lungs and before she had completed her fourth year, consumption terminated her existence.’ The child’s fortitude in the face of death was remarkable. Her attendants gently reminded her that she should say her prayers as the end approached and the exhausted child did her best. ‘I am not able to say my long prayer [the Lord’s Prayer],’ she told them, ‘but I will say my short one: Lighten mine eyes, oh Lord, lest I sleep the sleep of death.’ ‘This done,’ added Mrs Green, ‘the little lamb gave up the ghost.’ . . .

. . .The queen made an excellent recovery after the birth of her third daughter, as the countess of Leicester reported to her husband in March 1637: ‘The queen is the best in her childbed that ever I saw. The king dines and sups with her and sits by her the greatest part of the day. The little princess shall be privately christened by her brother and sister.' This picture of the devotion of the royal couple is all the more touching in the context of Princess Anne’s sadly short life. . .

 . . .The little princess’s deathbed scene was described by the Victorian writer Mary Anne Everett Green in a manner almost as maudlin as the death of Little Nell in Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop. ‘Her health, from early infancy, was extremely delicate; a constant feverish cough showed a tendency to disease of the