The Unofficial British Royal Family Pages

Changing Years - Centuries of Royalty

Today is the last day of 2006. After a year which saw the 80th birthday celebrations of Queen Elizabeth II, we might wonder what royal events to look forward to in 2007. Will Prince William marry? Will another realm be lost as Barbados decides to become a republic? What might people have been wondering about at this point in previous centuries?; what royal occasions did they have to look forward to in their 07s? Let's take a few hundred-year leaps back in time.

December 31 1906. King Edward VII was going to celebrate the sixth anniversary of his accession in a few weeks. Six short years since the end of the Victorian era, and the longest reign in British history. Britain was the pre-eminent superpower of the time. Its empire was the largest ever known, governing a quarter of the human race, although a new giant was emerging across the Atlantic and the seeds of imperial demise had already been planted. Canada has been an internally self-governing dominion for many decades, but in the new century Australia has joined it, and 1907 would see the elevation to dominion status of New Zealand and Newfoundland. The non-white empire remained intact, though, its jewel being the Indian Empire, and it would grow further before it began its collapse midway through the century.

The king was largely a constitutional monarch, but the hereditary House of Lords was still almost the equal of the elected Commons, and even the king himself was able to have a significant effect on foreign policy with his Entente Cordial with France a few years earlier. In August 1906 he held a meeting with the German Kaisar, Wilhelm II, hoping to ease the worsening relations between their two countries. It didn't enjoy the same success as the Entente.

1907 was to see the theft of so-called "Irish Crown Jewels". They were not really crown jewels at all, but the sovereign's personal insignia as Sovereign and a knight of the Most Illustrious Order of St. Patrick, which, in July, were discovered to be missing from their home in Dublin Castle. A century later, their fate is still unknown.

One hundred years earlier, we were in the 46th year of the reign of George III, who was to go on to become our longest-reigning monarch until his granddaughter surpassed him later in the century. Europe was embroiled in the Napoleonic Wars, and in August 1806 the thousand year-old Holy Roman Empire had been dissolved with the abdication of Emperor Franz II (who, however, retained imperial status as Emperor of Austria). A side-effect of the disappearance of the empire was that King George's German possession, the electorate of Hanover, was upgraded to a kingdom, since it was no longer part of an empire and there was no emperor to elect. In September 1806, the Prince of Wales (later to be George IV) visited his principality, becoming the first Prince to do so since 1642!

1807 was to see the death of Henry Stuart, "Cardinal York", thus bringing an end to the Royal House of Stuart over a century after it had ceased to reign. Henry was the great-grandson of King James II, and younger brother of the romantic Bonnie Prince Charlie. No Jacobite heir has made any claim to the throne since Henry's death, although claims continue to be made on their behalf by a tiny Jacobite minority.

Jacobites have always styled their claimants "King (or Queen) of England, Scotland, France and Ireland"; but if we travel back to 1707, we'll find that the most significant royal event of the year was the disappearance of the separate English and Scottish crowns, united "forever after" into a new crown of Great Britain. As in 1807, Britain was embroiled in another European war with France as its main protagonist (the War of the Spanish Succession). In the preceding years, following the death of Queen Anne's last surviving child, the English Parliament had passed the Act of Settlement, vesting the succession in James I's granddaughter, Electress Sophia of Hanover, and her descendents. The Scots, unhappy with the existing relationship with England, had then passed their own act, which conferred the right to choose a successor to the Scottish crown on the Parliament of Scotland. In all probability, this would have led to a re-separation of the crowns, which was not acceptable to England. In 1706-07, England used strong-arm tactics to force the Scots to the negotiating table in order to bring about a permanent union of the kingdoms.

The union had been presaged a century earlier, in 1606, by the adoption of a new union flag, which combined those of England and Scotland. James VI of Scots had become James I of England three years earlier and, although he was technically king of two separate realms, he preferred to be styled "King of Great Britain", and had commissioned the new flag. The king wanted to go further and fully unite the two kingdoms, but in 1607 a bill to achieve such a union was defeated in Parliament. However, that same year saw an important step in the development of the crown's overseas empire : the foundation of the settlement of Jamestown, Virginia - the first permanent English settlement in North America.

