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On the 24th of March603, Queen Elizabeth I 1 of England and Ireland died at Richmond Palace near London. The last child of King Henry VIII was 69 years old and had died without an heir, having never married and after cultivating the idea of herself as the Virgin Queen. Her passing led to a quick flurry of activity as messengers headed north to Scotland. There they informed King James V 6th, ruler of that nation, that his cousin had died and that the English throne was
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now vacant. Elizabeth had never confirmed that James should succeed her and had left the question of the succession hanging in the air for decades. As such, it was not a foregone conclusion that the Scottish king would assume the throne of England unopposed. Yet, as James proceeded south with his courtiers and followers to London in the late spring and early summer of6003, it became clear that the Scottish monarch would ascend as King James I of England. The House of Stewart that he
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ushered into power would rule for over a century, lasting until the House of Hanover in 1714.
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At first, it [music] might seem strange that the Scottish royal family ended up ruling England in6003, but in reality, foreign tinged dynasties were the norm in England. Since England was unified by the House of Wessix back in the 10th century, the throne had passed through numerous dynasties. Several came from France and only gradually became English over time. The Tudas, of which Elizabeth was the last monarch, were as much a Welsh dynasty as an English one. When the Scottish House
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of Stewart, [music] established by James I in6003, passed from the scene in 1714, they were replaced by the German House of Hanover. This is the story of the peculiar donastic history of England from the first unification of the realm under the House of Wessex down to the formation of the British state when the House of Stewart gave way to the House of Hanover. England only emerged gradually as a concept and then as a unified kingdom. The word England itself effectively
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means the land of the angles. The Angles were one of the main Germanic groups that sailed to Britain in the fifth century AD and overran large parts of the island after the Romans strategically withdrew from the island in 410 AD. Other Germanic groups that joined the Angles included the Saxons. They largely came from the coastal regions of northwestern Gmania and what is now Denmark. In the centuries that followed, numerous Anglo-Saxon kingdoms emerged in the former lands of Roman
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Britain. Roman rule had covered England and Wales, though Scotland or Calonia, as the Romans had termed it, had never been subject to Roman dominion. Hence the concept of England was of the land that was once ruled by Rome. Wales came to be considered as distinct over time as the pre- Roman Celtic Britain element remained strong here even after the Angles and Saxons arrived. A ruler of the most powerful Anglo-Saxon kingdom, King Offer of Mercia, even built a large
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dyke or series of defensive earthworks along the border between England and Wales in the 8th century AD. The Kingdom of Mercia nearly succeeded in uniting all of England under its rule in the time of offer. But some powers such as the Kingdom of Wessix in the south held out against the Mercian supremacy, meaning that England would not be unified until a later time. In the 9th century, England had only become more divided, though this was a prelude to the subsequent unification of
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the country. Back in the 790s, the Vikings or Norse people of Scandinavia had begun raiding parts of coastal Britain, striking at monasteries and other sites with wealth and slaves to plunder. This pattern continued for over half a century, replicating the tendency towards hitand-run raids that the Norse war bands had demonstrated elsewhere in Western Europe. But gradually over time, these same war parties began to actually seize territory and set up their own kingdoms in the lands they were
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attacking. In the case of England, what Christian chronicles of the time called the great heathen army arrived in the year 865 and began conquering large parts of the east and north of the country around North Umbrea and East Anglia. Mercia, which had its main power base in northwestern England and the Midlands, was weakened and became a vassel of the Danes for a time. But by the time the Danes moved south to try to conquer Wessex in the 870s, they were running
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out of steam. In 878, the young king of Wessix, Alfred, defeated the Danes at the Battle of Edington. Over the next 20 years, down to his death in 899, he began uniting much of England under his rule, bringing East Anglia and Mercia broadly under the control of Wessex. This was the beginning of the establishment of the kingdom of England and Alfred is often viewed as the first king of England. Though this is not explicitly true, North Umbrea remained under Danish rule for decades to come
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and Mercia too was only loosely controlled by the House of Wessix at this time. Alfred is known as Alfred the Great, not because he managed to fully unify England under his rule, but because he halted the Danish advance, began forcing the Danes in East Anglia and other places to convert to Christianity, and also because he paved the way for the full unification of the kingdom by his son and grandson. In the 10th century, he was succeeded by his son Edward the Elder. In a rather confusing
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development, historians of later centuries looking back at the history of medieval England would choose to call these earlier monarchs by a descriptor name like the great or the elder rather than by a regal number like Alfred the or Edward I. Edward the Elder was arguably the first king of England. His father Alfred had proclaimed himself to be Angllorum Saxonum Rex, meaning king of the Anglo-Saxons, asserting the belief that he ruled over all of the Anglo-Saxons rather than all
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of England. Edward the Elder continued with this title, but he succeeded in reducing Mercuria and North Umbrea to his rule for a time, meaning that he was briefly in charge of virtually all of modern-day England. However, it was really his son Athlan, succeeding Edward in 924, who was the first undisputed king of England. Athlan finally reduced Mercuria and North Umbrea comprehensively to his rule and unified the kingdom. In 927, he began using the title Rex Angllorum, meaning king of the
