Kings and Queens of Britain

Speaker: Daniel Francis (British English)

If we are to trust Roman sources, Britain had monarchs governing the land before the legions of
Emperor Claudius set foot on the isle. And it is also in these early sources that we find one of the
defining features of monarchic rule in Britain: that it’s the women rulers who make a
more lasting impact on the kingdom. 

For instance, it is in these early sources that we learn about Boudicca, a queen of the Iceni, one of
the tribes of 1st century AD England, and her fight against the Romans. This fierce queen of East
Anglia led a revolt in 60 AD, rising up against the Romans in revenge for their brutal treatment of
her daughters. Despite some initial successes, which included the destruction of Londinium, she
was finally defeated by the Romans and she took her own life — by drinking poison —
to avoid capture. 
Like the rest of Europe, Britain started having monarchs as protagonists of its history after the fall
of the Roman Empire, in the late 5th century AD. In the Early Middle Ages, after the Angles and
the Saxons came from what is now Germany, there were plenty of kings in Britain. Their kingdoms
were not very large, and most of their time was spent fighting with each other.

The most memorable king of the early Middle Ages would have to be Alfred, aptly known as “the
Great”. He was initially the king of Wessex, one of these smallish kingdoms that peppered the
isles in medieval times. But he went on to become the king of all the Anglo-Saxons in the late 9th
century. He managed to get the Angles and the Saxons to stick together (for a while) in the face of
a common enemy: the Vikings. The Norse invaders had been ravaging Britain for decades, but
they would eventually Christianize, and they would also be among the claimants (and occupants)
of the throne of England. 

In fact, one of the best-remembered monarchs in British history, William the Conqueror, was a
descendant of these Vikings. Born in the North-West of France, he was known as the Duke of
Normandy, but in fact the name of this region came from the name “Norman” given to the “Norse
man” or Viking. 
William conquered England in 1066, killing the last Anglo-Saxon king, Harold II, in the Battle of
Hastings, on the south coast of England just across the English Channel. William, who unified the
kingdom once again, spoke French, as did his descendants. In fact, French was the language of
the kings and the elite for three hundred years. The French connection also led to the involvement
in the conflict over the right to rule the Kingdom of France known as the Hundred Years War. The
war, which actually lasted 116 years, only ended in 1453, after Joan of Arc turned the tide of the
war in favour of the French. 

Not long after this eternal war abroad, England had a bitter conflict within its own shores. The
Wars of the Roses saw the houses of York and Lancaster pitted against each other with the crown
as their ultimate goal. In an unexpected plot twist, the Tudor house, a noble lineage with its origins
in Wales, was ultimately the winner. Even though the Tudors’ grip on the throne only lasted for 118
years, they are one of the dynasties that had the longest-lasting effects on the crown. For a start,
due to Henry VIII’s obsession with a male heir, he separated the English Church from the Catholic
Church in Rome, in order to have religious approval for his divorce from his first wife, Catherine of
Aragon. Ironically, it would be his daughter Elizabeth I, born from his second marriage to Anne
Boleyn, who started the long process of turning the small island kingdom into a world power. It
was under her reign that the Spanish were defeated in their attempt to conquer Britain, and it was
because of her agreement with the Stuarts, the Scottish ruling house, that the two kingdoms were
united, after she died without heirs, having refused to marry. 

The 17th century was an eventful one for the British: there was a foiled plot to kill the king —
the Gunpowder Plot —, a revolution, a beheading, and a reinstatement. The Stuarts would
eventually be substituted in the 18th century by the House of Hanover, with unequivocal German
origins. 
In the 19th century, the last and greatest Hanoverian monarch, Victoria, became the empress of a
gigantic empire, mostly thanks to its naval power. With the arrival of the 20th century, the
monarchy had its last change of owner. It now took the name of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, after
Victoria’s husband Albert. This name did not last long: this dynasty had to endure two World Wars
against Germany, with the first one leading the royal house to change its name to Windsor, to
distance the monarch from its German origins, an unwelcome link when young Britons were dying
by the thousands under German fire. 

For most of the 20th century and these first twenty years of the 21st, Britain has only had one
queen: Elizabeth II. She has had her fair share of rocky events, including an annus horribilis in
1992, but she remains a well-loved figure in many British homes. It remains to be seen if she’ll
manage to bequeath this affection to her son Charles.   

Shakespeake's Kings (by Sarah Presant Collins)

From Blackadder to The Crown, the British royal family has provided plenty of material for popular
drama over recent decades. But the fascination with royal intrigue is nothing new. William
Shakespeare absolutely loved a royal story. In the late 1500s, under the reign of Elizabeth I, he
wrote eight history plays about five real English kings.
Given that Queen Elizabeth I had a habit of executing anyone who criticised her, Shakespeare
was careful not to write about the royal family from the time he was living in. Instead, he looked
back to the 15th century for historical inspiration. His eight most famous history plays — Richard
II, Henry IV (in two parts), Henry V, Henry VI (in three parts) and finally Richard III — are set
between around 1400 and 1485. The plays were all based on historical records, but Shakespeare
was a dramatist not a historian, so he took plenty of liberties with the sources, cutting or adding
events and characters as he liked.
The plays have been so influential that a lot of what think we know about the five kings is probably
pure Shakespeare. For example, Shakespeare depicted Richard III as an evil psychopath with
a hunched back. Was he really? No! And yet that’s the image that has stuck. In Henry V,
Shakespeare paints a vivid picture of the young Prince Harry, who prefers getting drunk with his
friend Falstaff to the responsibilities of royal life. But later, when Harry becomes king (with the
name Henry V), he is a model monarch. It didn’t happen quite like that in real life, but
Shakespeare went for the drama every time. Just imagine what a fabulous play he could have
created from the latest intrigues of Meghan and today’s ‘Prince’ Harry!