What do all these people have in common, other than being royal of course? The
answer is that they were all spares who became heirs, then ultimately took the
crown. The men were never meant to King, the women were never meant to be Queen,
but all made it to the throne nonetheless through a combination of early deaths, the occasional
revolution and even an abdication crisis. Some were ambitious and had sought the throne out,
even stealing it from other members of their family with a better claim than their own.
Others were people who unexpectedly became monarchs and were reduced to tears at the
thought of taking on such a responsibility. In today’s video from History Calling,
I’m going to share their stories with you as we look at the Houses of Tudor, Stuart,
Hanover and Windsor and hear about some of the people who unexpectedly became monarchs.
If you’re not familiar with the phrase ‘the heir and the spare’ it is used to reference
the direct heir to the throne before they have any children and whomever is the next in line
should anything happen to that heir before they are able to produce any offspring. The spare is
not someone who, in the normal course of things, would become monarch themselves. In other words,
the current Prince George is not the spare to his father, Prince William, because George is
already in line to become monarch someday. The current spare is in fact his little sister,
Princess Charlotte, just as their uncle, Prince Harry, was once the spare to Prince William.
Oh and if you’re wondering, yes it was the publication of Prince Harry’s memoir Spare
which inspired this video as it got me thinking about all the spares who have born in the royal
family over the past 500 years who have gone on to take the throne. The reason I’m limiting myself to
just the past half a millennium (roughly speaking) is that prior to that the rules around inheritance
were a lot less strictly defined and the idea of who the heir really was, was more open to debate.
Quite often it was just whomever was able to grab the throne and hold onto it and so the concept of
who the true spare was, was also more fluid. It’s therefore much easier to pick up at the start
of the 16th century when male primogeniture was becoming a lot more accepted and respected (and
if you’re unfamiliar with it, male primogeniture was the idea that boys inherited first according
to birth order and only if the male line was exhausted did females come into play).
I’m also not going to cover every single spare to heir story as some of them involve
the deaths of very young children who were only heirs for very short spaces of time. I’m
just going to look at some of the best known and only for English, later British history.
The first spare to become heir is also one of the most famous; Henry VIII. Born in 1491 Prince
Henry, Duke of Cornwall, to give him his earlier title, was the second surviving son of Henry
VII and Elizabeth of York and it was his older brother, Prince Arthur, who was meant to be King.
In April 1502 however, less than 5 months after his marriage to the Spanish Princess, Catherine of
Aragon, the 15-year-old Arthur died of an unknown ailment at Ludlow Castle and the 10 year old Henry
found himself the new heir to the throne. He was duly given Arthur’s title of Prince of Wales and
when Henry VII died in 1509 Prince Henry became Henry VIII. This wasn’t the end of the Tudors’
dynastic struggles though, for as you may well know Henry VIII fought for decades to produce
a male heir of his own and along the way he became the father of not just one, but two spares
himself. More unexpectedly still, they were both girls and they were both initially born as heirs.
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Henry’s oldest surviving child was his daughter Mary, born to his first wife and one-time
sister-in-law, Catherine of Aragon. Mary’s journey to the throne was messy to say the least.
Born a Princess of England and heiress presumptive to the throne (meaning she was heir until a
legitimate brother was born), she remained in that position until 1533 when her father
completed his abandonment of her mother, had their marriage annulled and Mary declared illegitimate.
Her position as heiress was instead taken by her half-sister, Princess Elizabeth, born in September
1533 to Henry’s second wife, Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth was in turn barred from the throne
however, after her mother’s fall and execution in 1536 when she too was declared illegitimate.
When their father finally had a son, Prince Edward, in October 1537 by wife number 3,
Jane Seymour, it looked unlikely that either girl would ever wear his crown.
Jane died soon afterwards though and despite three further marriages,
no more little half-siblings were forthcoming. In 1543 these two sisters therefore experienced
a highly unexpected reversal of fortune when their father used an act of parliament to restore them
to the line of succession behind Edward and any children he might have (though this Act
of Succession didn’t become law until 1544). Mary was now the spare and when Henry died
in 1547 she moved up to the position of heir to Edward, with Elizabeth now in the spare position.