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English. He even later declared himself on royal charters and coins to be the Rex Totous Pritani, King of the whole of Britain. Although this was a lofty statement for a ruler who did not yet have any major control over a parts of Wales or Scotland, Athlan was the first unequivocal king of England. The dynasty that his grandfather, father and he had established is known as the house of Wessex. People by and large did not have surnames in Europe in the early Middle
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Ages and so the first royal family of England was known by the kingdom which they ruled. The house of Wessix theoretically ruled England for nearly a century and a half after Athlan first began declaring himself Rex Angllorum in 927. However, this was a complex period of English history. While the country remained unified through the remainder of the 10th century and into the 11th, the Danes remained a problem. New armies arrived from Denmark and Norway periodically, but now the royals of
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those two countries were intermaring with the House of Wessex. The royal line of Wessex kings ruled fairly uninterrupted down to 1013. In that year, a Danish warlord named Swain Forkbeard invaded and overthrew Etheld the Unready. After a messy series of wars in the years that followed, during which both Swain and Etheld died, Swain's son Kut succeeded as king of England in 1016. He married Etheld's widow, Emma of Normandy, in an effort to claim some sort of legitimate ties to the House of
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Wessex. Though in reality there was a brief separate dynasty established by Swain and Kut the house of Denmark. For a time under this Danish royal family, England emerged as an imperial power. Kunut also became king of Denmark in 1018 and then of Norway in 1028. Meaning that for a period of time he ruled over an extensive North Sea Empire. Kunut the Great, as he is often termed, ruled down to 1035. Following his death, two of his sons, Harold Herfoot and Haruknut,
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continued the House of Denmark down to 1042. But when Arthur died suddenly and without an heir, Edward the Confessor, a son of Ethel the Unready, who had been overthrown 30 years earlier, reestablished the House of Wessics as rulers of England. >> Edward the Confessor acquired his name because of his intense religious devotion. The 11th century was a period of Christian revival which would culminate in the launch of the crusades to the Holy Land and against the pagans
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of Northern Europe at the end of the century. In Edward, Christianity possibly led him to adopt a vow of celibacy despite being married to Edith of Wessex, the daughter of one of the most powerful ears of the realm. Celibacy is problematic for any monarch, especially in medieval times when their foremost duty was to have children and preserve the royal line. While it is not known with absolute certainty that Edward refused to consumate his marriage, what we do know is that he and
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Edith never had children. Thus, when he died on the 5th of January in the year 1066, the direct line at the House of Wessix died out with him. As a result, Edward's wife, Edith's brother, Harold, claimed the throne on his brother-in-law's death. This theoretically ushered in a new royal dynasty again, the House of Godwin after Harold's father, the powerful Godwin. It would become the shortest lived dynasty in English royal history. Already a different claim to
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the throne had emerged from across the English Channel. William, Duke of Normandy, ruler of Normandy in Northern France, was a second cousin of the recently deceased Edward the Confessor, as Edward's mother, Emma, had hailed from Normandy. Thus, as is very well known, William led an army of his Norman knights across the English Channel and defeated Harold at the Battle of Hastings on the 14th of October 1066. This decisive engagement, killing King Harold and many of the ruling elite of
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Anglo-Saxon England, brought the House of Godwin to an end after just over 9 months and ushered in the rule of the House of Normandy. The Norman conquest would actually take several years to fully complete. Its violent methods involved the brutal subjugation of the Anglo-Saxons and Danes by the Normans, including scorched earth and mass land appropriations. These were brutal but effective in consolidating Norman rule. The importance of the Norman conquest and the establishment of the House of
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Normandy as rulers of England cannot be understated. This didn't just bring a new ruling dynasty. It changed the very culture and society of England. Until this time, the Anglo-Saxons had spoken Anglo-Saxon or old English, an almost strictly Germanic language. Now, it mixed with the old Norman French spoken by William and his Norman knights. This was a romance language derived from the Latin of the Romans. Gradually over time the two languages melded together in
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England to form the modern English language. A hybrid language which mixes elements of the pre-NOman Germanic tongue and the postNorman romance language. The legal and court system also changed with the Germanic common law that had been followed in England mixing with the civil law system of the Normans. a legal system that was also derived more from the laws of the Roman Empire. Bizarrely, French would remain the official language of the law courts in England until the early 1730s as a
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result. These were just some of the changes wrought by the Norman conquest. More immediately, William the Conqueror or William I established his closest followers as baronss all over England, setting up a Norman aristocracy. He ruled down to 1087, though he spent much of his time in Northern France and continued to view himself first and foremost as ruler of Normandy. Two of his sons, William II or William Rufus and Henry I ruled successively after him. Henry would rule until 1135,
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perhaps after organizing the murder of his brother to become king himself all the way back in the year 1100. Much of his reign was characterized by a succession crisis after his only legitimate male heir. William Adelene was killed in a sea accident known as the white ship tragedy of November 1120. Henry spent much of the remainder of his reign trying to convince his nobles that his soul surviving legitimate child Matilda should succeed him. However, in an age when leading men into battle was
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one of the main duties of a monarch, the idea of a female ruler ultimately proved impossible to sell to his lords. Civil war followed when he died in 1135.
