The House of Plantagenet had its origins in a cadet branch of the original counts of Anjou, the dynasty established by Fulk I of Anjou at the beginning of the tenth century. The Plantagenet dynasty ...

The MacAlpin dynasty, which ruled Scotland throughout the Dark Ages, united the warring races of Picts and Scots as one nation. Our section on this dynasty includes the reign of Kenneth I himself and ...

Harold had previously sworn a reluctant oath to support William's claim to the throne when having been shipwrecked on the coast of Normandy, he had become William's unwilling guest. However, before he ...

When Britain's last Stuart monarch, Queen Anne died in 1714, the crown of England passed by the 1701 Act of Settlement to the Stuart dynasty's German Protestant cousins, the House of Hanover, or ...

On the death of Edward the Confessor without a direct heir, the Witan elected his brother-in-law, the powerful Harold Godwinson, Earl of Wessex, as King. Coin of Harold II Harold had been elected from ...

The House of Tudor took England's throne through victory over Richard III, the last Plantagenet king, at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. Its founder, the Lancastrian Henry VII laid down the ...

The Viking attacks on England were ferocious and unremitting. A marauding Viking army under the command of the Norwegian Olaf Tryggvason reached England in 991 and pillaged Folkestone, Sandwich and ...

The Order of the Bath is the fourth most senior order of chivalry in Britain. It was created by Letters Patent of the first Hanoverian king, George I, on 18th May, 1725. The name derives from the ...

Henry seized England's crown on the death of his brother, William Rufus on 2 August 1100. He had been present on the hunting expedition in the New Forest which resulted in Rufus' death, either by ...

Louise-Renée de Kérouaille, an ancestress of Princess Diana, was born in September 1649 into a noble but relatively poor Breton family, she the daughter of Guillaume de Penancoët, Seigneur de ...

The Tower of London, that formidable symbol of England's national heritage, served as a royal residence as well as a prison in the medieval period. The monarch traditionally spent the night at the ...

(1) Charles Emmanuel III, King of Sardinia, 1751-1819 ( great-great-grandson of Henriette Anne Stuart, youngest daughter of Charles I.) The Jacobite CHARLES IV (2) Victor Emmanuel, King of Sardinia ...