Name: Henry Frederick STUART, Prince of Wales.

Birth: 19 Feb 1594 at Stirling Castle

Death: 6 Nov 1612 at St. James Palace, England

Father: James I STUART, King of England

Mother: Anne of Denmark

     Henry Frederick Stuart Prince of Wales (1594-1612), the eldest son of James I (of England) and Anne of Denmark. Notable for the strict morality of his way of life, in marked contrast to his father, and known to support a vigorously Protestant and anti-Spanish foreign policy, he became the focus for the hopes of those at court with Puritan sympathies. His death, loudly rumoured to be a result of poison, brought nationwide regret, while the hopes of forward Protestants centred increasingly upon Henry's sister, Elizabeth, and her husband, Frederick V of the Palatinate.

     Henry Frederick Stuart Prince of Wales (1594-1612), heir to James I of England, James VI of Scotland, spent a considerable amount of time at Richmond Palace and with his sister Elizabeth Stuart and the son of John Lord Harrington of Kew farm. His Lordship was supposed to be looking after Elizabeth. He found that difficult. When Henry died in 1612 he was replaced as heir to the throne by Charles, later Charles I. The Hanoverian dynasty derived from Elizabeth's line.

     J.P. Kenyon in his Stuart England said that 'James I of England was not the king men were looking for in the early seventeenth. He was lazy, never realizing that the wealthier the kingdom the more complex it was, and the more time was required to govern it. He spent far too much time reading and talking instead of doing; he had no time for the day-to-day chores of government - he even retreat to Royston or Newmark at the height of the parliamentary session. He remained a foreigner -being Scots, he just might as well have been a German, or a Portuguese - and a foreign king polarized the already existing tension between "Court" and "Country"... Most of his ministers would have liked a less intelligent, more active man like his son Prince Henry, whose death in 1612 was to many Englishmen the real beginning of disillusion... James's prestige slumped further with the sudden death of the eighteen-year-old Prince of Wales in 1612. Henry's virtues were much exaggerated, but he was certainly the antithesis to his father, and while he lived much could be forgiven James in the knowledge that his death would bring a new diapensation. Prince Charles, a reserved boy of twelve and little known, was no substitute.' (Kenyon, J.P. Stuart England, The Pelican History of England, Penguin Books, Middlesex, 1985, pp. 59-77)

     Prince Charles' mother, the English Queen Anne of Denmark, was a sister of the Danish King Christian IV, and there appears to be a tradition that Mytens' portrait of Charles (KMSsp372) was originally to have been a gift from the English royal family, perhaps especially from Queen Anne, to the Danish king, see an unsigned and undated manuscript (presumably a draft for a catalogue of the pictures in the Royal Kunstkammer) in the Statens Museum for Kunst archives, which can perhaps be dated to the 1790s, in which it says of a picture: Ce tableau ... a été un present da la mêre de ce prince [i.e. Le Roi Charles I d'Angleterre] à son frêre, le Roi de Danemarc Christian. This cannot of course be correct, as Queen Anne died in 1619 and the portrait is dated 1624, and so it is possible that there is a confusion precisely with KMSsp184 (or possibly with a quite different portrait of Prince Charles in the possession of the Danish king), or that the tradition only contains that germ of truth that one or possibly several portraits of the youngest son of the Queen of England arrived in Denmark as gifts to the Danish king. This would conform well with the general practice in this field; for instance none of the many portraits of Charles I and Queen Anne, which Mytens painted on the king's behalf were painted for the king himself, but were intended as gifts to friends and relatives. So there are reasonable grounds for assuming that the picture arrived during the reign of Christian IV.