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The anarchy, as it is known, was an intense period of civil war that began in 1135 and lasted down to 1154. Matilda attempted to press her right to the throne and had a large contingent of supporters, but others threw their support behind Steven of Bla, a grandson of William the Conqueror on his mother's side. Steven was the de facto king for much of the period of the anarchy, though both sides succeeded in capturing their respective rivals during the years of civil war, only to have them escape
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or be rescued again. While both also stressed that they were the legitimate monarch, England was torn apart in the process. The medieval chronicles of the 12th century make it clear that the period of the anarchy was a particularly destructive time for the country. Large parts of England were left destitute during the conflict. In the end, the war between Steven and Matilda only came to a concrete end in 1154 because Steven's designated heir, Eustace, had predesceased him in 1153.
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As a result, when Steven himself died the following year, it paved the way for Matilda's son Henry to become King Henry II. The names of donastic houses change when succession is via the female line. What this means is that while Henry became [music] king based on his mother's descent from William the Conqueror, he became the first monarch of the house of Plantaginet because his father was Jeffrey Plantaginet. Jeffrey was the ruler of the county of Onju in northwestern France, meaning
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that the house of Plantaginet was also theoretically a French donastic [music] house. Henry II would rule England for 35 years. It was an often controversial reign, most especially because of his efforts to assert greater crown control over the English church, a move which led to him clashing with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Beckett. Beckett was eventually murdered in 1170 by supporters of Henry in the dispute. What was especially heinous about this was
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that the murder took place on sanctified ground in Canterbury Cathedral itself. Beyond this, Henry raised the English crown to a position of unprecedented power. Barring perhaps the brief period when Kunit had ruled over the North Sea Empire a century and a half earlier. Henry not only ruled England, he held Normandy and several other French lands inherited through the royal house of Normandy. His own father's inheritance had brought him the county of Onju in France, while Henry's marriage to
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Elellanena of Aquitane placed him in control of a large part of western France. These lands centered on Aquitane and Gaskini and the important port city of Bordeaux. Moreover, the English crown was already exercising extensive control over Wales, though this control was not yet complete. Henry II flexed his muscles further and attempted to make vassels of both the King of Scotland and the Dukes of Britany in northwestern France. Finally, in 1169, Henry sanctioned the invasion of Ireland by
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some of his leading nobles, beginning a history of English intervention in Ireland, which still resonates to this day. Such was the power of the English crown by the latter stages of Henry II's reign that historians generally write these days about an empire. The name Anja derives from the county of Anju which covered England and Wales, parts of Ireland and nearly half of modern-day France, particularly in the north and west. The Ona Empire of the House of
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Plantaginet proved nearly as short-lived as the North Sea Empire of Konut the Great. The problem was that when Henry died in 1189, his son and heir, Richard the Lionheart or King Richard I was about to set off to lead the third crusade to the Holy Land. This was arguably the most famous of all the crusades for the manner in which Richard and the Muslim warlord Saladine sparred with one another for control of Jerusalem. However, Richard's focus on the reconquest of that city meant that
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he consequently spent the first half of his reign far from home. In his [music] absence, his far less capable younger brother, John, tried to revolt against the nobles, who Richard had installed to govern in his absence. The crown was weakened, not least because Richard had directed so many resources towards the crusade, and many of those who had been subdued by the English crown in France, Scotland, and Wales during the time of Henry II began to exercise a renewed independence.