Still, Edward had survived infancy (generally speaking the most dangerous time of life up
until old age in that century) and it still seemed rather unlikely that either sister would become
queen. That however, is exactly what happened. Edward died in 1553 at the age of 15, Mary
ascended to the throne and when she died childless too in 1558 the first Elizabethan age began when
the woman who had been a Princess for less than three years of her life and who had been at
the bottom of the pile of potential Tudor heirs, unexpectedly came out on top and took the throne.
For the next story of a spare who became an heir, we move on both to the Stuart dynasty and to the
17th century. Elizabeth was succeeded by her distant cousin, James VI of Scotland in 1603
and at that time the heir to the throne was his eldest son, Henry, born to James and his wife,
Anne of Denmark, in 1594 and who was created Prince of Wales in 1610. The spare at this point
was James’s second surviving son, Prince Charles, born in 1600. England was on course to have King
Henry IX, but there was an unexpected upset in 1612 when Prince Henry died of typhoid fever,
aged only 18. His place as heir was now taken by his brother and when James I
of England died in 1625, he was therefore replaced by this son who became Charles I.
If you’ve seen my video on what happened to Charles I’s body after his death, you’ll know that
things didn’t end well for him as he was deposed, then executed by the Parliamentarians in 1649.
By then he had produced three surviving sons however. The eldest became Charles II (though
it was 1660 before he was able to return from exile in mainland Europe to claim his throne).
The second, who had been the spare until their father’s death was Prince James, Duke of York.
Once Charles I was dead and Charles II proclaimed King, James became the heir. The third son was
Prince Henry, who died in 1660 just a few months after his eldest brother had retaken the throne.
Charles II had a prodigious number of children, but unfortunately none of them were by his wife,
the long-suffering Portuguese Princess, Catherine of Braganza. This meant that his heir remained his
brother and one-time spare James, who became King in 1685 after Charles’s death. By his first wife,
Lady Anne Hyde, James had produced a considerable number of children too, but only two daughters,
Mary and Anne, survived. Both these girls went through periods of being the heir and the spare
during their youth because James and Lady Anne Hyde had several sons, but none lived more than
a few years. Nevertheless during the times when these little boys were alive they displaced their
sisters in the line of succession. Lady Anne died in 1671 and in 1673 James remarried, this time to
the Italian Princess, Mary of Modena. She too produced numerous children during the 1670s and
1680s, but as of 1688 none had survived, leaving James’s daughter Mary (now the Princes of Orange
after marrying her cousin, William of Orange) as the heir presumptive and her sister Anne
(who was the Princess of Denmark through her own marriage) as the spare. Then, in 1688 everything
changed. In June Mary of Modena gave birth to a healthy baby boy, James, Prince of Wales and he
immediately displaced his half-sister Mary and bumped her and Anne down the line of succession.
This would have been galling enough for two women who had by now no doubt become
accustomed to the idea that they would both one day be Queen (Princess Mary hadn’t been able to
produce any children, so Anne knew she would likely ascend to the throne), but worse still,
these two sisters had been raised staunch Protestants at the insistence of their uncle,
Charles II, while their father, James II, had converted to Catholicism and intended to raise
their new little brother as the same. So what did they do? Well they pretty much stole the throne.
Now I have a whole video on how Mary and Anne went about getting their father’s crown before
he was even dead and in spite of the existence of a legitimate male heir, so I’m just going to give
you the abridged version here. Anne (along with many others it has to be said) put out that her
little brother was not in fact her little brother and that he was instead a changeling smuggled into
Mary of Modena’s birthing chamber in a warming pan. Yes, you heard that right; a warming pan.
Princess Mary and her husband/cousin, William of Orange supported this idea and by the end
of 1688 some panicky English nobles, who were now staring down the barrel of a new Catholic dynasty,
wrote to William and essentially asked him to take the throne. He did so and he and Mary (and she
was the one who actually had the stronger blood claim on the crown) became joint monarchs while
King James, Mary of Modena and their son, fled to France. This series of events became known as the
Glorious Revolution and it completely reshaped the English succession and led to a law barring
Catholics from holding the throne. Mary II (as she now was) died of smallpox in December 1694.
