Painted when the artist was thirty-one, this picture was the last of three Tudor subjects which he executed at this date, succeeding The Princess Elizabeth obliged to attend Mass by her sister Mary (RA 1869) and Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn observed by Queen Katharine (RA 1870), which was sold in these Rooms on 12 June 1992, lot 250. All emphasise the psychological aspects of the incidents represented, as do a number of other early literary or historical works, including a scene from Much Ado about Nothing (RA 1861; sketch in Guildhall Art Gallery), On the Road to Waterloo, a Napoleonic subject (RA 1863) and Edward II and his favourite Piers Gaveston (RA 1872; repr. Baldry, facing p.16).

Stone was later to make his name and fortune with a series of rather vapid pictures of Regency couples engaged in amorous dalliance or enjoying the bittersweet delights of a lovers' tiff, but in these early works he shows a genuine capacity for historical narrative. Their comparatively serious nature was probably due to Stone's friendship with Dickens, who had known his father, the painter Frank Stone, and came to regard Marcus 'almost as a son' when Frank died in 1859, doing much to promote his career including commissioning him to illustrate Our Mutual Friend and Great Expectations in the 1860s. It is probably significant that as early as 1858 Dickens had given the boy a copy of his Child's History of England, and as Baldry points out (loc. cit.), there is a distinct similarity between the subject of The Royal Nursery and an incident in Dombey and Son.

A study for the painting is reproduced in Baldry, p.14.