Did royalty ever "baby swap" a newborn daughter to fake having born a male heir?

by AkilliesZ

In the Netflix show "Kingdom" (spoilers for anyone who hasn't watched it), one of the plotlines involves a pregnant queen having several pregnant common women captive. This is presumably so that if the queen births a daughter who cannot inherit the throne, she will take one of their recently born infant males and proclaim it as her own, thus "producing" a male heir. Is this pure fiction, or are there recorded instances (or in fact, was a commonplace practice) of this kind of thing happening?

mimicofmodes

So basically, for an assumed medieval-to-early-modern Europe: as far as we know, no. Between a serious belief in the importance of royal bloodlines, the ability of parents to have more than one child, and the fact that even princesses were useful, there was little reason to swap out a newborn princess for a non-royal male baby.

However, something like this was rumored to have happened on at least one occasion.

James II of England, son of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, probably did not ever expect to be king until relatively late in life. He was the second son (technically the third, but his oldest brother died very soon after birth), and when he was in his teens, he went into exile with his mother and siblings; his father was executed. A decade later, when his brother was accepted as Charles II, he gained a sister-in-law that he and everyone else expected to have royal heirs. But ... she didn't. Charles had a lot of kids with a lot of women, but none with his wife, so his brother remained heir presumptive for Charles's whole life and then became king after him. ("Heir presumptive" means someone could theoretically bump you out of line. "Heir apparent" means that nobody can take it away, typically because you're the eldest son of the current ruler.)

Just before the Restoration, James convinced a young woman named Anne Hyde to sleep with him by promising to marry her, and to his credit, he did once Charles became king even though the establishment was against the match because of the inequality of their positions: her father was a lawyer and MP before the Civil War who then went abroad with the exiled royal family, and he could have expected to marry a foreign aristocrat or potentially even a princess despite the fact that he was unlikely to inherit the throne. They had eight children together over the course of eleven years, all but two of which (the future queens, Mary and Anne) died in infancy, and Anne died not long after the birth of her last child in 1671.

So, here's another wrinkle: James was Catholic. Charles I had been kind of "Catholicky" (not officially Catholic, just ... ) and had married a Catholic French princess; Charles, James, and the other royal children had grown up abroad in Catholic and non-Anglican contexts. Anne Hyde had converted for him when they married. This was a Problem when it became clear that he would be the next king, because England had kind of gone through a lot of religious turmoil over the past 150 years, and the people and the government wanted a solidly Anglican Protestant king. Two years after Anne's death, James went public with his religion by refusing to swear an Anglican loyalty oath and then married the Catholic Mary of Modena, an Italian princess and a member of the d'Este family. About ten years later, he was king, and while it wasn't the biggest deal ever on his coronation, it would persistently become more and more of a deal as he continued to offend Anglicans and their institutions.

When will I get to the point?? Anyway, James and Mary had a very hard time having children. In the first fourteen years of their marriage, they only had one child who lived past a few months, and a number of stillbirths. Then when Mary turned thirty (yeah, she got married young), she gave birth to a healthy son, James Francis Edward. Suddenly, there was an heir apparent who was definitely going to be raised Catholic, and possibly even more intransigent about it than his father. After years of increasing hostilities, the Anglicans bought into a ridiculous conspiracy theory that this healthy baby had been brought into the birthing room hidden in a warming pan (one of those covered pots on a stick you'll see in kitschy Colonial-Revival-decorated homes) and swapped out for the stillborn prince. By the end of the month, the Glorious Revolution had begun with an invitation on the part of certain English nobles extended to William, Prince of Orange and husband of James's older sister Mary, to invade the country and become an acceptable Protestant king.