Queen Anne's Lace

When Anne of Denmark became engaged to James of Scotland the fourteen year old princess embroidered shirts for her fiancé while three hundred tailors worked on her wedding dress. The flower was named after the lace that she made, and the black spot is believed to a drop of blood from where she pricked herself.

The English spy Thomas Fowler reported of the engagement between Denmark and Scotland, that Anne of Denmark was "so far in love with the King's Majesty as it were death to her to have it broken off and hath made good proof divers ways of her affection which his Majestie is apt in no way to requite". The Scottish King James wrote, "God is my witness, I could have abstained longer than the weal of my country could have permitted, [had not] my long delay bred in the breasts of many a great jealousy of my inability, as if I were a barren stock".



After they were married it was quickly brought home to the seventeen-year-old queen that she was to have no say in the care of her son. James appointed as head of the nursery his former nurse Helen Little, who installed Henry in James's own old oak cradle. Most distressingly for Anne, James insisted on placing Prince Henry in the custody of John Erskine, earl of Mar, at Stirling Castle, in keeping with Scottish royal tradition. Nervous of the lengths to which Anne might go to regain her son, James formally charged Mar in writing never to surrender Henry to anyone except on orders from his own mouth, "because in the surety of my son consists my surety", nor to yield Henry to the queen even in the event of his own death.
After public scenes in which James reduced her to rage and tears over the issue, Anne became so bitterly upset that in July 1595 she suffered a miscarriage. Anne saw a belated opportunity to gain custody of Henry in 1603 when James left for London, taking the earl of Mar with him, to assume the English throne following the death of Queen Elizabeth. Pregnant at the time, Anne descended on Stirling with a force of "well supported" nobles, intent on removing the nine-year-old Henry, whom she had hardly seen for five years; but Mar's mother and brother would allow her to bring no more than two attendants with her into the castle. The obduracy of Henry's keepers sent Anne into such a fury that she suffered another miscarriage: according to David Calderwood, she "went to bed in anger and parted with child the tenth of May".
After narrowly surviving the birth and death of her last baby, Sophia, in 1607, Anne’s made a decision to have no more children.

Although Anne's flower was named for her marital hopes, it is an interesting circumstance that women have used the seeds from Queen Anne's Lace, for centuries as a contraceptive. The earliest written reference dates back to the late 5th or 4th century B.C. appearing in a work written by Hippocrates, and John Riddle writes in Eve's Herbs, that queen anne's lace seeds are one of the more potent antifertility agents available. Research on small animals has shown that extracts of the seeds disrupt the implantation process, or if a fertilized egg has implanted for only a short period, will cause it to be released.