Royal Births Before an Audience: Witnesses at the Queen's Bedside

When a European queen went into labor in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, the room filled. Princes of the blood, ministers, ambassadors and court officials crowded in, sometimes followed by anyone who could push through a door. To modern readers this looks like a grotesque lack of privacy. To the people who arranged it, it was a matter of state. A royal child was the next link in a dynasty, and a dynasty depended on everyone believing that the child in the cradle was the child the queen had borne.

Three well-documented births show how the custom worked, what it could and could not prove, and why it eventually gave way: the birth of Louis XIII in 1601, the birth of James Francis Edward Stuart in 1688, and the first delivery of Marie Antoinette in 1778.

“This child belongs to everyone”: Fontainebleau, 1601

The fullest early account comes from the midwife herself. Louise Bourgeois delivered Marie de’ Medici, queen of Henri IV, of the future Louis XIII at Fontainebleau, and in 1617 she published a narrative of the royal births she had attended.¹

Bourgeois records the king preparing the queen as her labor began, around midnight. He reminded her that he had told her several times “le besoin qu’il y a que les Princes du sang soyent à vostre accouchement” (the need for the princes of the blood to be present at your delivery), adding that it was “la grandeur de vous & de vostre enfant,” the dignity of both mother and child. He knew she was shy, he said, and feared that the sight of them might hinder her labor, but “c’est la forme que l’on tient au premier accouchement des Roynes”: this was the established form for a queen’s first delivery.¹

The rule had limits. Henri had already decided that, apart from a short list of named ladies of the household, no princess or lady should attend, to avoid jealousies and because too many opinions disturbed those doing the work. Physicians stayed within call, and two monks from Saint-Germain-des-Prés prayed beside relics of Saint Margaret.¹ Three princes of the blood, Conti, Soissons and Montpensier, were summoned around one in the morning, waited about half an hour, and were sent home when the midwife told the king that the birth was not yet close.¹

The delivery room was arranged for watching. A large pavilion of Holland linen was stretched like a tent by cords at its four corners, with a smaller one inside it over the labor bed. The queen chose to deliver in a birthing chair covered in crimson velvet, and when the moment came, Bourgeois writes, the princes sat under the great pavilion facing her. The labor lasted twenty-two and a quarter hours.¹

Witnessing did not mean that everyone knew everything at once. Bourgeois wrapped the newborn in her lap so that no one but she knew its sex, and she had agreed on a private signal with a member of the household so that the king could learn the news without alarming the exhausted queen.¹ Once he knew he had a son, Henri embraced the princes and threw open the door to the antechamber. Bourgeois estimated that some two hundred people came in, so many that the queen could not be carried to her bed. When the midwife objected, the king told her to be quiet: “cét enfant est à tout le monde, il faut que chascun s’en rejoüisse” (this child belongs to everyone; everyone must rejoice in him). She dates the birth to the evening of Thursday, September 27, 1601.¹

A birth that was doubted: St James’s Palace, 1688

If public birth was meant to settle questions of legitimacy, the English case of 1688 shows how badly it could fail when politics were already inflamed.

Mary of Modena, the Catholic second wife of James II, had lost several children in infancy. When she became pregnant again in 1687, many Protestants feared a Catholic male heir who would displace James’s Protestant daughters Mary and Anne in the succession.²³ Doubt began before the birth: critics suggested the pregnancy itself could be feigned, and Princess Anne, who was skeptical, was away at Bath when the child arrived on June 10, 1688.³

The birth at St James’s Palace was crowded. The official announcement in the London Gazette said the queen had been “safely delivered of a PRINCE at St James’s, his Majesty, the Queen Dowager, most of the Lords of the Privy Council, and Divers Ladies of Quality being present.”⁴ It did not help. A story spread that the queen had borne a dead child and that a live baby had been smuggled into the bed in a warming pan, the covered metal pan of coals used to heat sheets.³² One of the later depositions, made by a woman of the household, mentions that she saw fire carried into the queen’s room “in a warming Pan to warm the Bed” before the queen lay down, an ordinary domestic detail that the rumor turned into a hiding place.⁵