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Richard eventually returned to his dominions in Western Europe in 1194 after essentially bolstering the crusader cause in the Holy Land but failing to retake Jerusalem. He spent the next 5 years attempting to reconstitute full control over the Anjava Empire. However, in 1199, he died at just 41 years of age from a wound he had suffered in battle that turned gangras. His marriage to Bengaria of Nava, a princess of the Basque region in northern Spain, had been childless, as
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the pair had spent little time together after marrying while he was on crusade. Therefore, John now succeeded as King John I. There is perhaps a reason why there has never been a King John II. The first one proved to be a disaster as a monarch. He clashed with the church and was excommunicated by the pope. Most disastrously, he went to war with the French crown and managed to lose the vast majority of his family's extensive dominions in France, including the duche
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of Normandy, the lands from which William the Conqueror had staged his conquest of England. It was not just that John managed to lose most of the house of Plantaginet's vast territories in France in a disastrous war from 1202 onwards. He also quarreled intensely with his own nobles at home in England. The Ears and baronss of England were unhappy as it stood [music] with the catastrophic loss of lands in France. What was worse, John had raised the burden of taxation so
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that he could raise new armies to try to stem the flood of losses to the French. Other points of conflict between the crown and nobility included the king encroaching on bonial privileges of land held by the church. All of this resulted in growing tensions which erupted in the 1210s. In 1212, some baronss conspired unsuccessfully in a plot to kill Jon. The situation grew worse in 1214 when John effectively lost his battle against the French and his losses on the
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continent were confirmed. As pressure on the king grew, he agreed to issue a royal charter known as Magna Carta, Latin for great charter in 1215. Magna Carta is a foundational document of English constitutional history and in the development of modern democracy. It stated that there were certain rights held by the nobles of the realm which had to be recognized and respected by the king. The great charter also limited the power of the crown and is viewed by many as the first step in a very long
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process whereby a constitutional monarchy was developed in England. Magna Carta would go on to influence everything from the US Constitution to the French Revolution. That being said, the charter failed to prevent a more intense war breaking out between Jon and the nobles within a short period of time. It was also almost immediately broken by Jon, resulting in the outbreak of more conflict. This was the first baron's war lasting from 1215 to 1217 and was punctuated by John's death in
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1216 from dissentry. John's premature death at 49 years of age meant that his son Henry who had just turned 9 years old succeeded him as King Henry III. This was a less than ideal situation for a kingdom in crisis. And yet Henry's reign proved comparatively more successful. It was long, in fact, the longest in English political history up to that point, with Henry ruling down to 1272, 56 years after he first ascended the throne. He stabilized the situation after he began ruling in his own right
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in the 1220s. He also tried to resume the war effort in France to reclaim some of the lands his father had lost. Though ultimately he was unsuccessful in this. Instead Henry eventually came to arrangements with the French in which the English king evidently began to accept the reality of the situation. Henry was in effect a very beige monarch, someone who ruled for a long time and improved the situation he inherited from his father, though without much fanfare. The
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greatest compliment that could be paid to him is that he had helped stabilize England. The country was on a steady enough footing by the end of his reign that his son, King Edward I, became one of England's most successful monarchs. Edward was the monarch who came closest to compensating for England's loss of its extensive territories in France by nearly conquering all of Britain. He can lay claim to being the monarch who finally reduced Wales effectively to
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English rule while in the 1290s he also managed to assert English control over Scotland for a brief period of time. Moreover, English control over large parts of Ireland was expanding and would peak at the start of the 14th century before entering into decline as a result of what historians call the Gaelic resurgence there. Unfortunately for King Edward I and the Plantaginate dynasty, strong kings are often followed by weak ones and this was becoming a very common pattern for the
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custodians of the English throne. When the conqueror of Wales died in 1307, he was succeeded by his son Edward II. The new monarch became infamous for promoting royal favorites like Piers Gavston and Hugh Dispenser, some of whom may have been his male lovers. In turn, these individuals and their families exploited their influence over the king to build up large factional networks. They amassed significant power and wealth disrupting the social equilibrium in the process. To compound matters, the
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conquest of Scotland was broadly reversed as figures there such as Robert de Bruce expanded a revolt against English rule. This opposition in Scotland had already taken root in the time of Edward I, but now worked to achieve Scottish independence once again. Matters were not helped by a terrible famine which ravaged Europe in the mid310s, the significance of which is often overlooked because of the even more deadly arrival of the bubonic plague to Europe three decades later. Eventually,
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Edward's favoritism to the dispenser family alienated a large number of his nobles, including the powerful Roger Mortimer. He subsequently entered into a relationship with Edward's own wife, Isabella of France, and they overthrew Edward II in favor of his young son, King Edward III, who became king in 1327.
