the initial mind-sets of...
create English farming industry, if that's what you want,
will put you at a culture clash
with the people who want to live amongst the forest.
With the threat of attack from the native Powhatan tribe hanging over them,
the priority for Dale and the settlers
was to complete the fort's defences as soon as possible.
Well, what they're doing is, they're building quickly.
They're building the palisade quickly
and they're putting these up quickly.
We have no records that actually show what the buildings looked like.
We're assuming contemporary buildings to what
they would have known back home.
The joinery is traditional,
it's the sort of thing that
any number of people would have known how to do.
I mean, carpenters, of course, but as I said,
the soldiers all had their secondary skills.
I don't think you'll have a standing army in England till Cromwell's Model Army, correct? Is that right?
So a lot of these guys have their backup trades,
and you've got carpenters and sawyers and things like that
who can create, out of a whole tree, your beams.
So they would have been really key members of the expedition?
Oh, yeah. The guys who could fell trees. Everything's made of wood.
Handle an axe, handle a saw and handle a musket.
Those are the three things you've got to worry about.
In this climate,
there was no difficulty growing crops
but there was one in particular
that promised Henry and the early settlers a fortune -
tobacco.
It was hard physical work for the British settlers
not used to Virginia's subtropical temperatures.
I think life for everybody here was pretty difficult.
The biggest chore is tobacco, so that would be men,
women and children helping with that.
And that is our tobacco barn.
What, behind you? Behind you, so that's where they would dry it,
press it, pack it up in barrels
and get ready to ship to England to barter
for everything they need here.
And that's how the colony was making its money?
It has already been lucrative for the Spanish, and so,
the English decide they want a piece of that.
They want a piece of that action.
And see if that tobacco works well here in Virginia, and it does.
Yeah. They are really talking it up in England.
They're not telling everyone how difficult it is to live here,
about the heat, about possibility of Indian attacks, disease,
all of these things.
They're just talking about how wonderful it is and
how much money you can make.
To Henry's huge frustration,
he was deemed to be too young and too precious
to be allowed to travel to America
to experience Virginia for himself, and instead,
had to rely on letters and accounts from people on the ground.
But the riches of America
were not the only focus for Henry's attention.
Back home in London,
he continued to boost the image of himself
as a great Renaissance prince.
He employed agents to seek out treasures to adorn his court.
He bought up whole collections of works of art, coins, books, antiquaries,
and sculptures, many of which are kept in Windsor Castle.
Windsor Castle houses key pieces of what became the Royal Collection,
which blossomed under Henry's influence.
There is certainly evidence of him buying paintings to fill his court,
particularly at Richmond Palace,
that he sends out commissions for new works of art
and sends out agents to acquire new pieces, so he's clearly
starting to collect in the way
that his contemporary princes in the courts of Europe were doing.
So was he taking a lead from them?
Did he want to be compared with them, somehow?
I think that's very much in his mind and, you know,
very much the idea of the Renaissance princes,
apart from being great at sport and being a good horseman,
and being good on the jousting field,
you have to also show your education through the works of art
that you have in your household.
People are seeking out the artists of the day, so this, actually,
this is a very good example, because Giambologna was well-known
in a lot of the Southern courts
and in courts in, for example, in the Netherlands and Flanders,
so everyone had to have their own Giambologna
and Henry didn't have one
so when he's approached by the ambassador saying,
"What sort of gift would you like from Italy?"
that's the person he chooses because it's the must-have of the moment.
You must have a Giambologna in your collection.
This is actually one of a gift of 15 small bronze sculptures
that were sent to Henry in attempt to win his hand,
actually, for a Medici princess, Catherine of Medici, from...
so the gift was from her brother, the Grand Duke of Tuscany.
So this is a must-have back in the 17th century? Absolutely, yes.
If you really want to impress, you've got to have a Giambologna,
or something like it. Something, yeah.
And of course, this is one of the ones of that group of 15 that Henry
liked most but there are records of him opening the parcels when they
arrived, and he actually seizes the first one
that comes out and kisses it because he's so delighted with it.
Oh, really? Yes, yes.
And I suppose also, it represents Henry's European aspirations as well.
Yes, very much so,
so he really is deliberately setting himself up as one of these
European Renaissance princes.
