Rheged stretched south from Hadrian's Wall and included the modern county of Cumbria and probably parts of Lancashire and southern Scotland also. The name of the county of Cumbria derives from the old ...

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 ...

On the death of King Charles II on 6 February, 1685, his Catholic brother James, Duke of York succeeded to the throne as King James II. Charles II left no legitimate offspring but a large family of ...

Although King Richard III had only one legitimate son, Edward of Middleham, by his wife Anne Neville, he is known to have had at least two and possibly three illegitimate children. John of Gloucester, ...

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 fifteen-year-old Edwy, or Eadwig, the eldest son of the former King Edmund the Elder and St. Elgiva of Shaftesbury succeeded his uncle Edred to the throne of England in the year 955. Edwy was ...

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 ...

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 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

(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 ...