November 2023

Primogeniture means inheritance by the eldest legitimate male child. The British monarchy was a good example (until the 21^st century and the 2013 Succession to the Crown Act). According to this rule, a daughter could only inherit if there was no male heir, and however useless the eldest son might be at the job of being king, his younger brothers just had to sit there and watch. Primogeniture did have the advantage of not dividing land and property into ever smaller shares. Also until post medieval times, the monarch was supposed to sit on a horse waving a sword if there was a war, so a male monarch was usually a more practical choice (which is not to say that women didn’t join in from time to time with the political side). It could result in some fairly useless kings. However, throughout history, people found a way round it if they really wanted to. Some examples follow.

The Declaration of Arbroath

Some people just said straight out that they would choose their own king. The Declaration of Arbroath was a letter written to the Pope in 1320 during the Scottish Wars of Independence. It was sealed by fifty-one Scottish barons and freeholders, and asked the Pope to confirm Robert the Bruce as their sovereign, and Scotland as an independent country. But it goes on to say that they wouldn’t agree to any king who gave in to the English. They would choose someone else.

The Princes in the Tower

Another method, if you happened to be a royal relation who wanted to grab the throne, was to claim that your sovereign was illegitimate. A “pre-contract” or legally-binding betrothal was a handy device in these circumstances. One famous example was Richard III, who claimed that his elder brother, King Edward IV, hadn’t really been married to Elizabeth Woodville, mother of the Princes in the Tower, because Edward had been pre-contracted to Lady Eleanor Butler. Therefore his nephews and nieces were illegitimate and disqualified from inheriting the throne. It ended on Bosworth Field, with a distant relative winning the battle and consolidating his claim by marrying the eldest sister of the two now deceased male heirs, who had conveniently been declared legitimate again.

Hacking and smiting

Winning the throne by brute force was popular in the Middle Ages. The “Wars of the Roses” were a struggle for the crown between the descendants of Edward III.  The crown changed hands a number of times following a successful battle.

(i)  Richard II/Henry IV: Edward III died in 1377 and was succeeded by his grandson Richard II, son of his eldest son. However Richard II made himself so unpopular that he was forced to abdicate in favour of his cousin Henry Bolingbroke (Henry IV) in 1399. Henry was the eldest son of John of Gaunt, Edward III’s third son, and John’s first wife, Blanche of Lancaster. John had an elder brother Lionel, Edward III’s second son, but Lionel only had a daughter. Her grandson, Edmund Mortimer, earl of March, was considered by many to be Richard’s heir, but he was only eight years old when Richard was deposed. He became a faithful supporter of Henry V and VI. However, he died without children and his sister Anne succeeded to the claim (see below)

(ii)  Henry VI/Edward IV:  Henry IV was succeeded by his son and grandson, Henrys V and VI. Unfortunately Henry VI was not a success. He was regarded as a weak king, dominated by his wife, and had attacks of mental illness. So he too was challenged by a cousin, the Duke of York. The Duke of York was descended from Edward III via two of his sons. His mother, Anne Mortimer, was descended from Lionel the second son through the daughter. On his father’s side he was descended from Edward’s fifth son.  So his claim depended on (a) whether a female had a claim to the throne and (b) hacking and smiting – lots of battles of the Wars of the Roses.  Brute force won the day, although the Duke of York was dead before the Yorkists won. His eldest son Edward took the throne as Edward IV.

(iii)  Richard III/Henry VII Edward had two younger brothers. George, Duke of Clarence, and Richard, Duke of York. George died before Edward, leaving a son and a daughter. He had been attainted for treason. Richard survived his brother Edward who died while his sons were still children. Uncle Richard declared Edward’s children illegitimate (see above) and took the throne as Richard III.  The princes disappeared at some point. Whether it was Richard who killed them is still an unsettled question. Clarence’s son was bypassed on the excuse that he was disbarred by his father’s attainder.

The last Lancastrian heir was Henry Tudor, who managed to defeat Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth, marry Edward IV’s eldest daughter and take the throne. His personal claim to it was weak. He was descended through his mother, Margaret Beaufort, from John of Gaunt. However, his descent was not from the marriage with Blanche but from John of Gaunt’s adulterous affair with Catherine Swynford. John and Catherine later married and the Pope legitimised their offspring after the event. Parliament during the reigns of both Richard II and Henry IV confirmed this. However, Henry IV then made a legal decree that his half-siblings should not have a claim to the throne, although people argued about whether he was allowed to do this.

So Henry VII’s claim that the Lancastrians had the better claim to the throne involved both inheritance via a female – he could therefore not object to the Yorkists’ claim to inheritance via a female – and a rather dodgy situation as regarded legitimacy. If he wanted to rule by right of his Yorkist wife, she was another female and had a male cousin living (the Duke of Clarence’ son), although Henry eventually got rid of him. In the end, it just depended on hacking and smiting – Henry won the Battle of Bosworth.

The Hanoverian Succession

And there is the Hanoverian succession, where the English Parliament chose a king on religious grounds. King James II was removed (without violence) from the thrones of England and Scotland in the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 because of his attempts to rule without Parliament, and because he had converted to Catholicism, married a Catholic queen and announced that his son would be raised as a Catholic. They gave the throne to James’ elder daughter by his first, Protestant marriage. This was Mary, who was married to her cousin, William, Prince of Orange. She and William died childless and were succeeded by her younger sister, Anne.

Alas, Anne also died without children in 1714. The 1707 Act of Succession expressly forbade Anne to be succeeded by a Catholic monarch. Estimates of how many alternative candidates for the throne existed at that point range wildly from around fifty to six. There do appear to have been six definite contenders alive in 1714 who were more closely related to Queen Anne than the Elector of Hanover. But he was the closest Protestant relative.

To begin with there was Queen Anne’s half-brother, James Stuart, the “Old Pretender". Had it not been for the Act of Succession, James and his two sons, Charles (“Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Young Pretender) and Henry, Cardinal Stuart would have inherited the throne. Not everybody in the by-then United Kingdom supported the exclusion of James and his descendants. There was trouble over this for years, culminating in the 1745 rebellion. Outside Britain itself, France, Spain, the Papal States and Modena all regarded James and Charles Stuart as the king of England, Scotland and Ireland.

In 1714, the next heir after Charles Stuart was Anne Marie d’Orléans. She was the daughter of Henrietta of England, Charles II’s sister, so Anne-Marie was Anne’s first cousin. Henrietta had married Phillippe Duc d’Orléans, younger brother of the king of France. She had converted to Catholicism on her marriage and her daughter was naturally Catholic as well.

Anne Marie d’Orleans married the King of Sardinia, Victor Amadeus II of Savoy. She had two surviving sons in 1714. Also Catholics….

Next were two granddaughters of Elizabeth of Bohemia, daughter of James I. They were the daughters of her son Edward and were Anne’s second cousins. However, Edward had also converted to Catholicism, and his daughters were Catholics as well.  Oh dear…

So after Anne’s death the throne was offered to the nearest Protestant relative, the son of Elizabeth of Bohemia’s youngest daughter. This was another of Anne’s second cousins, the Elector of Hanover, a small principality in north-west Germany. An elector was a head of state entitled to vote in the election of the Holy Roman Emperor. He became George I, first of the Hanoverian line. The Electorate (later kingdom) of Hanover was ruled by the kings of Britain until the accession of Queen Victoria in 1837.

So in practice, primogeniture does NOT rule, OK.  You can always tweak it a bit if it seems advisable!