This web page is a work in progress, showing fragments of the whole.  Read Royal Renegades and get it all.

On 29 May, 1630 in St James's Palace, at about noon, King Charles I's optimism and Henrietta's fortitude were rewarded with the birth of another son.  And it was clear from the outset that this one would live.

He was a large, swarthy child (the queen later called him her ‘black boy’), a Bourbon rather than a Stuart in appearance, contented to the point of laziness, a trait he would never entirely lose. The baby was named Charles, like his dead elder brother, and christened in the Chapel Royal, in a ceremony where everyone wore white satin with crimson embroidery, a costume that harked back to the marriage of King James IV of Scotland and Margaret Tudor in 1503. The child’s godfather was his uncle, Louis XIII of France, and his godmother was Marie de Medici, who, with characteristic extravagance, sent him diamonds. . .