Kings & Queens of Great Britain

Every Question Answered

David Soud

• Publisher: Thunder Bay Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781626862715
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

From the House of Wessex to the House of Windsor, follow the pageant of personalities that have made Great Britain what it is today.

Fascinating biographies of the British monarchs from the time of Roman Brittania to present day answer your every question about the country's aristocracy. Details of the kings' and queens' personalities are the focus, with a timeline across the bottom relating the major events of their reigns. Also included is a section devoted to royal edicts. All the Edwards, Richards, Henrys, and Williams are represented—along with outstanding personalities such as Lady Jane Grey and Oliver Cromwell—a king in all but name. This is essential reading for all Anglophiles, so brew a pot of tea and dig into the history!

The House of Wessex

From the time of Roman Britannia to the Norman invasion of 1066, England was seldom a unified country. Rather, it was mostly divided among petty kingdoms ruled by Anglo-Saxon kings, and large swaths of Britain were eventually held by the Danes and other Vikings. This was a heroic age, the era that gave rise to the great epic Beowulf, but it did not lack sophistication. In time, the kingdom of Wessex came to dominate the rich culture of Anglo-Saxon England. Such towering rulers as Alfred the Great and Athelstan, along with the sainted Edward the Confessor, made the House of Wessex one of the great dynasties of British history.

THE KINGS WHO BUILT ENGLAND

The House of Wessex, also known as the House of Cerdic, was the first royal line to rule over a kingdom we would recognize today as England. With few interruptions, from the ninth to the eleventh centuries, they held a shifting swath of territory that defined English culture. In doing so, they had to defend their realm against the incursions of land-hungry invaders—most prominently the Vikings, who left their own indelible imprint on British culture. Only with the Norman invasion in 1066 would the last of the Wessex kings fall, and with his death would come a complete transformation of what it meant to be English.

Boudicca, female leader of the Iceni, who put up an impressive resistance to Roman occupiers in the first century CE.

Of course, Britain had kings, or at least chieftains, long before the House of Wessex materialized. The region has been inhabited for millennia; from Orkney to Stonehenge, its early peoples have left relics for us to ponder. For several centuries before the Christian era, the British Isles, like much of Europe, had been home to Celtic peoples, for whom kings largely played a symbolic role. It was only a matter of time before more sturdy organization would come, from within or without. In the first century BCE, it seems that high kings became more dominant, with one Caswallon commanding the allegiance of most Britons.

THE ARRIVAL OF THE ROMANS

But then a different, much more effective organization arrived in the form of the Roman Empire. In 55 BCE, Julius Caesar tentatively invaded Britain. He was more concerned with unrest in Gaul than in conquering Britain, and after an impressive show of force soon withdrew. About a century later, Rome would return with a much more ambitious agenda. At that time, the British high king Cunobelin had proved an able leader, unifying much of what is now England—a mixed blessing, since it was his power, and the evident mineral resources in his kingdom, that brought Britain to the attention of the Roman emperor Claudius.

ROMAN BRITAIN

Cunobelin died in 40 CE; his successor, Caradoc, had only three years on the throne before facing a full-scale invasion of the Roman legions. At the Battle of the Medway, the Britons were defeated. After a few years of desultory guerrilla campaigning, Caradoc was captured and sent to Rome, where he and his family apparently settled down to enjoy life on the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, the Romans established their base at Londinium, which became London, and the process of Romanizing Britain, or Britannia, began. Though some tribes resisted—most famously the Iceni under the female warrior Boudicca—within a generation the conquest was largely finished.

England would be a realm of the Roman Empire for the next four centuries, during which Roman customs would establish a firm foothold. In 122, Emperor Hadrian ordered the construction of his wall as a fortified northern boundary to the empire. Within those boundaries, Romanized Briton even produced a handful of emperors in the waning years of the empire. But by the mid-fifth century, Rome itself was under siege. The great migration of Germanic and other tribes on the mainland took its toll, and eventually Britannia was left to fend for itself.

527

Constantinople’s Emperor Justin dies aged 77. His son Justinian begins a 38-year reign.

535

Massive eruption of the volcano Krakatoa in Indonesia spews so much ash into the upper atmosphere that the world’s climate is cooled for the next three years.

540

Antioch falls to the Persians who loot the city before retiring to Persia.

