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but she looks better than ever she did, which is not usual: for people when they are so far gone, for the most part look very ill. Besides, it is very odd that [her visit to] Bath, that all the best doctors thought would do her a great deal of harm, should have had so very good effect so soon, as that she should prove with child from the first minute she and [the King] met, after her coming from thence. Her being so positive it will be a son, and the principles of that religion being such that they will stick at nothing, be it never so wicked, if it will promote their interest, give some cause to fear there may be foul play intended.4

A week later Anne returned to the subject. There was ‘much reason to believe it is a false belly’:

For, methinks, if it were not, there having been so many stories and jests made about it, she should, to convince the world, make either me or some of my friends feel her belly; but quite contrary, whenever one talks of her being with child, she looks as if she were afraid one should touch her. And whenever I happen to be in the room as she has been undressing, she has always gone into the next room to put on her smock.5

Anne’s suspicions were echoed by Thomas Osborne, Earl of Danby. He reported to the Prince of Orange that ‘many of our ladies say that the Queen’s great belly seems to grow faster than they had observed their own to do’.6

On 10 June, the Queen gave birth to a son, James Francis Edward Stuart, Prince of Wales, who was immediately declared first in line to the throne, ahead of his grown-up half-sisters. Officially, the joyous event was greeted with delight and enthusiasm nationwide. After nearly thirty years of dynastic uncertainty, ever since Charles II’s Restoration in 1660, at last the country had a healthy male heir. Bonfires were lit, gazettes and newsletters were ‘stuffed with nothing but rejoicings from Towns for the birth of the Prince’, and the government spent £12,000 on fireworks with which to celebrate.

At The Hague, however, the news was greeted less enthusiastically. Prince William banned all public celebrations of the Prince’s birth. Firm statements were issued, insisting on the irrelevance of the new Prince of Wales to the English succession.

The tide of speculation continued unabated. ‘People give themselves a great liberty in discoursing about the young Prince, with strange reflections on him, not fit to insert here,’ one contemporary commentator wrote. Matters were not helped by the fact that the deeply sceptical Princess Anne had been away at Bath Spa taking the waters at the moment when the Queen went into labour, and was thus unable to testify to the authenticity or otherwise of the birth itself. Writing to her sister on 18 June, Anne expressed her ‘concern and vexation’ that ‘I should be so unfortunate to be out of town when the Queen was brought to bed, for I shall never now be satisfied whether the child be true or false’. Reiterating her suspicions to her absent sister, Anne expressed surprise that the Queen had so miscalculated the date at which the baby was due, and had thereby ‘chosen’ to give birth during her sister-in-law’s absence. Had Anne perhaps, as more than one contemporary pamphlet proposed, been persuaded to leave London for fear that she would be a too ‘vigilant observer’ at the lying in?

If the timing of the pregnancy had been judged suspicious, the arrival of a hale and hearty male heir now prompted a flurry of publications voicing the opinion that somehow or other a surrogate baby had been substituted for Mary’s sickly or stillborn one – perhaps smuggled into the delivery room in a warming pan by a midwife. Talk of a ‘warming-pan plot’ became so loud and persistent that four months after the birth, on 22 October 1688, the King called a special meeting of the Privy Council, at which forty-two men and women who had attended the delivery, or had access to the Queen immediately prior to it, presented their testimony, giving the reasons and evidence for their sincere belief that the Prince of Wales was the King’s bona fide son.