Henry also had another passion - books.
He was left a collection
which he used as the basis of his own library.
He then scoured the land for the best books in the country.
Books of medicine, astrology and philosophy,
sat alongside collections of sonnets, plays and musical scores.
They were even cookbooks and joke books.
In three years,
Henry had assembled more books than his father had in an entire lifetime
and his collection would go on to form the backbone of one of the greatest
research resources in the entire world - the British Library.
At the age of just 16,
this impressive young man had already done so much in the fields
of the arts, science and exploration, and more than ever,
he seemed like a great king in waiting.
In this Scottish-born Prince,
the House of Stuart was set to establish itself as a royal dynasty
for generations to come.
Yet, Henry was never to return to Stirling
or the country of his birth,
where he spent more than half his life.
The Union of the Crowns meant that power would be dealt not from Scotland,
but from the throne in the English capital.
Hopes were high that Henry would continue to unite Britain
and also help establish a Protestant status quo in Europe.
Kings are born for foreign policy.
When and how to make war, when and how not to.
Secure your country - security equals, probably, prosperity.
And he is getting called from Europe.
Broadsheets, newspapers, they're full of Henry.
They are shouting for him to come on a crusade and
lead the Evangelical union of Protestant states.
It's an EU of Protestant states.
And the reason they've got to do that is that Spain is reviving.
It's resurging fast and it wants to re-Catholicise Europe.
So they need a man who can lead the Protestant side and defend them all.
So Henry's going to be a significant player, they hope,
in combating a counter-Reformation in Europe.
Yeah, definitely, definitely.
They come and visit him. That's half of what his court activity is about.
He's the coming man. It's amazing, isn't it?
Yeah. That this wee prince, born in Scotland is going to become
such a significant player, not just within Britain,
but on the European stage as well.
Yeah, yeah. And the global stage, because as you know,
half the reason for establishing a colonial empire is the new Jerusalem.
It's Protestant North America,
which will tread on Spain's toes in Catholic South America.
It's all part of a picture.
It begins to come together from now on.
And that's what all this is about, all this collecting,
all of this scientific research, the martial expertise,
it's all got to be for a purpose.
It's not just... It's not a game.
Kings rule as well as reign and he is being prepared.
And what they're doing, is a kind of virtue signalling.
"Here's the man. Here's the man who is going to save us."
By 1612, at the age of 18,
Henry had grown into an exemplary Renaissance prince,
an accomplished diplomat,
and friends and foes alike saw him as a very European future king
of a truly United Kingdom
at the heart of a great European and global empire.
He had the world at his feet
but fate was about to play its hand and deny him his birthright.
As Henry impatiently waited to take over from his father,
he spent a lot of free time at his palace in Richmond,
swimming most days after large gourmet lunches of raw oysters and seafood.
Then in October 1612, after a swim in the Thames near Richmond,
Henry fell ill.
With fevers and a chill,
he took to his bed and the doctors were called,
but of course, in the 17th century,
the cure was often more deadly than the disease.
Henry was lethargic, had a high temperature
and severe stomach pains,
all of which pointed towards waterborne typhoid fever.
I've come to the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh
to learn what treatments he would have been given
in the early 17th century.
We're moving into the realm of early modern medicine
and into some scientific ideas,
but for the most part,
the ideas came from ancient Greece and Rome
and they were based upon this idea of the four humours of the body.
Right. And the four humours of the body - blood, yellow bile,
black bile and phlegm - were meant to be kept in balance.
Because Henry Frederick Stuart comes in complaining he's feeling unwell,
he's got this terrible temperature.
He's probably not very well either end.
Yeah, that's right, yeah.
So what would the doctors do in that situation?
Well, well, certainly, they could use a clyster,
which was something used on the fundament of the...
A clyster on the fundament? A clyster was basically an enema
and you injected things through the anus into the...
What sort of things?
All sorts of different herbal medicines,
depending on what an individual surgeon or physician
thought was important.
But they would have been more inclined to actually carry out
a procedure, venesection, or blood-letting.
What I'd have to do, I'd have to put a...
..a tourniquet or a bandage around there to tighten it up,
to show me the veins
and then I'd have to
place my bowl and find a vein,
open it with - this is called a fleam.
