Next to her is her sister Mary who lived to be two, and then died of
fever, saying many times over in her wanderings these same words, "I go,
I go, away I go." Hers too is a very natural little figure, in spite of
the stiff straight clothes and the quaint cap; and the carver has put a
great deal of life into the weeping cherubs, to whom surely not the most
rigid Puritan could have objected. In this same corner were laid, some
years later, the bones found by some workmen under the stairs at the
Tower of London, supposed to be those of the little princes who had been
murdered there, so that at last King Edward the Fifth and his brother
were honourably buried near their more fortunate sister Elizabeth of
York.
The tomb of Mary Queen of Scots is really a Stuart vault, and it might
almost be called the vault of Royal Children, for more than thirty are
buried under it. Here, without any monument, but an inscription on the
floor, lies Henry, Prince of Wales, the eldest son of James, who gave
such high promise both of character and ability, that he had won the
hearts of the people, and more especially of the Puritans, in a
remarkable degree. James, though holding very unsatisfactory views as to
the rights and duties of a king, had nevertheless brought up his son
wisely and had educated him most carefully. Before he was six he had
been instructed "how to behave towards God, how to behave when he should
come to be king, and how to behave in all those matters which were right
or wrong according as they were used;" and when he was only nine he
wrote in Latin to his father giving an account of the books he had been
reading, which included Cicero’s Epistles.
According to the law of Scotland, the heir to the throne was not allowed
to be brought up by his parents, but was sent to Stirling Castle, to be
under the care of the Earl of Mar, who held the right to be the
hereditary guardian, and this accounts for the many letters which passed
between the little prince and the king and queen. When Elizabeth died
and James became king of Great Britain, he had to go hastily to London,
but about a year later he sent for the queen to come "with the bairns to
Windsor, where he prayed God they should all have a blyth meeting." As
they arrived there during the festival of St. George, Prince Henry was
at once made a Knight of the Garter, and his "princely carriage and his
learned behaviour" on that occasion greatly impressed every one who saw
him. The coronation of James was fixed for St. James’s Day, but because
of the plague raging in London, all the fair pageants and the public
rejoicings were hastily countermanded, so that the ceremony was almost a
private one, even the usual procession through the city being left out.
Great was the disappointment of the Londoners, though they were promised
that so soon as the plague had disappeared the king, with the queen and
their children, would visit the city with all the state of a coronation
procession.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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