Smallpox, the terrible scourge of the age, busy at the dangerous season of the falling leaf, smote the youngest son of the royal house, and on the 22nd, Henry, Duke of Gloucester, was dead in the flush of his early youth.
He had abundantly proved himself, in the Spanish campaign, a gallant soldier at the side of his brother James, and if there were already signs manifested that he was not altogether untouched by some of the failings of his race, that question must be suffered to sleep with him. In 1659, when he had been created by letters patent Duke of Gloucester and Earl of Cambridge, he had also been invested with the Garter at The Hague by Sir Edward Walker, Garter King-at-Arms, but he was never installed.[[122]]
[122]. Sandford’s “Genealogical History.”
In the anger and excitement consequent on the discovery of the Duke of York’s stolen marriage, the younger brother must needs put in his word.
He did not like Mistress Anne. He vowed with boyish petulance that he hated “to be in the room with her, she smelt so strong of her father’s green bag.”[[123]] And perhaps, who knows? the impatient words may have rankled in the mind of the latter, though it mattered little after all.
[123]. “Memoirs of the Court of England under the Reign of the Stuarts.” John Heneage Jesse.
All too soon, alas! the grave closed over the fair young head, and one forgets all that is best forgotten. We only think tenderly of Henry Stuart, as the loving child who sat on his doomed father’s knee at that last piteous interview in St James’s Palace, the day before the fatal 30th January, and promised fealty to the brother who was next to claim it, with the unquestioning obedience of childhood.
HENRY, DUKE OF GLOUCESTER
Charles II., callous as he was steadily becoming to his better feelings, grieved bitterly at the loss of his young brother,[[124]] and this unexpected sorrow probably helped to soften him with regard to events which were soon to follow. Over in France, too, the little sister Henrietta, whose short intercourse with her brother had been marked by their mother’s unjust persecution of him, wept passionately for him, as she had been eagerly looking forward to seeing him again during the visit she and her mother were on the point of paying to England. At the boy’s funeral in Westminster Abbey his brother James was chief mourner.[[125]]