British Royal Houses Explained

While the British royal houses aren't quite the Starks, Lannisters, and Targaryens, their soap operatic history has been an inspiration for "Game of Thrones." Stretching back to the Middle Ages, Britain's royal houses have been a source of fascination for millions worldwide. A royal house is the family which rules the country. These houses in Britain have changed over time. Sometimes this occurs when a female ruler bequeaths the realm to a male heir who takes on the house name of the father. Many other times the royal house changes through usurpation, murder, or political circumstance.

Britsroyal provides a handy list of each ruler of England, Scotland, and Wales from the late eighth century to the present. Counting from the earliest royal house of Wessex starting in 802, there have been 14 royal houses in British history. This accounts for only the royal houses of England and then later with its eventual unification with Wales, then Scotland. Yet, despite the numerous houses, they are almost all related. Life Magazine traced the lineage of the late Queen Elizabeth II and shows that she was a direct descendant of not only William the Conqueror but also the ninth-century Saxon king, Alfred the Great.

To keep it less confusing, the separate houses of Scotland and Wales when they were independent kingdoms will be omitted from this article, which will provide an overview of the sweeping history of the British royal houses.

By the 11th century, the Kingdom of England came increasingly under attack by the Danes. The British Library tells us that the kingdom increasingly paid ransom to stave off depredations. However, this only seemed to embolden the Danes, since in 1014 Swein Forkbeard removed the Wessex king Æthelred from power. Then Swein's son, Cnut (also spelled Canute), defeated King Edmund Ironside at the Battle of Assandun in 1016, which divided the kingdom. According to Britannica, Edmund's death shortly thereafter resulted in Cnut taking the whole of the kingdom for himself.

A new dynasty, the House of Denmark, was founded which consisted of England, Norway, and Denmark. To make things a bit more legit — and to prevent any usurpations — Cnut married Æthelred's widow in 1017. He also passed out English estates to his Danish followers and murdered potential Wessex claimants to the throne. After the initial shocks, Cnut calmed down a bit and tried to rule like a proper English monarch. He proved pretty effective although, as the BBC relates, Cnut is mostly known today for a moral fable of how he showed how feeble the power of a king was compared to God when he could not prevent the tide from coming in. Cnut died in 1035, but his sons were so ineffectual and feuded so much that the Wessex rulers returned in 1042.

If you were going to pick any historical royal house of Britain to be a part of, you'd probably want to avoid the House of Blois. There was only one king from this house, that being Stephen who usurped the throne from Matilda in 1135. Stephen was the son of Adela (daughter of William the Conqueror) and Stephen Henry the Count of Blois. As explained by the World History Encyclopedia, Stephen, as King of England, had a disastrous reign.

Civil war spread throughout the kingdom as supporters of Matilda vied against Stephen. At one point, Matilda was captured and held, but upon being freed set up a rival court. As for Stephen, he could not contain the chaos of the period which was dubbed "The Anarchy." Local barons began asserting their power by building castles and minting their own coinage. In the meantime, Matilda turned to backing her own son, Henry, to be the next in line for the throne. Henry even launched an invasion of England from Normandy, but he didn't have enough funds to complete a new conquest.

Stephen was predeceased by his son and only potential heir, Eustace, in 1153. With Henry threatening to invade again, Stephen signed a treaty with him agreeing to make Henry heir. When Stephen died the following year, Henry was crowned as King Henry II. It is telling that there has been no other king of Britain named Stephen.

Even though Henry III was the son of King John and ascended successfully to the English throne in 1216, he is usually not considered an Angevin monarch but rather a Plantagenet. This may be because, as Historic U.K. mentions, so much territory had been lost under John that it was no longer the same political entity.

There were five Plantagenet kings from 1216 to 1399. This long period saw the English kings turning their attention to their British neighbors. The World History Encyclopedia explains, for example, that Edward I (reigned 1272 to 1307) conquered Wales and incorporated it into his kingdom. It is at this time, according to Royals.uk, that Edward named his eldest son and heir the Prince of Wales. This has become a venerable royal tradition. Edward also attacked Scotland but was much less successful. He was also the British king during the rebellion of William Wallace.

This line of the Plantagenets came to an end with the reign of Richard II (ruled 1377 to 1399). Apparently Richard thought himself divinely appointed which didn't play well at court. Political intrigue saw his overthrow by his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, the Duke of Lancaster. Richard was killed while in prison in Yorkshire, then his body was put on display at the Tower of London. He was 33.

