Behind west European history is an English-French and a more recent Protestant-Catholic rivalry.
Things began in 1066 when William the Bastard sailed from Normandy. On 14 October, he defeated the Anglo-Saxon King Harold at Hastings.
Five hundred and twenty years later on 14 October 1586, Mary Queen of Scots was tried for treason. One of her defences was that she could not be convicted of treason as she had been a foreign queen and never an English subject. Although she was referring to her Scottish throne, she had for a short time been Mary Queen of France. She was convicted and beheaded.
Mary’s request to be buried in France was refused by Queen Elizabeth and she was interred in regional England. Elizabeth’s successor and Mary’s son James righted matters when he ordered that her remains be brought to Westminster Cathedral – where William the Bastard was crowned King of England on Christmas Day 1066 – and she now rests opposite Elizabeth.
The inscription is telling:
To God, the best and greatest. To her good memory, and in eternal hope. MARY STUART, QUEEN OF SCOTS, Dowager Queen of France, daughter of James V of Scotland, sole heir and great granddaughter of Henry VII, King of England, through his elder daughter Margaret, (who was joined in marriage to James IV of Scotland): great-great-granddaughter of Edward IV, King of England through his eldest daughter of Elizabeth [of York]: wife of Francis II, King of France sure and certain heiress to the crown of England while she lived: mother of James, most puissant sovereign of Great Britain.
James fathered many children. One, Elizabeth, married Frederick the head of the German Protestant Union and in turn mothered Sophia. Another, Charles, succeeded his father as king and in turn fathered a further James.
Over the next century, there were two revolutions. The first was the Civil War, when Charles son of James lost his head. The second was the Glorious Revolution in which James son of Charles fled to France. While the reasons for the Civil War are complex, the reason for getting rid of James remain uncontroversial. He was a Catholic and not a Catholic by birth but a Catholic by conversion, a state of affairs arising from having lived much of his life in France.
One effect of the second revolution was the Bill of Rights. By it, James was held to have a abdicated and to have been succeeded by his Protestant daughter Mary and her Protestant husband William, who happened also to be James’s nephew. It also proclaimed that Catholics were debarred from the Crown.
By 1701, this had become a problem. Mary was dead and William had not had other children. Mary’s sister Anne, a Protestant, would soon succeed William but her last child had died the year before. The abdicated James had provided a brother for Mary and Anne, but that brother James and his own son Bonnie Prince Charlie as Catholics living in France were the cause of the problem and not the solution. In essence, the English had a twist on the ancient dynastic problem. Instead of “what do we do with no successors?” it was “what do we do when we can’t abide the successors?”
The upshot was the Act of Settlement by which the English set out that they wanted a Protestant ruler, even a German one, if the alternative was a French Catholic. Above I noted that two grandchildren of James I were Sophia the German Protestant and James the Catholic by conversion in France. The effect of the Act was “after Anne dies, we’ll take a descendant of Sophia over a descendant of James”. Sophia had been born 71 years before, on 14 October 1630, and James 68 years before, on 14 October 1633.
I note in passing – it doesn’t make it into the usual English narratives – that both the Bill of Rights and the Act of Settlement continued a conceit of English kings, queens and parliaments which was started by Edward III – great-grandfather of the aforementioned Edward IV – in 1340 and continued up to the early 1800s, whereby the monarch of the day was styled among other things the king/queen of France. Given that the last piece of the mainland, the port of Calais, was lost during the rule of Queen Elizabeth’s elder sister in the 1550s, the practice was a curious case of statutory law being utterly delusional.
The events of the early 1700s also give colour to the various explanations for English regnal numbers.
First, had Bonnie Prince Charlie received the crown, he would have been Charles III!
Second, when James son of Mary Queen of Scots became king of England, he became King James I. However, he had already been and continued as King James VI of Scotland.
Mere technicality, one might say. One would be wrong. In the middle of the 20th century and while the English welcomed a second Elizabeth, Scots nationalists famously defaced postboxes bearing “E-II-R”. There were two good reasons. First, they had never had an “E-I-R”. Second and in any event, the E-I-R in question had ordered the beheading of Mary Queen of Scots: see above. Prime Minister Churchill suggested at the time that in the future, the higher of the English and Scottish sequences might be used.
There can be symmetry, of course. Sophia’s contribution to the English monarchy was the Hanover house. While its most famous members were George III and Victoria, Victoria’s predecessor William was the king of regnal numbers. He was by one wag’s assessment William I of Hanover, William II of Ireland, William III of Scotland, and William IV of England.
Above all this and back to 14 October 1066, it has been the English practice of centuries not to take kings and queens prior to William of Normandy into account. If they were taken into account, the next Edward would not be Edward IX but more likely Edward XII.
The result is that the regnal numbers of England have been determined by an invasion force from France. Which is odd, or at least has been odd since the time of the aforementioned Edward III. When he married Philippa of Hainault in 1328, he married a descendant of the sister of Harold. The result is that every English monarch since – as well as Mary Queen of Scots – has not only gotten to call the victor at Hastings “great-great-[whatever]-father”, they have also gotten to call the loser “great-great-[whatever]-uncle”.