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14-year-old Edward III might have become king of England in January 1327, but it was effectively Mortimer and Isabella who ruled England. That is until 1330 when Edward demonstrated his acumen at a young age by moving against Mortimer and having him killed. He then began to rule in his ownstead. Edward's reign, the second longest prior to the 18th century, would last down to 1377 and would have enormous implications. In 1337, he went to war with France. Initially, he had hoped to reclaim some
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of the territory that had been lost back in the days of his great greatgrandfather, King John, but he soon developed grander ambitions to claim the French throne as well. The senior male branch of the long- reigning Capescian dynasty had died out in France in 1328 with the death of King Charles IV. Charles had been succeeded by King Philip V 6th, the first monarch of the new house of Valwa. The thing was that Edward actually had a stronger claim to succeed to the French throne as Charles
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IVth had been his uncle, his mother Isabella's brother. Therefore, in 1340, Edward began pressing his right to the French throne. It was the beginning of the H 100red Years War whereby the monarchs of England sought to reconstitute their continental empire in France and if possible even join the crowns of England and France under one ruler. Initially Edward met with considerable success in the 1340s and 1350s, but over time his efforts stalled. By the 1360s and 1370s, the war
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was turning into a stalemate, albeit with the English having reclaimed parts of northern France around Normandy and a solid power base in the west centered on Bordeaux, Accutane, and Gaskani. King Edward III was arguably England's greatest medieval monarch. It wasn't simply that he rejuvenated the crown's position in France and undid the humiliations suffered back in King J's day. He also oversaw the creation of the most centralized kingdom in late medieval Europe, one that was capable of
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responding to problems because of an effective government, taxation system, and judiciary. Moreover, Edward led the country through a cataclysmic crisis in the shape of the Black Death. the first and most virilent wave of the bubonic plague. The black death ravaged Europe from 1346 onwards, killing an estimated 1/3 of the population of the continent over the next decade. It was also Edward who was largely responsible for building Windsor Castle into the great center of
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royal power that it became west of London. His marriage to Philipper of Ano, a noble woman from a powerful aristocratic house in the Low Countries, would prove enormously consequential for the donastic politics of England for well over a century. Edward and Philipper had 13 children in all. Several of these died either in infancy or because of the Black Death, but five of the boys lived to become adults. The eldest, Edward, the Black Prince, was a formidable figure who became England's
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war leader in France in the 1360s, but he died a year before his father and never became king himself. Of the others, the third, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, was in many ways the most important. John inherited vast estates around England and his branch of the royal family became extremely influential. Others such as the descendants of the second eldest son, Lionel, Duke of Clarence, and the fourth eldest, Edmund, Duke of York, would soon play a role in
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a fresh wave of unrest and civil war in England from the late 14th century onwards. King Edward III's death in 1377 ushered in the familiar pattern of one capable and strong English ruler, being immediately followed by a weak and reckless one. In this instance, Edwards was succeeded by his 10-year-old grandson, Richard II, the son and heir of the Black Prince. Richard began to rule in his own right as he grew up in the 1380s. Problems began to appear quickly of a
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kind that echoed the reign of Edward II at the start of the century. Richard was inclined toward favoring upstarts amongst the nobility. This was often based purely on his personal relationships with them rather than honoring the seniority and power of the more established noble lines. By the late 1380s, there were already moves to force him into acting in line with what the senior nobles of the realm wanted. The alliance of English nobles who opposed him, which included John of
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Gour's young son and heir, Henry Bowling Broke, managed to get Richard to curb his worst impulses for a time. However, in the 1390s, the king became more assertive again and pushed back against those who had tried to resist him in the 1380s. His relationship with his first cousin Henry Bowling became particularly tense and eventually ended with Bowloling going into exile in France. Richard then refused to acknowledge Bowling Broke as successor to his father's vast titles and lands after
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John of Gaunt died early in 1399. Henry struck quickly. That summer, while Richard was campaigning to revive royal authority in Ireland, he crossed to England and seize control of the country in an almost bloodless clash. Richard was captured and deposed after returning to England, following which Henry was crowned as King Henry IVth of England. In some ways, this was a continuation of the house of Plantaginet, but Henry is often viewed as the first monarch of the
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house of Lancaster after his father's ducal title. The most striking aspect of Henry IVth's reign was his seizure of power and establishment of the House of Lancaster. Thereafter he ran into his own difficulties quite quickly, learning that it was much easier to be in opposition to the king than to actually rule. Firstly, he faced the largest rebellion in Wales of the late medieval era, led by a local ruler by the name of Oang Glindur. On top of this, he suffered from premature ill health and
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from the opposition of an emerging faction at court that surrounded his own son and heir, Henry of Mmouth. Ultimately, his health affliction, which was possibly leprosy, and certainly included some severe skin affliction, claimed his life in 1413, just shy of his 46th birthday. As a result, his young son succeeded as King Henry V at just 26 years of age, though he was already a seasoned political figure and military commander by that time. Henry V's reign would be
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relatively brief, but one which was hailed by his contemporaries and by subsequent generations of English historians. He ended the revolt in Wales and then resumed the H 100red Years War against the French after a period of some prolonged reluctance to seek military engagement in France since Edward III's day. On St. Crisen's Day 1415, the 25th of October, Henry and his English longbow men inflicted a crushing defeat on the heavy cavalry of the French at the Battle of Azinkor.
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In the period that followed, the English war to claim control of France reached its high water mark as Henry forced the French into the Treaty of Troy in 1420. Henry now married Katherine of Valwa, the daughter of King Charles V 6th of France, and it was promised that Henry would succeed the aging and mentally unstable Charles as King of France when he died. Edward III's dream of uniting England and France under him or one of his descendants was seemingly close to being realized.
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All too often there was a cyclical nature to English donastic history. This continued to be the case in the middle of the 15th century. First Henry V, a very capable monarch died young in 1422 at just 35 years of age. His premature passing was most likely from dissentry, an intestinal disease that leads to severe diarrhea. It was possibly the cause of the death of the Black Prince as well a half a century earlier. In both instances, the early death of the Black Prince and Henry Vickly ushered in
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a period of minority rule as a child now ascended to the throne. In the case of the succession to Henry V, this was the king's 9-month-old infant son, Henry V 6th. Like Richard II before him, he would grow up to prove to be an ineffective monarch. His reign was dominated by his cousins and a string of overmighty aristocrats such as the Bowforts, a cohort of nobles descended from John of Gaunt and his third wife, Katherine Swinford. The war effort in France went into sharp decline for the
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English during Henry V 6th's reign, culminating in the effective end of the Hundred Years War in 1453. When news of the final English defeat on the continent arrived to Henry, the king suffered a serious psychological collapse. He became catatonic for a period of nearly a year and a half between the summer of 1453 and the end of 1454. As his reign descended into disaster, support for Richard, third Duke of York, a great grandson of King Edward III, grew sharply. Soon war would follow.
