The strange historical traditions of royal births

It could get crowded in the corridors of the Lindo Wing at St Mary's, Paddington, next month, now that the Duchess of Cambridge has reportedly asked her mother and sister to be on call for her baby's birth. It may just be a precaution, in case Prince William fails to make it to the hospital on time.

He is planning to be there - just as Prince Charles was present at his birth - but he is continuing his work as a search and rescue pilot in Anglesey, and nature's timing can make the best-laid plans even of heirs to the throne go astray.

On the other hand, the Middletons are a notably close family - as is clear from the fact that the Duchess is planning to go home to her mother with the baby when her husband returns to work after two weeks' paternity leave. And there's one other thing that's worth remembering. Historically, royal births were not always conducted in privacy.

Far from it, actually. Three decades into the 20th century, royal-watchers saw a scene that might have come from the Middle Ages. While the then Duchess of York - later the Queen Mother - waited at Glamis to give birth to her second child, the Home Secretary and his sidekick whiled the hours away at Castle Airlie nearby, in mounting anxiety.

Even in 1930, the presence of a minister was required at - or at least in the same house as - the birth of a royal baby. The two men had arrived in Scotland on August 5, to be told that the Duchess would go into labour within the week. When August 12 came, they sat up all night.

It was August 21 before the call came to say that the birth was imminent, and by then it was days since they'd dared leave the house. With the village full of journalists, the Duchess grumbled about "vultures" to her mother-in-law, Queen Mary, who called pregnancy a woman's curse. The officials had all come "very previous", the Duchess felt, and now she supposed she would be given "all sorts of horrid drinks, so as not to keep these foolish people waiting".

The Ceremonial Secretary was already concerned about the fact that this was the first royal birth north of the border in more than three centuries, and people might think things were being done in "an irregular, hole and corner way". He even raised the spectre of other, older, suspicious royal births - of tales that an impostor baby had been smuggled in, via a warming pan, when James II's wife Mary of Modena finally gave birth to a boy. Many such dramatic stories cluster around the history of royal births.

But what's interesting is the long shadows they cast - even today. When the Duchess of Cambridge gives birth, with the world's media camped outside the door, will she be the victim of a very modern persecution? Or just following in the oldest traditions of the monarchy? In medieval and Tudor days, queens withdrew to their own darkened rooms for a month before and a month after giving birth, living in an enclosed world where only women were allowed. No male doctors, no priests, no gazing out of the window, even.

"Her Highness's pleasure being understood as to what chamber it may please her to be delivered in, the same to be hung with rich cloth or arras, sides, roof, windows and all…" said the ordinances laid down for Elizabeth of York, wife of Henry VII.

But behind the formality lay the fears - not only of dying in childbirth, as Elizabeth of York did - but also of the pressure to produce an heir. We know of Henry VIII's frantic quest for a son; Mary Tudor taking to her chamber with a false pregnancy and then having to come shamefacedly out again; and Elizabeth Tudor's terror of maternity.

The Stuart and Hanoverian centuries are full of a different sort of horror story. The rumours about Mary of Modena and the warming pan don't hold much credence; but Mary's stepdaughter Anne (who otherwise stood in line for the throne) wrote that she'd never believe in Mary's baby unless she witnessed the delivery. Anne herself endured 17 pregnancies, with no child who lived to maturity. T

he Hanoverians were bedevilled by parent and child relations so fraught that Frederick, Prince of Wales bundled his labouring wife into a coach rather than have his baby, the future George III, born under George II's roof. Queen Victoria made no bones about loathing the business of childbearing - even though she went through it nine times. She and Albert consciously set up the image of a fertile, tranquil family life to distinguish her from her "wicked uncles" - but in private she complained that young babies were unpleasantly froglike in their movements and that breastfeeding was disgusting.

Famously, she told her eldest daughter that a woman at such moments was "like a cow or a dog". When, with her later confinements, she sniffed chloroform to relieve the pain, many ministers of religion were horrified, although the British Medical Journal came to her support. Since then - though Diana, Princess of Wales was determined to give birth without drugs - most royal mothers have taken whatever medical help they felt necessary.

As for William's determination to be with Kate during delivery, both Prince Albert and his son, the future Edward VII, were there to witness their wives giving birth. Prince Philip, by contrast, was playing squash when Prince Charles was born. In another way, too, the latest, much-photographed generation of royals are mirroring the traditions of far earlier days - days when a royal child might be displayed naked to the assembled nobility, so that everyone knew it was healthy.

When the Duchess of Cambridge gives birth, every medical detail the media can get hold of will be freely discussed. When Prince Charles was born in 1948, in a Buckingham Palace apartment especially kitted out as a hospital suite, the fountains in Trafalgar Square flowed blue for a boy. But no pictures were put out, or public appearances made, for almost a month.

Rumours even began to spread that there was something wrong with the baby. And in 1926, when Princess Elizabeth was born, only the most discreet of announcements revealed that after medical consultation "a certain line of treatment was successfully adopted" - code for the fact that she was born by caesarean section. In one sense, though, the Duchess of Cambridge will be allowed a comparatively recent gift of privacy.

The birth of Princess Margaret in 1930 was the last at which the presence of the Home Secretary was required. When Princess Elizabeth was due to give birth, research instituted by a Labour government decided that the tradition was nothing more than a hangover from the days when government officers had in any case been perpetually in and out of royal apartments, and had never been needed for the verification of an heir. Ironically, given her own experience, it was Queen Elizabeth who protested at this break with tradition, but Tommy Lascelles, George VI's private secretary, held firm. It was "an unwarrantable and out-of-date intrusion into Your Majesties' private lives".

In the late 20th century, things changed again. Prince William was the first heir to the throne to be born in hospital, in the same Lindo Wing at St Mary's, Paddington. And the whole of his mother's pregnancy had been conducted in the public eye. Now it is her daughter-in-law's turn - and the press were blamed, six months ago, for having forced the royal couple to announce this pregnancy early after Kate was admitted to hospital with severe morning sickness.

But think back to other centuries - to when Marie Antoinette gave birth surrounded by so many people that she fainted from the heat, with not only courtiers but carpenters climbing on the furniture to get a better view. At least the Duchess of Cambridge can choose who will attend her very private delivery - if she wants her mother and sister there, so be it. So when lenses are trained on the hospital, should we lament it as another instance of the evils of the celebrity age? Or should we feel relief that the paparazzi are, if anything, less intrusive than the random spectators who once watched over a royal delivery. '

Blood Sisters: The Hidden Lives of the Women Behind the Wars of the Roses' by Sarah Gristwood is published by HarperPress