C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.

The King’s Children

By Thomas Fuller (1608–1661)

KATHERINE, fourth daughter to Charles the First and Queen Mary, was born at Whitehall (the Queen mother then being at St. James), and survived not above half an hour after her baptizing; so that it is charity to mention her, whose memory is likely to be lost, so short her continuance in this life,—the rather because her name is not entered, as it ought, into the register of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields; as indeed none of the King’s children, save Prince Charles, though they were born in that parish. And hereupon a story depends.

I am credibly informed that at the birth of every child of kings born at Whitehall or St. James’s, full five pounds were ever faithfully paid to some unfaithful receivers thereof, to record the names of such children in the register of St. Martin’s. But the money being embezzled (we know by some, God knows by whom), no memorial is entered of them. Sad that bounty should betray any to baseness, and that which was intended to make them the more solemnly remembered should occasion that they should be more silently forgotten! Say not, “Let the children of mean persons be written down in registers: kings’ children are registers to themselves;” or, “All England is a register to them;” for sure I am, this common confidence hath been the cause that we have been so often at a loss about the nativities and other properties of those of royal extraction.

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