Right. And then drain off
a few ounces of blood, and then...
How would you stop it?
Well, you'd put your finger over it.
And also, they'd put a little...
..bandage around it.
There were all sorts of recipes for stopping the blood,
or cleaning the area, or stimulating the skin, even.
So the blood-letting, for example,
was a way of getting the body back into balance.
And it was not good for the patient.
But they believe it to be.
I mean, they were still using pigeons,
as far as I understand it, to treat him.
Pigeons?! Yeah, pigeons, yeah.
What would be the remedy there?
Well, it was believed that pigeons...
..applied to the feet - not so good for the pigeons,
cos often they were cut open and then applied to the feet.
A dead pigeon? A dead pigeon applied to the feet.
Or you could pluck the pigeon of its feathers and then apply his skin,
or her skin, to the feet or to the place where the illness was
thought to be, and it was all based in superstition,
the idea that the pigeon might be able to...
..put extra humours into the body, or take them away.
It's more like witchcraft.
It's very like, yeah, yeah.
It's very like witchcraft, yeah, that's right.
Now, Chris, I'm desperate to ask you a wee bit more
about this fascinating object.
What's that? Well, this is a trephine,
which is effectively a skull saw
and it's used to open up an aperture in the skull.
Without anaesthetic?
Without anaesthetic, yeah, yeah.
You'd have to remove the skin around the area.
Dear me. Drill a hole into the skull and then,
that was thought to, again, allow the humours out.
So what do you think the combined effect of all these so-called remedies
would have had upon our patient, Henry Frederick Stuart?
Well, I have to say, from what I know of it, precisely nothing.
I think if you've got something like typhoid,
no amount of external intervention
is going to really change the outcome.
Given the horrific nature of the so-called cures,
it perhaps comes as no surprise to learn
that the patient did not survive,
and tragically, Henry Frederick Stuart died at 8pm in the evening
of the 6th of November, 1612.
He was just 18 years of age.
The whole nation went into shock
and thousands of people lined the streets
to watch the funeral procession to Westminster.
But it was too much for his parents, the King and Queen,
who couldn't bear to attend,
and it was left to Henry's brother, the 12-year-old weakling Charles,
to be chief mourner.
After the funeral, it's almost as if Henry was written out of history.
Despite all his talents, this bright star in the firmament,
this great Stuart Renaissance prince, has now in the 21st century
been largely completely forgotten.
Now, why is that?
James, James...
His father? Yeah.
James, I think, makes sure -
he sees the direction of travel of Henry's court,
that it is a lot more militant and active and interventionist,
that they're not actually going to agree on their vision for Britain
at home, in Europe, in America.
They're not going to agree and what he does,
he promises a big sepulchre after his funeral - doesn't build it.
Right. Henry's put in with his granny, Mary Queen of Scots.
Right.
He dismantles Henry's legacy as far as he can.
But why? That must have been a very painful thing to do and James is grief-stricken at the time.
Yeah, he was grief-stricken.
It seems a strange and contradictory thing to do.
Well, except they've got two bodies.
You know, you are James the man and the father, who is very loving.
The Stuarts are good family people, again,
unlike the Tudors, of course, notoriously -
but then he is also the Crown.
Right. And the Crown is a different thing.
The Crown is responsible for the country,
and the father, yes, sits in the Privy Council
and whenever something comes up after Henry's death
that touches on Henry, he suddenly says, "But Henry's dead.
"Henry's dead."
And stops proceedings and leaves but yet, he dismantles his court,
dismisses all these radicals and these Puritans, saying,
"You're notorious Puritans",
dismisses them and takes Charles to live with him.
Charles won't have his own court.
Not for years. So in a way, James has learnt his lesson.
If you give the son and heir too much power, and too much freedom,
then that sows the potential seeds for division.
When Henry died,
his little brother Charles would eventually inherit the throne,
becoming Charles I of Great Britain and leading the whole country
into a century of tumult, revelation and sectarian conflict
which would further divide England and Scotland.
But had Henry lived, had he not died of typhoid fever,
none of this would have happened
and we'd be looking back at a very different history today.
A swim in this river denied us all of the best king that we never had
and just like a stone, thrown into the river,
his memory has vanished without trace
but the ripples created by his short life are being felt by us still.