British Succession

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I couldn’t sleep, so I was thinking about the rules of succession to the British throne. Why? Because I’m currently reading The System of the World, Neal Stephenson’s latest novel, and part of the plot involves British succession circa 1714. Also because I’m a dork.

Anyway, I found the general algorithm for succession to the British throne:

The procedure is roughly as follows. If individual A is dead or ineligible:

1. look for A’s eldest-born male B (if none were born, go to 3).

2. If B is dead or ineligible, go to 1 with “B” instead of “A”.

3. If no candidate meeting the criteria is found, return to A, find the the next eldest-born male C; repeat steps 1-3 with “C” instead of “A”, until a candidate is found or all of A’s male children are exhausted.

4. Repeat steps 1-3 with “female” instead of “male”.

5. If no candidate has been found yet, go to A’s royal parent D and look for D’s next eldest-born male, repeating steps 1-4 with “D” instead of “A”.

6. If no candidate has been found, go to D’s royal parent E and repeat steps 1-5.

7. Keep going climbing up the royal genealogy. If you reach step 6 with D = Electress Sophia, there are no candidates left (this will take a while, because there are about 4360 individuals descended from her: see the list).

Also, you have to have been born in wedlock and you can’t ever have been Catholic. (Those picky Anglicans.)

So, yeah, there are more than 4,000 individuals in line to the throne. So much for King Ralph.

The more specific reason I looked this up is because I was wondering if Prince William would still be in line to the throne if Prince Charles died, or if the next eldest son of Queen Elizabeth would then become heir. It turns out that William’s place in line is secure. Once the heir (Charles) has a son (William), that can’t be broken. Britain follows primogeniture, i.e., “male heirs take precedence over female, with children representing their deceased ancestors; and under the rule of primogeniture, the older son precedes the younger.”

Anyway, maybe I can fall asleep now.

10 thoughts on “British Succession”

  1. Thank goodness we don’t have a monarchy. It’s so anachronistic. But hold on, ours is a republic that can elevate a man to the presidency even when he doesn’t win the popular vote. So, nevermind, the general algorithm for succession makes more sense now.

  3. Welcome to British history – if that didn’t make you sleep – try the British Constitution – you’ll find enough documents scattered about to keep you sleeping as sound as Rip-van-Winkle. I find the battles in the War of Independence sleep inducing – the battles in the Continental Congress were far more exciting.

  4. I guess it says something about the British that their law dictates that the monarch must be descended from a German lady. Why a German? I think I read somewhere that someone sued the British government in the European court of human rights, alleging ethnic bias in that law.

  5. This brings to mind one of my all-time favorite obscure movies, The Bed-Sitting Room. Made in 1969 and barely released, it’s Richard Lester’s rendition of Spike Milligan’s play about the aftermath of nuclear war. A small group of survivors band together in typical cherry British fashion — very much along the lines of popular memory of the Blitz in WWII. It had an all-star cast including Rita Tushungham, Harry Seacombe, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, the lovely Richard Warwick (remember him in If. . . ?) Sir Ralph Richardson in the title role (post-apocalypse the surivivors find they’re mutating into things. When the process is complete for Richardson he crise out “Quick, put a sign in my window: ‘No coloreds, no children and above all no colored children!!!’ “)

    In any event by deduction they discover that among their number the charwoman, Mrs. Ethel Shroake (Dandy Nichols) is the closest surviving heir to the throne. And thus the film concludes with a rousing rendition of “God Bless Mrs. Ethel Shroake.”

  7. As for the “why a German lady”: the Electress Sophia of Hanover (I pine to be an Electress someday, whether of Hanover or somplace else) was the nearest Protestant relative of never-stable Stuarts, who ruled after the Virgin Queen Elizabeth I died (not surprisingly) childless. After nearly 200 years of Catholic-Protestant back-and-forth, Parliament had had enough, and declared the monarch had to be non-Catholic.

    I had nothing to do with Sophia or her descendants being German per se (really, she was Scottish and Czech, and only Hanoverian by marriage), so I don’t know what that lawsuit may have been all about.

  8. It’s a fascinating history, all the same; I only discovered that George I of England was buried in Hannover when I discovered his tomb in the royal park there, which meant quite a bit of reading on my return to London.

    Europe was borne out of incest; I is well proud.

  9. Weird. [My] Jeff and I were just talking about the rules of British succession the other day. Sometimes I think that you and Matt, and he and I, are roughly the same people.

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