The Kings of England

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 193, 12 May 1937, Page 6 (Supplement)

The Kings of England

One Thousand Years of Continuity The House of Windsor (By J. HURDEN WARD.) youngest son, Henry I, married Edith, daughter of Malcolm 111 and Margaret Atheling, and their daughter, Matilda, married Geoffrey of Anjou. Thus Henry 11, son of Geoffrey and Matilda, inherited the blood of the Conqueror and of the Saxon dynasty. The next break in the male line does not occur until 1485, when twelve successors of Henry II had filled the throne. In that year the House of Plantagenet went down in a sea of blood, and Henry VIII came to the throne. Henry's inheritance of the Royal Saxon blood came from his mother, Margaret Beaufort, who was the great-grand-daughter of John of Gaunt, the son of Edward III; he had married twice, the second time morganatically, but his family by his second wife, Catherine Swynford, was legitimated, though debarred from right of succession. These Beauforts became Dukes of Somerset and passed out in the shambles of the Wars of the Roses. The sole male line descendants of the Plantagenets are the present Dukes of Beaufort. Margaret Beaufort then, coming of this family, married

Edmund Tudor, and their son came to the throne in 1485 as Henry VIII. Three generations of the Tudors occupied the throne, and, at the death of Elizabeth in 1603, it became necessary to cast back to pick up the Royal line. The link was provided by Margaret, daughter of Henry VII, who had married James IV of Scotland, and it was her great-grandson who now came to the throne as the first of the House of Stuart. During the period of the Stuart dynasty occurred events which revolutionised the succession to the throne. First came the Great Rebellion and the ten years of the Commonwealth. Then in 1688, James II was forced to abdicate and his male heirs were deprived of the rights of succession. With this assertion of the right of Parliament to alter the succession the constitutional position of the crown was newly defined. Two daughters of James 11, Mary and Anne, succeeded him, while his two male heirs, the Old and the Young Chevalier, James 111 and Charles 111, as legitimists call them, both died in exile. None of her many children survived Anne, and once more it became necessary to turn back to pick up the Royal line. James Il's son was debarred. Charles II had left no heirs. There were no descendants of Charles I. But a daughter of James I, lovely, unhappy Elizabeth Stuart, had married Frederick, King of Bohemia. Her daughter, Sophia, one of the most beautiful, the cleverest, the strongest of women of her time, married the Duke of Hanover, and it was her son who came to the throne as George I. The Dukes of Hanover were Welfs, descended from the eighth-century Count Warin of Altorf. The early Welfs were kings of Upper Burgundy, but the male line became extinct on the death of Welf 111 in 1055. The grandson in the female line, Welf IV of Carinthia, became Duke of Bavaria and founded the younger line. From him sprung Henry the Black.

who married the daughter of Magnus of Saxony, Henry the Proud, who inherited the Emperor Lothair's lands in Brunswick, and ultimately the Hanoverian dynasty which reigned in England until 1837 On the death of William IV in that year, the principle of the succession to the British crown was illustrated once more. Two sons of George 111 had succeeded him, first George IV and then William IV. Neither had left heirs. Other sons still survived, the Duke of Cumberland, the Duke of Sussex, the Duke of Cambridge. But between William and the Duke of Cumberland had come another son, the Duke of Kent, who had left a daughter, Victoria. Victoria came before her uncle, the Duke of Cumberland, in the line of succession, just as Princess Elizabeth now comes before her uncle, the Duke of Gloucester. In Hanover the same principle did not obtain. The heir to the kingdom of Hanover was the Duke of Cumberland, and with the accession of Queen Victoria that State ceased to be one of the oossessions of the British Crown. Queen Victoria's marriage with Prince Albert of SaxeCoburg brought the crown into the present family. The Dukes of Saxe-Coburg, of whom His Majesty and his brothers are the heirs-males, belonged to the house of Wettin, a family of German feudal princes very similar to the Welfs. The German princes had always the custom of dividing their scanty kingdoms between all their sons, and when the dominion had been pared too fine, they would draw lots; one son would'stay at home and marry, and others would go campaigning against the Turks, or sell their swords to a Wallenstein or a- Gustavus. So it came that Saxony was divided, and the kingdom thereof and the four dukedoms were all held by the Wettins. His present Majesty is descended in .the male, line from Dietrich, who built his castle at Wettin on the Saale, and died in 982. But the Throne of England descends to him as a direct descendanl of the Conqueror and the heir of the Saxon Royal blood.