The House of York is another branch of the Plantagenets which, starting with Edward IV in 1461, successfully took the throne. There were two more Yorkist kings after Edward IV, who are listed by Britannica as Edward V and Richard III.

Edward V was barely a teenager when he ascended to the throne in 1483, so within a matter of months, the World History Encyclopedia tells us he was shunted aside by their uncle, Edward V's brother, who took the regnal name Richard III. To ensure that his nephew would pose no threat to his usurpation, it is believed he had Edward V and his younger brother (another Richard) murdered in the Tower of London. Edward V was incidentally the 13th of the Plantagenet kings.

Richard III wasn't accruing any good karma. The Lancasterians came back led by a distant cousin, Henry Tudor, who was of illegitimate descent from Edward III. Despite the shaky claim, Richard had earned a lot of enemies. After further soap operatics which entailed a possible poisoning of his own queen so that he could remarry his niece so as to prevent Henry from doing so, matters came to a boil. Henry landed with an army of French mercenaries. At the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, Richard was deserted by key allies and killed. The Wars of the Roses was finally over. Richard would go down in history as one of Britain's biggest villains.

James VI, the King of Scotland, was Elizabeth I's cousin and closest relative. As a result, he took the throne in 1603 as James I. His surname was probably originally spelled Stewart, but at some point, according to Britannica, this changed to Stuart.

The Stuarts united the thrones of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland for the first time. The World History Encyclopedia tells us that James I styled himself as the King of Great Britain. The early Stuarts in general created a problem because they firmly believed in their divine right to rule. This placed them into conflict with Parliament, which came to a head during the English Civil Wars (1642 to 1651). This period saw the overthrow and execution of James' son Charles I by Parliamentary forces and the establishment of a Protectorate led by Oliver Cromwell. However, the strict, religiously driven rule of the Protectorate led to its dissolution after Cromwell's death in 1660. Charles's son, Charles II, then took the throne in a restoration of the Stuarts.

Charles II was tolerated, but when his brother James II took the throne in 1685, he alienated and maddened people over religion (James II was a practicing Catholic). When his son was born and baptized a Catholic it was the last straw. He was removed by Parliament in 1689 who invited his daughter, Mary II, to take the throne in what was called the Glorious Revolution.

George I was the first of the Hanoverian kings. This royal house had remarkable longevity. Royal.uk states that they remained in power from 1714 to 1901 during a long period of stability, prosperity, and the finalization of the constitutional monarchy. During their time, the underlying structure of British politics and government to this day was created.

Curiously, despite nearly two centuries of Hanoverian rule, there were only six monarchs of this house. This was because the reigns of these monarchs were longer. History tells us that George III, for example, reigned from 1760 to 1820 making him the longest reigning king in British history. Unfortunately, George III suffered violent episodes of insanity during his reign. His granddaughter, Victoria, reigned even longer, from 1837 to 1901, according to Britannica.

These monarchs witnessed a period of tremendous change in Britain, particularly seeing its industrialization and the expansion of the British Empire to its zenith. To give an idea of how Britain's imperial ambitions had truly become global during the Hanoverians, Victoria was named Empress of India in 1876. The reign of Victoria was so synonymous with the times that her name became the name of the era in which she ruled.

That brings us to the House of Windsor. One caveat on the name: Royal.uk describes how in 1960, Queen Elizabeth II and her husband Duke Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, said that all male Windsors and unmarried Windsors who were not styled as Royal Highness or have the title of Prince or Princess would have the name Mountbatten-Windsor, which reflects Philip's surname. 

George V (our first Windsor) died in 1936. He was succeeded by his son Edward VIII. However, as related by Brittanica, Edward abdicated the throne that year in a scandal that involved him running off to marry the American Wallis Warfield Simpson. His younger brother, therefore, became George VI. George, a stutterer, became the subject of the inspirational 2010 film, "The King's Speech."

George VI died in 1952 and was succeeded by Elizabeth II. Elizabeth, who died in 2022, had the longest reign of any monarch in British history. She saw the dismantling of the British Empire and the great changes of the 20th and early 21st century. As monarch, her power was ceremonial but she did much to try to keep the image of royal family as an ideal, which at times was challenged by various scandals, not least her relationship with her son's first wife, Princess Diana. Still, Queen Elizabeth's role in connecting the past history and duty of the royal houses to the present has made British royalty a cherished institution, even in a time well away from Swein Forkbeard.