With William of Orange preparing to invade, James took the unusual step of putting the birth on the record. On October 22, 1688 he summoned an extraordinary council of privy councillors, peers, judges and the Lord Mayor of London. He told them that “extraordinary Diseases must have extraordinary Remedies,” and claimed that “scarce any Prince was ever Born where there were so many Persons present.”⁵ The Queen Dowager, Catherine of Braganza, declared that she had come to the labor and “never stirred from her till she was Delivered.” About forty witnesses then gave sworn testimony.⁵

The depositions read like a detailed reconstruction of the room. The Lord Chancellor, George Jeffreys, said he “stood all the Time at the Queen’s Bedside” and heard her cry out, and that he followed the child into the next room and saw it newly born.⁵ Another lord recalled that the sex was passed in whispers, “for no Man was permitted to speak it aloud, lest the sudden Knowledge of It might have discomposed the Queen,” the same caution Henri IV’s midwife had used in 1601.⁵ The testimony was enrolled in Chancery on October 27 and printed by the king’s command.⁵

None of it changed many minds. As the Folger Shakespeare Library’s account of the episode notes, the witnesses could be dismissed: many were women, many were Catholic, some could not see well in the crowded room, and the queen was moved to another room straight after the birth.³ William used doubts about the birth among his reasons for intervening, landed at Torbay on November 5, and within weeks James and his infant son had fled to France.² Witnesses could prove a birth only to people inclined to believe them.

A crush at Versailles, 1778

Ninety years later the French court still followed the same form, and Marie Antoinette’s first delivery became its most famous example.

On December 18, the day before the birth, the Austrian ambassador, the comte de Mercy-Argenteau, reported to the queen’s mother, the Empress Maria Theresa, that the first physician and the accoucheur had been lodged beside the queen’s apartments for a fortnight, that four wet nurses were on standby, and that more than two hundred people of quality had moved from Paris to Versailles to await the event, until no lodgings were left and food prices had tripled.⁶ The queen gave birth to a daughter, Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte, at half past eleven in the morning on December 19, 1778.⁶

Mercy’s report a few days later shows that even a seasoned diplomat found the custom strange. “Par une suite de l’usage singulier de ce pays-ci,” he wrote, “j’avais été appelé et obligé d’être présent à l’accouchement de la reine”: through a singular custom of this country, he had been summoned and obliged to be present.⁶ Just after the birth the queen suffered what he called a convulsive attack. He gave four causes: the commotion of too many people, the queen’s efforts not to cry out, her fear that the silent infant was dead, and the shock of joy when it cried. The accoucheur relieved the attack within four minutes by bleeding her at the foot. By Mercy’s account, the king and almost everyone else had followed the infant into the next room when the attack came, and the king did not witness it.⁶

Madame Campan, one of the queen’s women, wrote a more vivid account years later. In her memoirs, when the accoucheur announced that the queen was about to deliver, “the persons who poured into the chamber were so numerous that the rush nearly destroyed the Queen.” The king had ordered the tall screens around her bed to be tied with cords the night before, and Campan believed they would otherwise have fallen on her. The room seemed like “some place of public amusement,” and “Two Savoyards got upon the furniture for a better sight of the Queen.”⁷ In Campan’s telling, the windows had been sealed with strips of paper, the king forced them open himself, and the surgeon bled the queen before the hot water arrived. She called it a “cruel custom” and wrote that it “was abolished afterwards.”⁷

The two witnesses do not tell quite the same story. Maria Theresa, reading the reports in Vienna, came to suspect foul play. Writing in July 1780, Mercy assured her that before and during the attack no one had touched the queen except the accoucheur, the first physician, the first surgeon and two senior women of the chamber, and that the cause was “l’abondance et la vivacité du sang,” the abundance and vigor of her blood, not any crime. The empress replied that she blamed herself for her suspicion but did not think it had been lightly formed.⁶ The crowd mattered, then, but how much it caused the queen’s collapse depends on which witness one follows.