America had been discovered (or re-discovered) by Europeans in the 1490s, and the first recorded use of the name "America" occurred a century before the Jamestown settlement, in 1507, when it appeared on a German map. The generally accepted origin of this name is that it comes from Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian merchant explorer who explored the American coast after Columbus, but there are those who believe the continent was named after a Welsh royal customs official based in Bristol - Richard Amerik - who helped finance John Cabot's voyages to Newfoundland, and may have been involved with voyages of Bristol fishermen to Newfoundland before Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492.

Of more immediate concern to the crown of King Henry VII during 1506 was his own abortive marriage contract to Margaret, daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor. The Wars of the Roses had not yet been entirely consigned to history yet - in April 1506 Edmund de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk and chief Yorkist claimant to the crown, was imprisoned in the Tower of London. He would be executed seven years later.

In 1507, Henry VII, a Welshman, was reigning as the first king of his dynasty (the Tudors). One hundred years earlier the Welsh were a thorn in the side of Henry IV, who was also the first king of a dynasty (Lancaster). The Scots, too, were a source of conflict. James, heir to the Scottish throne, was captured at sea by the English in March 1406, and became King of Scots on the death of his father just five days later. During 1407, conflict in Wales led in October to the beginning of the siege of Aberystwyth Castle by Henry, Prince of Wales (later Henry V). It was to last nearly a year.

Conflict with Scotland dominated affairs a century earlier, too, with the English crown of Edward I battling against the newly-proclaimed King Robert the Bruce of Scots. Edward, who had subdued the Welsh and was to become known as the Hammer of the Scots, was to die in 1307, initiating the unfortunate reign of his son, Edward II. No one could have known then that the reign would end twenty years later with Edward being deposed and murdered on the orders of his own French wife and her lover.

Edward II's great-grandfather, King John, was on throne a century earlier and had his own Gallic problems - he had already lost the duchy of Normandy to King Philippe II of France, and was defending his duchy of Aquitaine against the same foe. The two monarchs made a two-year truce in October. John's other great dispute at the time was with the church and papacy. In March 1206, the Pope refused to accept John's nomination for the archbishopric of Canterbury, and in December the Pontiff persuaded the monks of the See to elect Stephen Langton as archbishop. Langton was in France at the time, and the monks who elected him were promptly exiled there too. In 1207, John dispatched the Archbishop of York across the Channel as well. The conflict was to last until 1213, and included the excommunication of the king and a Papal interdict (banning of church services) against the entire realm of England. Magna Carta was yet to come!

Where John lost Normandy, his predecessor of a century earlier regained it. The duchy and English crown had become personally united in 1066, when William, Duke of Normandy, conquered England; but on his death the two realms were divided between his two elder sons, Robert, who took Normandy, and William II, King of England. The brothers were to be each other's heir, but with Robert away on crusade at the time of William II's death, the third brother, Henry, seized the English throne. Conflict ensued, until, in 1106, Henry was able to capture and imprison Robert and reunite Normandy with England.

In the English monarchy of a thousand years ago, 1006-07, the long royal continental and overseas embroilment had yet to begin. The Anglo-Saxons had arrived from Germany centuries earlier, but no English king ruled territory abroad. The greatest threat to these islands was not from France or anywhere south, but from the Danes, who raided British and Irish shores constantly, and demanded regularly payments in tribute, called the Danegeld. Within a decade, the Danish King Cnut would sit on the throne of England. Danish rule lasted only 26 years, but a thousand years later, we can once again anticipate the accession of a prince of the Danish royal line on the English throne : despite their name of Mountbatten-Windsor, princes Charles and William are, in fact, male-line descendents of the Danish royal house of Oldenburg.

- Paul James