There had been tiffs and troubles before, of course, in the run-up to the wedding – you know, that little wedding at Windsor Castle between the Anglo-Saxon prince and the American, mixed-race, divorcee TV star in the spring of 2018 that attracted some 1.9 billion viewers around the world. What family wedding would be complete without a few family hiccups: a disputed bridesmaid’s outfit here, a missing tiara there – and oh yes, an absentee father of the bride?
But twelve months later, almost to the day (19 May 2018 to 6 May 2019), here was the fruit of the blessed union about to arrive, a springtime baby to thrill its parents and to bring all the family back together again – especially those two Windsor brothers and their allegedly warring wives.
Royal births, like royal weddings, are the human happenings that cement the affections of a modern people to its monarchy. Constitutional historians like to explain the theory – the paradox of how a modern democracy can actually be strengthened by the elitist and undemocratic traditions of an ancient crown. But there’s nothing like the practical appeal of a newborn baby in its swaddled slumber – the fresh arrival of new life that encourages life for all.
Just as with coronations and royal weddings, a set of popular ceremonies has developed around royal births in the age of mass communications – the jostling crowd outside the hospital, the smiling parents with their baby on the steps, the shouted compliments, the flashguns exploding. Then later, the quieter, more formal christening photograph and the announcement of all the godparents’ names.
That’s how Charles and Diana set the modern style in 1982. Their son William, on 21 June that year, was the first ever heir to the British throne to be born in a regular hospital – St Mary’s in west London, right beside Paddington railway station and smelling not a little of the trains. Charles’s sister, Princess Anne, had discovered the attractions of St Mary’s private maternity wing – named after the philanthropic Portuguese-Jewish Lindo family – for the births of her children Peter (b.1977) and Zara (b.1981). Harry followed two years after William on 15 September 1984 to make up a royal quartet of Lindo births.
When William himself became a father, he and Kate adopted the same tradition, choosing Lindo for their children, George (b.2013), Charlotte (b.2015) and Louis (b.2018). By this last date the footmarks of proud royal parents displaying their newborn to the world had almost worn grooves into those stone steps at Paddington. There was an anthropological thesis to be written on the success of populist monarchies who chose to display their offspring outside railway stations at birth: Austria’s archdukes snootily kept their child production away from the public eye, and who now cared about the archdukes – in Austria or anywhere else in the world?
In May 2019, however, Harry and Meghan had decided that they did not want to display their newborn baby on those steps outside the Lindo Wing. They wanted to be royal in a new style – and maybe not royal at all. And to understand why this mattered so much, we have to go back in royal history – to the legend of the warming pan.
The warming pan was the electric blanket or rubber hot water bottle of its day, a couple of centuries back. Before his lordship retired for the night, his chambermaid would heat up his sheets by smoothing them energetically with the warming pan – a large, flat, circular brass container on the end of a long wooden handle, with a high curved lid that meant it could hold a generous quantity of red-hot coals from the fireplace. Or a newborn baby …
Such a warming pan, it was alleged, had been used in 1688 to smuggle a healthy substitute baby into the birthing bed of Mary of Modena, wife of the hated Catholic King James II, replacing the legitimate heir who was said to have been born sickly. Until 1688 the unpopular monarch had been tolerated because his successor was going to be his Protestant sister Mary and her still more Protestant Dutch husband, William of Orange. Loyal anti-Catholic Brits had hoped that the generally popular and non-popish couple would succeed the childless and far-too-popish James as joint monarchs, William-and-Mary, thus preserving what passed for democracy in those days – as well as the Church of England.
The unexpected appearance of the living and healthy ‘warming pan’ baby, James Francis Edward Stuart, however, threatened this scheme – and 1688 turned into a landmark year in the history of Britain’s monarchy. William of Orange sailed his invasion fleet into Torbay that November, bloodlessly persuading James II to flee London with his warming pan son.
The ‘Glorious Revolution’ was British history’s memorable moniker for the stirring events of 1688 and its resulting settlement that became the model for our modern system of enhanced and democratic powers for Parliament and reduced powers for an increasingly symbolic ‘constitutional’ monarchy. Alongside the theoretical changes came the very practical provision that all royal births must, in future, be personally attended by the home secretary of the day, whose job it would be to make sure that the new royal arrival had been delivered properly, and not in a warming pan.
So, well into modern times, attendance beside the royal birthing bed became the duty of every British home secretary. Queen Victoria gave birth to all nine of her children with her home secretary in the room, along with assorted privy councillors – and this intrusive custom lasted long into the twentieth century. Sir William Joynson-Hicks was present at the birth of the future Queen Elizabeth II at her parents’ London townhouse in April 1926, and, four years later, his Labour successor, John Robert Clynes, had to