The next birth was managed differently. When Marie Antoinette bore a son on October 22, 1781, Campan recorded that “So deep a silence prevailed in the room that the Queen thought her child was a daughter,” until the Keeper of the Seals declared the infant’s sex.⁷ Senior officers of state were still present to attest the birth; Campan’s remark that the “cruel custom” was abolished suggests that what had gone was the free entry of the crowd.

From the bedchamber to the Home Office

In Britain the presence of officials at royal births lasted into the twentieth century, in shrinking form. Before 1894, according to The Gazette’s own history of royal birth notices, privy councillors and ministers joined the doctors and ladies-in-waiting in the birth room.⁸ In 1894, for the birth of the future Edward VIII, Queen Victoria decided that the Home Secretary alone would be enough.⁴ Attendance was not always punctual: at the birth of Queen Victoria’s eldest son in 1841, the Archbishop of Canterbury and two ministers arrived too late.⁹ The Home Secretary William Joynson-Hicks attended the birth of the future Elizabeth II in 1926, and the last minister to attend was John Simon, at the birth of Princess Alexandra on Christmas Day, 1936.⁹⁴

The custom was dropped in 1948, before the birth of Prince Charles.⁹ Its origin is less clear than often claimed. The History of Parliament’s blog, introducing a 2013 post by the historian Charles Littleton, said the 1688 warming-pan birth “led to the now abandoned tradition of Home Secretaries being present at a royal birth,” though Littleton’s own account of 1688 does not take up the point.² Yet according to a 2013 news report drawing on Ben Pimlott’s biography of Elizabeth II, Home Office researchers in 1948 could find no evidence that the minister’s presence had anything to do with verifying the birth.⁹ The tidy story that one rumor in 1688 produced three centuries of ministers in the delivery room may itself be a later simplification. By 2013, when Theresa May was asked about the duchess of Cambridge’s first child, she said the Home Secretary was no longer required to attend, while repeating the familiar explanation that the minister had been there “to evidence that it was genuinely a royal birth.”⁹

What the witnesses were for

Taken together, these sources show that court birth witnessing was neither simple voyeurism nor a perfect safeguard. It was a ceremony of proof, carefully staged: tents and screens, seating for princes, signals and whispers to protect the mother, and later a sworn record if proof was challenged. Henri IV treated the newborn as public property. James II discovered that the testimony of dozens of eyewitnesses could not overcome political distrust. At Versailles, a diplomat who stood beside the bed thought the practice singular, and a lady of the chamber thought it cruel.

The women at the center left little direct testimony of their own. What survives comes mostly from those who managed or watched them: a midwife proud of her skill, a king defending his son, an ambassador writing to an anxious mother. Their accounts show how much of a queen’s body was treated as a matter of state, and how slowly that changed.

Footnotes

1. Bourgeois, Récit véritable (1617), Durham and Hampton transcription, account of the 1601 birth. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

2. Littleton, History of Parliament blog, July 26, 2013 (the custom is mentioned in the post’s editorial introduction). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

3. Folger Shakespeare Library, “A Crisis of Succession,” Rumors of Royalty. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

4. The Gazette, “Royal babies and The Gazette.” ↩ ↩² ↩³

5. Depositions Taken the 22d. of October 1688 (EEBO-TCP A35710). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

6. Arneth and Geffroy (eds.), Correspondance secrète, vol. 3, 2nd ed. (1874), Mercy to Maria Theresa, December 18, 19 and 24, 1778 (pp. 276-280) and July 16, 1780 (pp. 448-451); Maria Theresa to Mercy, June 30 and July 31, 1780. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

7. Campan, Memoirs, Project Gutenberg #3891, accounts of December 1778 and October 1781. ↩ ↩² ↩³

8. The Gazette, “Gazette Firsts: The history of The Gazette and royal babies.” ↩

9. Press Trust of India, Business Standard, July 22, 2013. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