From fears of an “imposter prince” to the end of an arcane ritual, the curious history behind Britain’s most intrusive royal tradition
For centuries, the arrival of a royal baby was not considered a purely private family matter. Instead, it was an affair of state – one serious enough to require the presence of a Cabinet minister in the delivery room.
The practice reached its quiet conclusion on Christmas Day 1936, when Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent, gave birth to her daughter, Princess Alexandra. In attendance was Sir John Simon, the Home Secretary, making Alexandra the last member of the Royal Family whose birth was formally witnessed by a senior politician.
Within a decade, the ritual was abandoned. King George VI judged the practice unnecessary, and by the time his daughter, the then Princess Elizabeth, gave birth to Prince Charles in 1948, no government official was present. Charles thus became the first senior royal to be born free from ministerial supervision – a small but significant step towards greater royal privacy.
Sir John Simon would remain the final politician ever to attend a royal birth.
The fear that started it all
The origins of the tradition lie in one of the most febrile episodes in British history. In June 1688, Mary of Modena, the second wife of King James II, gave birth to a son, James Francis Edward Stuart. His arrival should have secured the Catholic king’s dynasty. Instead, it plunged the country into political panic.
James II had converted to Catholicism in the late 1670s, alarming the Protestant establishment. His brother and predecessor, Charles II, had insisted that James’s daughters from his first marriage, Mary and Anne, be raised as Anglicans. But the birth of a healthy Catholic male heir threatened to upend the succession.
Almost immediately, rumours spread that the child was an imposter – that Mary of Modena’s baby had been stillborn and replaced by another infant smuggled into the royal bedchamber in a warming pan. The boy would later become known to history as the “Old Pretender”.
The allegations were politically useful. William of Orange, married to James’s Protestant daughter Mary, cited doubts over the legitimacy of the birth when he invaded England later that year. James II fled the country on Christmas Eve 1688, and Parliament declared that he had abdicated. William and Mary were installed as joint monarchs in what became known as the Glorious Revolution.
Births as matters of state
In the aftermath, it was decided that no such uncertainty would be allowed again. Henceforth, the birth of any royal heir would be witnessed by senior politicians to certify that the child was genuine and entitled to the throne.
By the late Victorian era, the procedure had become more streamlined. When the future Queen Mary gave birth to her first child in 1894, Queen Victoria ruled that the presence of the Home Secretary alone would suffice. The births of Queen Elizabeth II and her sister, Princess Margaret, were both duly observed in this manner.
Yet by the mid-20th century, the ritual had come to seem archaic. Advances in medicine, changes in constitutional practice, and shifting attitudes to privacy rendered it obsolete.
Princess Alexandra’s arrival in 1936 marked the end of a centuries-old suspicion – and the last time the British state felt compelled to stand watch over the royal nursery.