603

Battle of Degasaston sees the defeat of Picts and Scots, handing control of what is now northern England to the English.

The history here remains murky, but it is clear that with the Roman administrative apparatus gone, all order broke down, as old tribal rivalries and individual ambitions asserted themselves. Some Britons simply reverted to the old ways, while others attempted to sustain a Romanized way of life. The story goes that Vortigern, a high king in the south, turned to the Roman practice of hiring mercenary forces, in this case Germanic warriors under Hengist and Horsa, rewarding them with grants of land and thereby giving them a foothold in Britain. Once the Germanic tribes saw how rich and fertile that land was, and how sparsely defended, they started coming in droves.

THE ANGLES AND SAXONS

The arrival of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes spelled the end of Romanized Britain. Though from about 450–550 there was inspired resistance to the steady invasion—the legend of King Arthur, who may well have originally been a Romanized British cavalry leader, seems to have originated here—the inexorable strength of the Germanic tribes, both in military prowess and in numbers, eventually won out, as the Britons were pushed back to Wales, Cornwall, and even Breton in France. For the next three centuries, a series of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were carved out; among them were Kent, Northumbria, Mercia, Essex, Sussex, and Wessex. Christianity arrived on the island from both Rome and Ireland, and many kings converted, a settlement largely in favor of Roman control being reached at the Synod of Whitby in 663. Eventually, one man, Egbert of Wessex, would defeat all his rivals and lay the groundwork for a kingship of England.

King Arthur remains the most iconic image of kingship in British culture. The Arthurian legends have inspired a number of British kings, including Edward III, founder of the Order of the Garter.

Glastonbury in Somerset, the epicenter of many legends about King Arthur. Those legends are widely regarded as being rooted in the resistance of Romanized Britons to the incursions of Germanic tribes in the fifth and sixth centuries.

610

According to Islamic belief, Mohammed has his first vision of the Archangel Gabriel who begins the revelation of the Koran.

616

Traditional date for the founding of a Christian chapel to St. Peter on Thorn Island in the River Thames, now Westminster Abbey.

654

Arabs invade Rhodes, melting down the famous statue, the Colossus of Rhodes.

709

King Cenred of Mercia in England abdicates and travels to Rome to become a monk.

720

The Moors cross the Pyrenees and capture Narbonne.

Egbert of Wessex overcame the dominance of Mercia and made the House of Wessex the most important line of kings in pre-Norman Britain.

FROM EGBERT TO ALFRED THE GREAT

Egbert was born in Wessex somewhere around the year 770. As he came of age, one king was dominating much of Britain. Offa of Mercia was a formidable leader and ruthless warrior; he was also powerful enough that even Charlemagne, rather grudgingly, acknowledged him as a lesser but still legitimate European ruler. Offa expanded his influence by demanding fealty from neighboring kingdoms, and he was brilliantly systematic about securing his lands. To this day, the remains of Offa’s Dyke, a long line of earthworks that were probably once topped with wooden palisades, extends at least 64 miles (103 km) along much of what is now the border between England and Wales. It was Offa, perhaps along with Beorhtric, then king of Wessex, who seems to have engineered Egbert’s exile to the continent, where he was to remain for 13 years, probably under the protection of Charlemagne. It may be that he learned something of the business of kingship while staying within Charlemagne’s carefully run empire. In any case, on the death of Beorhtric in 802, Egbert was there to claim the throne. More than likely, he had the considerable weight of Charlemagne and Rome behind him, but in any case Offa was long dead and his successors ineffective, so the time was right for Egbert’s star to rise.

Egbert seems to have risen to prominence steadily, and his gathering power came to fruition in 825, when his forces defeated a Mercian army at Ellendun, breaking the Mercian hold on the south. Four years later, he invaded and conquered Mercia itself, establishing himself as king over a large portion of the South and the Midlands of England. By 830, he had invaded Northumbria and accepted the fealty of its king, and even extended his reach into Wales. Briefly, Egbert was, in power if not i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. The House of Wessex
• 2. The Norman Kings
• 3. The House of Plantagenet
• 4. The Houses of Lancaster and York
• 5. The House of Tudor
• 6. The House of Stuart
• 7. The House of Hanover
• 8. The House of Windsor
• 9. Royal Edicts
• Index
• Acknowledgments