Cerdic was the first king of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Wessex who reigned from 519 to 534, and the ancestor of all the subsequent Anglo-Saxon Kings of England. The Anglo-Saxons were partly descended ...

Hamelin of Anjou was the illegitimate son of Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou, Touraine, and Maine, who was born circa1129, shortly after Geoffrey's tempestuous marriage to the Empress Matilda, ...

The House of Beaufort descended from the illicit union of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster (1340 - 1399) and his mistress Katherine Swynford, the family played an important role as staunch Lancastrian ...

When John, the last child of the great Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine was born on Christmas Eve, 1167 at Beaumont Palace in Oxfordshire, his father jokingly nick-named him Sans Terre or Lackland, ...

Cinaeth, known to history as Kenneth MacAlpin or Kenneth the Hardy, was born around 810 on the Island of Iona. He was the son of the Scots chieftain Alpin, who had led his countrymen in the struggle ...

Isabella of France was born in Paris, the daughter of Philip IV of France and Joan I of Navarre, the daughter of Henry I, King of Navarre. No record survives of her birth, but calculations based on ...

King Edward II wished to establish an alliance with Flanders through the marriage of his eldest son and heir, Prince Edward, to one of the daughters of Count William of Hainaut, and sent Bishop ...

John the Red Comyn, so known for his red hair, was the son of John Comyn, Lord of Badenoch, otherwise known as the Black Comyn, one of the Competitors for the Crown of Scotland, who based his claim on ...

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 ...

The half-timbered Queen's House, which faces Tower Green, was built in around 1530, in the reign of King Henry VIII, in a very different style than the rest of the Tower of London. Henry VIII probably ...

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 ...