Just think, what a tragic fate!

Just think, what a tragic fate! Mary of Modena endured ten miscarriages, and five of her children died in infancy; and when at last a viable child came into the world, she was accused of having substituted a healthy baby for her real child, a sickly, feeble one, and most likely not of the right sex.

And all because it did not suit the elder daughters of her husband, King James II, to acknowledge a male heir and deprive their own offspring of the right to the throne.

How did fake news spread in the seventeenth century? Forty people were invited to Queen Mary's confinement! By tradition, a crowd looked on at the birth of royal children, to bear witness to the authenticity of their origin. Poor Mary even asked James to cover her face with a hat, to hide from the gaze of the idle throng at her bedside.

Once it became clear that the boy who had been born would most likely survive, his 23-year-old half-sister Anne, who had allegedly been absent from the palace through illness at the royal birth, declared that James Francis Edward was a changeling. He would never be recognised as heir. Anne herself would become queen and reign until the end of her days.

Do you see? Forty high-ranking witnesses, aristocrats who had peered into the womb of the unfortunate Mary of Modena and heard her labour pains, were unable to certify the authenticity of her son's origin, because it did not suit the great political forces.

But in general this is the dreadful fate of many Stuarts and Tudors, connected, as it seems to me, with a genetic disorder that showed itself quite characteristically, for example, in the marital history of Henry VIII (I wrote a very detailed post about this).