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The series of conflicts which began in 1455 is known as the Wars of the Roses, owing to the fact that the ruling house of Lancaster had a red rose as part of their heraldic symbol, while the House of York with Duke Richard at its head, had a white rose as part of its coat of arms. The outbreak of the conflict in 1455 was surprisingly caused by the partial recovery of Henry V 6th. Henry's recovery ensured that the Bowforts and others around them could reassert their
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authority over the weak king. In response, York's supporters urged him to wage war. The first stage of the conflict was brief and saw Richard and the Yorkists win a major victory at the first battle of St. Orbins on the 22nd of May 1455. Thereafter, Richard was established as Lord Protector of the realm. the de facto head of Henry's government. Yet the Bowforts and Henry's queen, Margaret of Anonju, did not accept the situation, and in 1459, the wars resumed. Richard
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increasingly realized he would have to claim the throne for himself. But he died at the Battle of Wakefield on the 30th of December 1460 before he could realize his ambition. Instead, it fell to his son and heir, Edward, to do so. He won a series of striking victories in the first months of 1461 and that summer was crowned as King Edward IVth of England, establishing the House of York as the new ruling line. There would be a renewed effort in 1470 to overthrow Edward and place Henry back on the
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throne, but it ultimately failed in 1471. In that year, Henry and his son and heir, Edward of Westminster, were both killed, bringing an end [music] to the immediate Lancastrian threat to the new Yorkist monarch. The House of York might well have continued to rule England for decades or even centuries to come had it not been for Edward's early death in 1483 from some unknown illness, perhaps typhoid or pneumonia. He left behind two young healthy sons, one of whom immediately succeeded him as
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King Edward V. But the actions of Edward IVth's brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, would serve to undermine the new dynasty. He was appointed as regent for his 12-year-old nephew following his brother's death in 1483. He almost immediately moved to secure the throne for himself. Edward V and his brother were placed in captivity in the Tower of London, never to be seen again. While Richard soon proclaimed himself as King Richard III, this heinous act towards his own nephews provided an
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opportunity for a Welsh upstart by the name of Henry Tuda, who was at this time in exile in Britany and France. Henry's claim to the throne came through his mother, Margaret Bowford. However, it was a very weak one as the Bowfort children had been born out of wedlock and were only legitimized towards the end of John of Gant's life on the basis that they could never succeed to the throne of England. Moreover, on his father's side, Henry was actually largely Welsh. Despite these
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impediments, in 1485 he crossed to Wales with a small army, marched into England, and defeated Richard in combat at the Battle of Bosworth Field, during which Richard III was killed. Henry claimed the throne as King Henry VIIth, the first monarch of the House of Tuda. He would face several attempts to unseat him, but he saw them off and effectively ended the Wars of the Roses by marrying Elizabeth of York, Edward IVth's daughter, thus theoretically uniting what remained of the houses of York and
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Lancaster. When Henry VIIIth died in 1509, his eldest surviving son became the new monarch. King Henry VIII is viewed by some as the most controversial of all England's rulers. What is often overlooked is how popular he was in the first half of his 38-year reign. His marriage to Queen Catherine of Araggon was one of mutual respect. At first, Henry was not yet the tyrant that he would later become. Indeed, his accession was greeted with joy after the da years of Henry VIIth. Henry VIIIth
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had been a very shrewd and successful monarch, but he was not a king who earned the adulation of his people. His chief desire had been to stifle any resistance to the new dynasty and to put England's finances back on a firm footing. Henry VIII, by way of contrast, was young, athletic, and determined to renew the war with the French. Over time, things changed, though. By the 1520s, his marriage to Catherine of Araggon had only resulted in a healthy daughter. Henry had no legitimate male
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heir with which to secure the royal succession. Then he became entangled with Anne Berlin. Soon he was obsessed with divorcing Catherine and marrying Anne. He was sure that Anne would deliver him the son he needed. In the end, Henry had to split with the Roman Catholic Church and had his government infiltrated by a Protestant faction in order to acquire his divorce, though he himself was no Protestant. When Anne failed to quickly produce the male heir, Henry's worst impulses really took off.
