The Unofficial British Royal Family Pages

Protectors and Regents of England

One of the weaknesses of a hereditary monarchy is the possibility of having a monarch who is too young to rule, requiring a regency or protectorate to govern in his name. Whereas a monarch could stand above the factions of his subjects, anointed by God in his exalted position, a regent was a subject whose position could be aspired to by others. He faced the prospect of losing his position, and might be motivated to ensure his long-term power and status beyond the point of the rightful monarch coming of age.

The Anglo-Saxons avoided this problem by not having a strictly hereditary monarchy. The Witan, or Great Council, chose the new king from among his predecessors relatives. While the new monarch would typically be the old king's hereditary heir, he could be passed over if he was too young or deemed unsuitable in some other way.

The first underage King of England was Henry III who succeeded his father, King John, when he was nine. He inherited a country in conflict, and partly under the control of Louis of France, who had been invited to take the English throne by barons who were in conflict with King John. England was fortunate that the designated regent, William Marshal, was generally respected and able to command the support of the majority of barons. He was strong enough to defeat the rebellious barons and to persuade, or bribe, Louis to give up his pretensions to the crown and return to France. Marshal died in 1219, when Henry was 12 and power passed to the last great Justiciar of England, Hugh de Burgh. In addition to struggles with the barons, De Burgh faced a constant rivalry for power from Peter des Roches, Bishop of Winchester; a rivalry which continued beyond Henry's assumption of direct rule in 1227.

Henry's son and grandson, Edwards I and II, were both adults when they came to the throne, but Edward II was a weak king, regarded with contempt by many subjects and by his own wife, Isabella. In 1327, Isabella and her lover, Roger Mortimer, contrived the overthrow and eventual murder of Edward and the proclamation of her and Edward�s son as King Edward III, at the age of 14. Although the new king�s cousin, Henry of Lancaster, was officially his guardian, Isabella and Mortimer exercised influence and power during his minority. Edward finally broke their hold over him and the state when he came of age, and Mortimer was hanged, drawn and quartered as a traitor in 1330.

Edward III had a long reign, but his eldest son (the famous and heroic Black Prince) pre-deceased his father by a year, leaving England with the prospect of his son as another underage king, who succeeded to the throne as Richard II in 1377, at the age of ten. No regency was established, and initially Parliament attempted to govern, but effective power soon passed to the king's uncle, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. Richard began to assume direct control at only 14, when he was instrumental in quelling the Peasant's Revolt of 1381. In later years, he came into conflict with John of Gaunt's son, Henry, who deposed him and assumed the crown as Henry IV in 1399.

Perhaps the most unfortunate period of regency in English history occurred when Henry IV�s grandson succeeded to the throne as Henry VI in 1422, at barely nine months old. England was deep in conflict with the French. The young king's father, Henry V, had been recognized as heir to the French throne by the Treaty of Troyes two years earlier. The English controlled a large part of France, but French resistance to the arrangement (which had been imposed after English military victories), ensured that there would be no peace. When the French king, Charles VI, died a few months later, his son, Charles VII and Henry were proclaimed rival kings of France. At a time when England needed strong leadership, the protectorship of England was vested in the king's uncle, Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, who found himself struggling to assert his authority and was in frequent conflict with other magnates, while another uncle, John Duke of Bedford, was Henry�s regent in France, ill-supplied and ultimately unsuccessful against French patriots inspired in part by Joan of Arc. By the time Henry declared himself of age in 1437, England had lost all its French territories except Calais, and at home England was driven by faction which would continue throughout Henry's reign.

A contributory factor to the Wars of the Roses was another period of regency caused not by the king's age, but by his insanity. While Henry VI was unable to govern in 1453-54 and again in 1455-56, his second cousin, Richard Duke of York, was declared Protector of the Realm. After both occasions, the weak-willed Henry gave into the demands of his domineering wife, Margaret of Anjou, and his Beaufort cousins to deprive York of power and influence. The factional conflict erupted into Civil War which resulted in Henry's deposition in 1461 when Richard's son inaugurated the reign of the House of York as Edward IV. Henry enjoyed a brief restoration in 1470-71 before being deposed again and murdered in the Tower shortly afterwards.

The most notorious "Protector" in English history must be Edward IV's brother, Richard Duke of Gloucester. Edward died in 1483 leaving a young son, Edward V, and Gloucester as Protector of the realm, but within two months Richard produced, or more likely concocted, evidence that his young nephew was illegitimate, on the doubtful grounds Edward IV had married Elizabeth Woodville while already contracted to marry Lady Eleanor Butler. The boy-king was confined to the Tower, deposed, and his protector-uncle proclaimed king (Richard III) in his stead. The fate of Edward and his younger brother, Richard Duke of York, is not certain, but it is most likely that they were murdered on the new king's orders.

After Richard III's defeat at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, only two further reigns passed before the kingdom was again faced with a child-sovereign, Henry VIII's long-desired son, Edward VI, who became king at the age of nine in 1547. The late king's will had provided that its 16 co-executors should act as a Council of Regency until Edward's 18th birthday, but the new king's uncle, Edward Seymour (soon to become Duke of Somerset), quickly established his dominance as Lord Protector. Factionalism was rife again, though, and Somerset was deposed, executed and succeeded as Protector in 1552 by John Dudley, who was created Duke of Northumberland shortly afterwards.

As Edward VI fell ill and England faced the prospect of a return to Catholicism under his sister Mary, he and Northumberland conspired both to protect the Protestant settlement and Northumberland's own power by overriding Henry VIII's will and proclaiming Edward's cousin, Lady Jane Grey, as heir to the throne. Dudley married off his son to the 16 year-old Jane and intended to continue wielding power in his daughter-in-law's name. The plan failed as the English nobility and people refused to back this illegal usurpation; Jane was proclaimed Queen but was removed and locked up in the Tower only 10 days later. Northumberland paid for his treason with his life, and Jane and her husband, pawns in his power game, were also executed after the Wyatt rebellion the following year.

In the 331 years between 1216 and 1547, six of the 14 kings of England ascended the throne as minors. In the following four and a half centuries, there have been no underage monarchs, but there was one other reign in which a regency was required. From 1811 until his death in 1820, George III displayed symptoms of insanity (now attributed to porphyiria, possibly the same illness which afflicted Henry VI), and Parliament legislated to allow his son and heir, the future George IV, to act as Regent. Thanks to the supremacy of Parliament and relative decline in the power of the Crown, this regency didn't involve any of the murderous conflicts of previous ones.

In subsequent reigns, Parliament provided for a regency when the heir to the throne at the time was a minor. In 1937, Parliament made permanent provision for the minority or incapacity of the sovereign, and decreed that the next person in the line of succession to the throne would be regent. Unusually, this excluded the young monarch's surviving parent, who had been the first choice in previous regency acts. Had George VI died before the present Queen turned 18, the late Duke of Gloucester, rather than the Queen Mother, would have been regent.

In 1953 a further act was passed under which the Duke of Edinburgh, if still living, would be regent if all his children were under 18. That situation cannot now arise, and the 1937 act will control any future regency, barring further changes by Parliament.

- Paul James