Tracking The Line Of Succession Without Losing Your Mind
Researching the succession of English monarchs sounds straightforward until you actually open a textbook and realize how many people get it wrong. I spent three years building a database of the line of succession from 1066 to the present, and let me tell you: nobody does it right without running into problems. The biggest issue isn't memorizing names. It's understanding the structural breaks, contested claims, and legal definitions that separate one reign from another. Here's the thing most people miss. The numbering of monarchs is applied retrospectively, and it's completely unreliable for certain periods. Edward II was the second king after the Norman Conquest, but if you count Henry I as the first Norman king and William II as the second, then Edward II lands at number six. Except some historians don't count William II because his reign was illegitimate in their framework. So he becomes Edward V. There is no universal agreement. When I was cross-referencing sources for my own work, I found at least four different numbering systems in common circulation, none of which agreed with each other. The Act of Settlement 1701 is another trap. It established the Protestant succession and excluded Catholics, but it created confusion around how many monarchs actually reigned versus how many claimed the throne. James II never formally abdicated in the legal sense. He was declared to have abjured the realm by Parliament in 1689, but technically he remained James II until his death in 1701. William III and Mary II are numbered as co-monarchs, but they ruled under completely different legal arrangements. Mary died in 1694 and William continued alone. The numbering system treats them as one entry in most lists, but legally they were separate sovereigns with separate accessions.
The Real Problems With Building A Working List
I hit a wall when I tried to reconcile the pre-1707 English list with the post-1707 British list. The Kingdom of England existed as a separate entity from Scotland until 1707. Before that date, the monarchs of England and the monarchs of Scotland were different people for most of the period. James VI of Scotland became James I of England in 1603, but he was never crowned King of England in a separate ceremony. His English accession date is January 24, 1603, but his Scottish accession was July 24, 1567. That thirty-six-year gap matters when you're trying to date documents or understand which jurisdiction applied to a given claim. Another practical problem is the Interregnum. From 1649 to 1660, there was no monarch. Charles I was executed in 1649. The Commonwealth was proclaimed. Oliver Cromwell became Lord Protector in 1653, but that was never a hereditary monarchy. When Charles II was restored in 1660, his accession date is officially recorded as May 29, 1660, but legally his reign was considered to have begun on January 30, 1649, the day his father died. This retroactive reckoning is standard practice for succession purposes, but it makes any simple chronological list inaccurate if you're only looking at actual dates of coronation or proclamation. My workaround for this was to maintain two parallel timelines in my database. One tracked de jure succession based on legal theory, which is what the official records use. The other tracked de facto control, which shows who actually held power. The gap between those two timelines explains most of the confusion in secondary sources. People cite different dates for the same monarch depending on which framework they're using, and they rarely acknowledge the distinction.
What Most Resources Get Wrong
The biggest error I see in published lists is the handling of the dynastic transitions. The House of Plantagenet didn't end in 1399 because Richard II died. Henry Bolingbroke deposed him and founded the House of Lancaster. But the Plantagenet name itself was never used during the medieval period. It was coined later by historians. The actual dynastic situation was far messier. Edward III was a Plantagenet by descent through his father, but his mother was Isabella of France. The Lancastrian claim came through the legitimate male line. The Yorkist claim came through the female line. Both sides understood this, and both sides used it to justify their claims. The Wars of the Roses weren't about right of succession in any simple sense. They were about which interpretation of descent the military could enforce. Another common mistake is the treatment of claimants who never actually ruled. Edward VIII abdicated in 1936, but he is still counted as a monarch. His brother George VI succeeded him. But if you're looking at the legal continuity of the crown, Edward VIII'sabdication was unprecedented in modern British history and created a genuine constitutional crisis that was resolved by the His Majesty's Declaration of Abdication Act 1936. The Act itself is the primary source document. It's not complicated to find, but most lists skip over the legal mechanics entirely.
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Where To Actually Find Reliable Data
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is the best single resource for individual monarch entries. It's paywalled through most libraries but free at participating institutions. The History of Parliament Online covers the parliamentary side of succession disputes, which most people ignore. For the raw dates and succession mechanics, the official government website gov.uk maintains a page on the monarchy that is surprisingly accurate for basic chronology, though it stops at constitutional analysis and doesn't deal with the historical complexities. The National Archives at Kew holds the primary source documents. If you're doing serious work, you need to consult the Close Rolls, the Patent Rolls, and the Fine Rolls for medieval succession. These are available online through Discovery, the NAO's catalog, but the interface is terrible and the records are not transcribed. I spent months reading Latin and Anglo-Norman French entries to verify accession dates for the 12th century. There is no shortcut. For a complete and verifiable list, I recommend the Census of British Monarchs maintained by the Foundation for Medieval Genealogy. It's free, it's academically rigorous, and it provides citations for every entry. The wiki format means errors get corrected quickly, and the discussion pages often contain detailed debates about contested successions that you won't find anywhere else.
The Cases That Break Every Simple Model
Let me give you a specific example of why this is harder than it looks. Matilda, daughter of Henry I, was recognized as heir apparent and swore oaths of allegiance from the barons. Henry I died in 1135. Stephen of Blois rushed to England, seized the throne, and was crowned king. Matilda had a stronger claim by primogeniture, but Stephen had the support of the barons and the Church. The resulting civil war lasted nineteen years. Most chronologies simply list Stephen as the monarch and skip Matilda entirely. But Matilda never formally surrendered her claim. She was Empress Matilda, and she controlled large parts of England for stretches of the conflict. The succession wasn't settled until her son Henry II took the throne in 1154. If you're building a list of Previous Kings And Queens Of England, do you include Matilda? Do you count Stephen as the legitimate king? The answer depends entirely on whether you're following legal doctrine or de facto control, and almost no published list acknowledges that this choice has to be made explicitly. A second problematic case is Lady Jane Grey. She was proclaimed queen for nine days in 1553. She is not included in the official numbering of English monarchs, but she was crowned in a ceremony at the Palace of Westminster. If you're counting by coronation, she counts. If you're counting by legal succession, she doesn't. The same problem applies to claimed kings during the civil wars and interregnums. There is no objective criterion that resolves these edge cases, and any list that presents itself as complete without addressing the ambiguity is being dishonest.
Practical Advice For Anyone Working On This
Decide early whether you're building a de jure or de facto list, and stick to that framework. Mix the two and your data will be internally inconsistent. Document your decision on disputed successions in a notes section. Don't silently omit entries and pretend they don't exist. The reader deserves to know why certain figures are included or excluded. Use primary sources wherever possible. Secondary lists are compiled by people who made their own choices about inclusion and exclusion, and you have no way of knowing what those choices were unless you check the methodology. A list without cited methodology is just an opinion dressed up as fact. I learned this the hard way when I discovered that two widely circulated online lists disagreed on no fewer than eleven entries in the period from 1066 to 1272. Eleven entries. That's nearly one in five monarchs being handled differently by different sources. If you need a quick reference and don't want to dig into the archives, start with the Foundation for Medieval Genealogy and cross-check anything that looks questionable against the Oxford DNB. That combination will get you further than any single compiled list ever will, because it forces you to confront the uncertainties rather than paper over them.