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He would go through four more wives by the early 1540s. Jane Seymour, an of Cleves, Katherine Howard, and Katherine P. In the end, only one of the six, Jane Seymour, delivered him the son he wanted, a boy named Edward. In the meantime, Henry had become a different tyrannical figure. His initiation of the Protestant Reformation was followed by the dissolution of the religious orders in England, a decision which brought huge amounts of wealth into his coffers. This
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he promptly squandered through a fresh, pointless war against the French in the 1540s that achieved almost nothing. When Henry died in January 1547, it must have been a relief to many. It certainly was a boon to the Seymour family, who now rose to power within the government through the new monarch. The fruit of Henry's brief marriage to Jane Seymour. This was King Edward V 6th, who inherited the throne at an age too young to rule by himself at first. The Protestant faction was soon back in
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favor at court, having lost power at the start of the 1540s as Henry reacted against the very same religious changes he had initiated. A more thoroughgoing Protestant Reformation was affected by 1550, one which leaned towards Calvinism, the more austere branch of Protestantism that had been developed in Geneva by Jean Calva in the 1530s. For instance, the Latin mass was replaced with a service in the English language as dictated through the first book of common prayer issued in 1549.
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As Edward grew into his teenage years, it was clear that he also expressed fervent Protestant beliefs. Clearly, the half-hearted drift towards the Protestant camp that had occurred under Henry VIII was going to become cemented under Edward. That is until Edward became severely ill in 1553 and died that summer, perhaps from tuberculosis. His passing meant that Henry VIII's daughter from his first marriage to Catherine of Araggon now became the first ever full Queen of England, as
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Matilda had only ever been a claimant to the throne back in the days of the Anarchy four centuries earlier. Mary I or Bloody Mary as she has become known was determined to bring England back into the Catholic fold and burned hundreds of Protestants at the stake as part of her program of religious change. Most English people were still Catholics by then, and Protestantism in England would have been crushed had it not been for Mary's own death from what seems to have been uterine cancer in 1558.
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Thus it was that the last surviving legitimate child of Henry VIII, the daughter whose birth had so disappointed him when she was born to Anne Berlin back in 1533, rose to the throne as Queen Elizabeth I. Elizabeth's reign was a paradoxical one. She ruled for 45 years and in the 19th century was hailed by Victorian historians as the monarch of England who paved the way for the British Empire. Some of this is true. Explorers like Martin Frobisher, Humphrey Gilbert and
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Francis Drake explored the Atlantic and even circumnavigated the world during her reign and under her patronage. Walter Riley had attempted to establish the first English colony in what would become the United States. Ireland was firmly conquered after centuries of twoing and throwing with the dozens of independent Gaelic lords there. At home, the Protestant Reformation was cemented in place in a more moderate form known as Elizabeth's middle way. As Anglicanism took root, England even
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managed to wage a lengthy war against Spain, the world's first truly global superpower during her reign. It was English troops that helped the Dutch Republic claim its freedom from Spanish dominion, and England withtood several attempted invasions by the Spanish. The most famous of these, of course, was the attempted invasion by the Spanish Armada in 1588.
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What was unusual about all of this was that Elizabeth was not a particularly strong monarch. She delayed and procrastinated over every decision that needed to be made, often driving the members of her privy council, the cabinet of ministers, who really ran the realm from day to day mad with her indecision. Moreover, there was a complex psychology to the woman whose mother had been executed on the orders of her own father back when she was just an infant. Elizabeth would never marry herself,
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though the requirement to produce an heir meant that she entertained numerous royal suitors from France and even Sweden during the 1560s and 1570s. In the end, when the Virgin Queen died in6003, her Scottish cousin James, a descendant of the Tudtor through the marriage of Margaret Tuda, one of Henry VIIIth's daughters to King James IVth exactly a century earlier, rode south to claim the throne. The House of Tuda had come to an end after 118 years, and the House of
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Stewart rose to power in England, finally uniting all of Britain under the rule of one man, not by conquest, as monarchs like Edward I had attempted, but by the simple happenstances of marriage and biology. James I's reign was in many ways amongst the most successful in English or British history. For instance, it was during his reign that the firm roots of England's overseas colonial empire were laid down. The first permanent English colony in North America was established
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at Jamestown in Virginia in6007. 13 years later, the Mayflower arrived at New England. By the end of his reign in 1625, the first English colonies in the Caribbean were being founded on some of the smaller islands there. James' reign also had farreaching implications for Ireland as the Olter plantation saw an influx of thousands of Scottish settlers to the north of the country, a development which still has implications today. But James was also a spenthrift monarch who was reckless in how he
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lavished financial gifts on his court favorites. This contributed to some extent to the difficulties of his son, King Charles I's reign. Yet, it wasn't simply that Charles inherited poor finances. As part of his quest for more money, Charles also sought to become an absolutist monarch who would rule without parliament and impose religious uniformity across Britain. In the process, Charles's actions would attempt to reverse hundreds of years of constitutional evolution in England
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since the time of the Magna Carta back in 1215. The political community, chiefly parliament, was unwilling to accept this and in 1642 civil war erupted in England. The English civil wars that characterized the 1640s were part of a wider series of conflicts across the Stewart dominions that had started in Scotland in the late 1630s and which included a major rebellion in Ireland from the late autumn of 1641. These are more broadly known today as the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. In order
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to overcome them, Charles constantly tried to play one side against another. He even countenanced allying with the Catholics of Ireland to help him defeat his enemies in Parliament in England in the mid640s. In the end, owing to his intrigence and continued deceitfulness even after he was defeated militarily, Charles was defeated by the parliamentarians. The radical wing of the parliamentarian cause led by Oliver Cromwell placed Charles on trial and executed him on the 30th of January 1649.
