Infant’s Cap.
Both mother and child in this picture wear a lace cap of unusual shape, rather broader where turned over at the ear than at the top. It is seen on a few other portraits of that date, and seems to have come to England with the queen of James I. It disappeared before the graceful modes of hair-dressing introduced by Queen Henrietta Maria.
The genius of Van Dyck has preserved for us a wonderful portraiture of children of this period, the children of King Charles I. The earliest group shows the king and queen with two children; one a baby in arms with long clothes and close cap—this might have been painted yesterday. The little prince standing at his father’s knee is in a dark green frock, much like John Quincy’s, and apparently no richer. A painting at Windsor shows king and queen with the two princes, Charles and James; another, also at Windsor, gives the mother with the two sons. One at Turin gives the two princes with their sister. At Windsor, and in replica at Berlin, is the famous masterpiece with the five children, dated 1637.
Eleanor Foster. 1755.
This exquisite group shows Charles, the Prince of Wales (aged seven), with his arm on the head of a great dog; he is in the full garb of a grown man, a Cavalier. His suit is red satin; the shoes are white, with red roses. Mary, demure as in all her portraits, is aged six; she wears virago-sleeves made like those of Margaret Gibbes, with hanging sleeves over them, a lace stomacher, and cap, with tufts of scarlet, and hair curled lightly on the forehead, and pulled out at the side in ringlets, like that of her mother, Henrietta Maria. The Duke of York, aged two, wears a red dress spotted with yellow, with sleeves precisely like those of Robert Gibbes; white lace-edged apron, stomacher, and cap; his hair is in curls. The Princess Elizabeth was aged about two; she is in blue. Her cap is of wrought and tucked lawn, and she wears either a pearl ear-ring or a pearl pendant at the corner of the cap just at the ear, and a string of pearls around her neck. She has a gentle, serious face, one with a premonitory tinge of sadness. She was the favorite daughter of the king, and wrote the inexpressibly touching account of his last days in prison. She was but thirteen, and he said to her the day before his execution, “Sweetheart, you will forget all this.” “Not while I live,” she answered, with many tears, and promised to write it down. She lived but a short time, for she was broken-hearted; she was found dead, with her head lying on the religious book she had been reading—in which attitude she is carved on her tomb. The baby is Princess Anne, a fat little thing not a year old; she is naked, save for a close cap and a little drapery. She died when three and a half years old; died with these words on her lips, “Lighten Thou mine eyes, O Lord, that I sleep not the sleep of Death.” It was not Puritan children only at that time who were filled with deep religious thought, and gave expression to that thought even in infancy; children of the Church of England and of the Roman Catholic Church were all widely imbued with religious feeling, and Biblical words were the familiar speech of the day, of both young and old. It rouses in me strange emotions when I gaze at this portrait and remember all that came into the lives of these royal children. They had been happier had they been born, like the little Gibbes children, in America, and of untitled parents.
William, Prince of Orange.