Monarchy. What a simple ruling system. When a king dies, his eldest son then inherits the throne. What could possibly go wrong?
How has that royal succession in England held up during the last 500 years? Let’s take a look.
Henry Tudor won the War Of The Roses in 1485 and became Henry VII. Did his eldest son, Arthur, then rule? No, he died as a teenager, so his younger brother, trained for the church, not for kingship, ruled. You know him: Henry The Eighth.
But did his eldest son, Edward, rule? No. He was only nine when his father died, so regents ruled for him until he died at age fifteen. Suddenly, the English kingdom was forced to become a queendom, with Edward’s two half-sisters ruling: first (Bloody) Mary, then (Glorious) Elizabeth.
When childless Elizabeth died, her closest male cousin, James, ruled. Did James’ eldest son, Henry, then rule? Nope. He, too, died as a teenager, so his brother, ill-prepared Charles, reigned. Talk about a young man not trained for kingship. Charles the First was so awful as king that Parliament declared war on him, won, and then chopped off his head. Why Elizabeth II named her heir after this awful King is beyond me. At least, so far, he has kept his head!
You see where I am going with this. Beginning with Henry VII, there have been 23 British monarchs to follow. Of those, how many kings followed the simple system of passing their crown to their eldest son, who then passed it on to his? It certainly wasn’t all 23 of them.
Or 13 of them. Or 3 of them.
In fact, it was just one!
Only George the First would be succeeded by his eldest son, George II. And that was back in 1727. So for the past 300 years now, nothing but exceptions to the rule have ruled England. Even the current king is no exception to the exception of the rule, since he is the son of a queen, not a king. (By the way, there have been seven queens to rule England, but only Charles’ mother, Elizabeth, and Victoria produced a son to succeed them. The other queens had no better luck than their male counterparts).
How could this have happened? Simple. Life happened. Kings thought they could control their monarchy by decreeing that eldest sons would inherit their rule from their fathers in perpetuity. It turns out that “in perpetuity” was highly overrated. Some British kings had only daughters or they were childless, forcing their brothers to succeed them; as we’ve seen, some lost their eldest son in adolescence, forcing their inexperienced second sons to rule. There was that one king who abdicated his throne to his younger brother because he had lost his head over divorcee Wallis Simpson; and one king, Charles The First, you remember, who simply lost his head.
For centuries, royal families in Britain have preferred being called “The Family ROYAL.” But they never fool anybody; to everyone they have always been, for better or worse, “The Royal FAMILY.” They want to emphasize their royalty, but it is their incredible misfortunes and disaster-strewn lives that have always drawn our attention to the “family” aspect, the aspect that all of us mere commoners share with the most royal of blood. Their families and ours are both descended from the same ancestors: the family of man.
All these kings and queens, who as children were the most golden lads and girls in the kingdom, could not protect their royal heads simply by placing crowns on them, nor could they ward off suffering by referring to themselves as “We”— rather than the more unimpressive “I” that the rest of us must use. Their personal pronoun may have been plural, but their lives were as singular and peculiar as all of ours.
How I would love to conclude with a pithy quotation from Charles Dickens who, as you know, has always been my go-to-guy for pith. But even we die-hard Dickensians must wave the white flag before William Shakespeare, the Ultimate Word-Smith Of Pith. It was he who so cleverly expressed how royals and commoners share the same ultimate fate, and even worked in a lovely last-word pun:
“Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney sweepers, turn to dust.”
Email Elliot at huffam@me.com or click here