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Moreover, Cromwell's faction were unwilling to accept another claimant to the throne in his place. And so for a brief period of 11 years between 1649 and 1660, England became a republic, one which was headed by Cromwell as Lord Protector between 1653 and 1658. This is the only time that England has been a republic in its long history. 2 years after Cromwell's death in 1658, this radical experiment was abandoned. Charles I's son and heir returned home from the continent and the monarchy was
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restored albeit with the king's power now curtailed after the chastening defeat of Charles I in the 1640s
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the time in which England was still an individual kingdom distinct from Scotland and Ireland albeit one ruled by the same monarch was drawing near to an end and soon a more unified British state emerged. This last period prior to the act of union and the end of the reign of the house of Stewart was a time littered with contradictions. On the one hand, after Charles II was restored as king in 1660, a period of hedinism ensued that contrasted with the da puritanism of the 1650s.
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Charles II's reign was a period of heavy drinking and cultural vitality in London. Yet, it masked tensions under the surface, primarily concerning religion. Charles was at best a moderate Protestant. Worse still, his brother James, Duke of York, who succeeded him as King James II in 1685, was a Catholic. This was unacceptable to a large part of the political realm. And in 1688, they invited his daughter Mary's husband, William of Orange, the most powerful noble of the Dutch
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Republic, to come to England and seize power. William Duly did so. The glorious revolution that followed saw James flee to France as his supporters abandoned him. William and Mary now became the new co-mons, William III and Mary II. Most importantly, in 1689, the Bill of Rights was issued as the basis whereby William and Mary would assume the throne. It effectively stated that no decision could be imposed on parliament unilaterally by the crown. Where the Magna Carta had begun to establish the
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inalienable rights of certain parts of the English political community nearly half a millennium earlier, the Bill of Rights was the defining moment in the transition to a constitutional monarchy in England. As a result, in the 18th century, Parliament would supersede the monarch as the effective government of England and Britain. This process whereby the constitutional monarchy matured into a modern democracy in the 18th and 19th centuries would ultimately take place under a new
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dynasty and within a new state apparatus. Two things happened in the early 18th century that led to this. Firstly, in 1707, the Act of Union was passed to unite the thrones of England and Scotland. While James I had united the two countries under his sole rule when he headed south to London back in6003, the two crowns had remained separate and they continued to be a Scottish administration in Edinburgh. The act of union changed this, ushering in the British state. A further act of union in
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1801 would create a united kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Secondly, the House of Stewart came to an end just 7 years after the Act of Union of 1707. Mary II had died in 1694 and her husband passed in 1702. This ensured that Mary's sister Anne became the last monarch of the House of Stewart in 1702. She was a woman with a tragic natal history, having lost all of her children from 17 pregnancies. Thus, when she died in 1714, the direct line of the House of Stewart came to an
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end. Her successor was George, the elector of Hanover in northern Germany, a great grandson of King James I on his mother's side. It was the House of Hanover that would oversee Britain's emergence as a global imperial power in the 18th century. Monarchical England was coming to an end. A new Britain with its constitutional monarchy of Parliament and crown was now emerging. The donastic history of England between the first emergence of a unified kingdom of England in the 10th century and the
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active union in 1707 is a complex story, one involving upwards of nine dynasties if one views the house of Lancaster and York as distinct from the house of Plantaginet. It also includes the very short-lived house of Godwin in 1066. Of these dynasties, the majority came from outside England, at least on the paternal male side. The house of Denmark of the 11th century, for instance, was a Danish royal line, while the houses of Normandy and Plantaginet had origins in
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France. The Judas came from Wales on the male side, and the Stewarts came from Scotland. They were now being replaced by a German family, though all of these had ties to England, particularly on the maternal side of each family. Whatever their origins might have been, each of these dynasties had overseen periods of significant change in England, which had seen its transition from a medieval monarchy to a constitutional monarchy in the 18th century. Moreover, England had survived.
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Despite efforts by the Danes, the Spanish, and others to subsume England into a continental kingdom over the centuries, England had remained independent. Moreover, it had come to dominate both Britain and Ireland. In the 18th century, its power continued to grow. Bolstered by an ambitious merkantile and colonial class in London, colonies had been established in North America. the Caribbean and India by the end of the 17th century. In the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, the British Empire
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would become the world's foremost superpower and would change the history of the world. What do you think of the dynasties of England in the medieval and early modern periods? Was one particular house or dynasty responsible for England's emergence as a great power in modern times? Or did the British Empire ultimately emerge because of the manner in which the constitutional monarchy balanced political power in England and created a powerful business and colonial
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class? Please let us know in the comment section. And in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
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