William expired from complications following a riding accident in 1702 and Princess Anne,
who just like Elizabeth I, had once seemed unlikely ever to sit on the throne, found
herself the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland. We now pass from the Stuarts to their successors,
the Hanoverians, who came to the throne in 1714 after Anne died with no surviving children.
The first three King Georges were pretty good at producing children and it was 1817 before the
family had a succession crisis. In that year the ailing George III was still King and his
heir was the Prince Regent, the future George IV. The Prince Regent had only one legitimate child,
Princess Charlotte, but she and her son tragically died in childbirth in that year.
Her father was still the heir, but the spare was now his brother, Prince Frederick, Duke of York
and Albany, a guy you’ve probably never heard of because he’s one of those spares who never made it
to the crown. George III died in 1820, the Prince Regent became George IV and the childless Prince
Frederick became heir to the throne. The spare was now their younger brother, Prince William.
Frederick died in 1827, making William the new heir but he and his wife Adelaide had no surviving
children and so the role of spare was now taken by the young daughter of the next brother, Prince
Edward, Duke of Kent (who’d actually died back in 1820) and her name was Princess Victoria. By now
you can probably see where I’m going with this. George IV died in 1830, his brother became William
IV and Victoria moved up from spare to heir. When William died too in 1837, she became Queen.
Victoria lived until 1901 and with her husband, Prince Albert, the Prince Consort, she had nine
children, all of whom survived into adulthood and had children of their own, so in her hands
the succession was safe for quite some time, but in 1892 there was an upset to the expected line
of descent. Victoria’s eldest son and therefore her heir was the future Edward VII. His eldest
son was Prince Albert, Duke of Clarence, with the role of spare being held by Edward’s second son,
Prince George. In late 1891 Prince Albert got engaged to Mary of Teck and all seemed set for
a grand royal marriage and the production of the next generation of little Princes and Princesses.
Then, in January 1892, 28-year-old Albert died, having succumbed to pneumonia brought on by flu.
There was no major succession crisis though, for his brother George inherited his claim
to the throne and his fiancée, marrying Mary of Teck in 1893 and becoming King
George V in 1910. It was all very Prince Arthur-Henry VIII-Catherine of Aragon,
but with a happier ending for everyone, except of course Albert.
It was George and Mary’s eldest son who would cause one of the greatest scandals to ever hit the
royal family and produce the most recent instance of a spare having to take over for an heir.
This son was called Prince Edward, born in 1894 and known as David within the family.
His next younger brother and therefore the spare, was another Prince Albert, born in 1895 and known
as Bertie to his relations. Edward inherited the throne in January 1936 after George V’s death and
Bertie moved up to the position of heir, but no one seriously expected that this shy man with a
stammer would ever have to be King. It was instead assumed that King Edward VIII, as he now was,
would put his play-boy days behind him, marry a nice English girl and become a father. Not so.
The love of Edward’s life was an American divorcee named Wallis Simpson and his
determination to marry her (which was incompatible with his role as Head of the Church of England),
led to him renouncing the throne in December of that same year and passing it to his
brother. Bertie (who took the regnal name, George VI), was in such a state of shock and misery at
the thought of having to take this job on when he told his mother what was about to happen he
(and these are his words) ‘broke down and sobbed like a child’, which is really saying something
as the dowager Queen Mary wasn’t known for being all warm and fuzzy. Bertie did an admirable job
of helping to steer the country through World War 2 however and after a successful reign,
he died aged just 56 in 1952, passing the throne to his eldest daughter, Elizabeth II.
And that’s the story of the not inconsiderable number of spares who have ended up on the throne
over the past 500 years. I think it just goes to show, you never know what’s coming.
Thank you as always to my wonderful Patrons and to those of you who support the channel by
using the Thanks button underneath videos. If you enjoyed all this talk of Kings and Queens
succeeding to the crown why not try my coronation playlist next to continue your historical journey
and let me know below which of these spare to heir stories is your favourite and why.
I’ll be back next time with a new video and until then, keep learning.