ABSTRACT
The future King Charles I of England was born at Dunfermline Castle in Scotland on 19 November 1600; his parents were the Scottish king, James VI, and his queen, Anne of Denmark. Charles was not a robust or particularly healthy child and still could not walk or talk when aged two-and-a-half. This may have been because he was suffering from a form of rickets, a disease caused by vitamin deficiency which retards bone development. In March 1603, when Charles was barely two, Elizabeth I of England died and his father inherited the English crown. The new King James I immediately set out for London and was followed soon afterwards by his wife and two eldest children, Henry and Elizabeth. The sickly Charles, however, was left in Scotland in the care of Alexander Seton, Lord Fyvie, a peer with Roman Catholic sympathies, and it was well over a year before he was allowed to journey to England to join the rest of his family. Following his arrival in the country he was later to rule, he was brought up in the household of Sir Robert Carey. Over the next few years, he was gradually exposed to the colourful and somewhat chaotic excesses of his father’s English court, but as the youngest member of the royal family he was referred to as ‘Baby Charles’, and was not expected to shoulder many responsibilities or exercise much real influence.
