The notion of a world composed of ‘Nation States’ only began to arise in the 18th century. Before this time, governance was always by a powerful family, with a king or queen as its head. All houses start with an independently powerful individual, then branch off in different ways:

  • Main/primary/elder line: in the main line of succession.
    • Elder branch: after a split, marriage or any other succession issues, the main branch may rename to differentiate itself from the collateral branch. Elder doesn’t necessarily mean the name has existed for longer, just that it is more powerful
  • Collateral Branches: not in the main line of succession.
    • Younger Branch: an inferior branch subordinate to the elder branch.
    • Cadet branch: not subordinate to the main line. Main line may even have lost all power or relevance.

‘To laterally branch’ is simply the verb to describe the act of formation of a collateral branch.

All the houses to have ruled in England (from 1066), Great Britain (from 1707) and the United Kingdom (from 1800):

S

All were founded by a charismatic and independently powerful individual and saw an unbroken patrilineal line, until the Windsor’s, with the ascension of King Charles, who chose not to form a cadet house of Mountbatten.

Cadet Branch

Twice, the dynasty simply spawned a cadet branch according to a name change convention:

  1. King John ’lackland’ the Angevin to King Henry III Plantagenet. John lost most territory in France including the Angevin lands. We retrospectively call his son, Henry III, the first head of the House of Plantagenet. The distinction was not acknowledged at the time. It is a historical convention. At the time, they retained the title: ‘House of Anjou’.
  2. King George changed the name of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor in 1917, during WWI. This made Windsor a cadet branch of the former.

Seizing of Power

In every other case of dynastic change, there was a lack of male heirs. Sometimes the dynastic successor was won through force.

  1. Henry I of Normandy to Stephen of Blois via Stephen asserting control first and defending his claim,
  2. Stephen I to Empress Matilda and back again, via war.
  3. Stephen of Blois to Henry II the Angevin, peacefully via a succession treaty in effect after Stephen died after Henry beat Stephen in battle.
  4. Richard II Plantagenet to Henry IV of Lancaster. When Henry IV overthrew his cousin, the house of his father’s lordship, the 1st Duke of Lancaster, formed a cadet branch from the house of Plantagenet.
  5. Henry VI of Lancaster to Edward IV of York. When Edward overthrew Henry via the claim of the York cadet branch.
  6. James II of Stuart to William III of Orange-Nassau by landing a large army and causing surrender without ever having to fight.

Marriage

Other times, a Queen marked the end of a dynasty:

  1. Empress Matilda, nominally inherited the leadership of the soon-to-be-extinct house of Normandy when her father Henry I died with no living patrilineal heirs. She maintained a disputed claim of the leadership of the Dukedom of Normandy against her cousin, Stephen of Blois after her father Henry I died. She had also married into the House of Anjou, under the leadership of her husband Geoffrey Plantagenet so the House of Normandy was considered extinct upon the death of Henry I.
  2. Elizabeth I nominally inherited leadership of the soon-to-be-extinct house of Tudor when father Henry I died with no living patrilineal heirs. She proclaimed that she would not marry because she was ‘already bound unto a husband which is the Kingdom of England’. Her double first-cousin twice-removed on both sides, younger generation; James I then inherited the throne, descended from Henry VII and the maternal line. The House of Tudor was for all intents and purposes considered extinct upon the death of her Brother Edward VI.
  3. Mary II never inherited leadership of the House of Stuart. She married her cousin, William of Orange, who led the House of Orange-Nassau. William seized power from Mary’s father, James II in the Glorious revolution. James II retained leadership of the House of Stuart. William and Mary died without heirs and the crown passed to Mary’s sister, Anne.
  4. Anne never inherited leadership of the house of Stuart. She married into the house of Oldenburg who ruled Denmark. Their eldest son died at 11-years-old. The dynasty of the Stuarts died with Mary. But the house of Stuart continued to claim the inheritance, from exile in Italy, throneless and landless, through 4 generations and 100 years via James II, bankrolled by Catholic nobles on the continent. George I, a second cousin of Anne, inherited the throne.
  5. Victoria, never inherited the leadership of the house of Hanover. On the death of William IV, it passed to a German male relative, ending the personal union of Britain and Hanover. She married into the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.
  6. Elizabeth II did inherit leadership of the House of Windsor when her father, George VI died with no patrilineal heirs. By tradition, the Windsor dynasty was expected to end and be replaced by the house of the husband. Phillip was a low-ranking member of the Glücksburg house which ruled Greece and Denmark, thus until the age of 26, Phillip was literally called ‘Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark’. It was at this point when, after proposing, he forwent his Glücksburg titles and changed his surname to ‘Mountbatten’, his mother’s surname. Mountbatten being a noble family, but not a royal house, it was not seen as the start of a new dynasty or cadet branch of Glücksburg. Charles III could elect to use the name Mountbatten, which would de facto make it a cadet branch of Glücksburg.

Soon after Elizabeth became Queen in 1952, Lord Mountbatten observed that because it was the standard practice for the wife in a marriage to adopt her husband’s surname, the House of Mountbatten now reigned. When Elizabeth’s grandmother, Queen Mary, heard of this comment, she informed British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and he later advised the Queen to issue a royal proclamation declaring that the royal house was to remain known as the House of Windsor. This she did on 9 April 1952, officially declaring it her “Will and Pleasure that I and My children shall be styled and known as the House and Family of Windsor, and that My descendants, other than female descendants who marry and their descendants, shall bear the name of Windsor.” Philip privately complained, “I am nothing but a bloody amoeba. I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his own children.”

In times past this would not have been an issue and the name of the royal house would automatically change once the Crown passed through the female line to reflect the patrilineal line. With the name Windsor the British monarchy has a name that does not have foreign roots like many of the former British royal houses had. This trend, of adopting or keeping nationalistic names for European Monarchies has become the new tradition. Many extant monarchies have chosen to keep the dynastic name even when passing through the female line. For example, in the Netherlands the dynastic name of the royal family is Orange-Nassau despite passing through the female line in the last three generations. Even further back in time, Austria kept the Habsburg name even though the last male line Habsburg, Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI, died in 1740. In Russia, the name of Romanov was kept even though the last male line of Romanov died with the death of Emperor Peter II in 1730.

The dynasty that replaced the Romanov’s were the House of Holstein-Gottorp a collateral branch of the House of Oldenburg, but because Romanov was the name so associated with the Russian royal family it was decided to retain the name. In Belgium and Luxembourg, they also have distanced themselves from their dynastic titles. In 1986, former Grand Duke Jean of Luxembourg, dropped the dynastic title of the House of Bourbon-Parma, because the head of that house, Duke Carlo-Hugo of Bourbon Parma deemed that Jean’s son, the current Grand Duke Henri, had entered into an unequal marriage. In 1921 King Albert I of Belgium dropped the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha dynastic name for the same reasons George V did. Today, the Belgian royal family is simply known as being “of Belgium.”

In 2013, the UK passed the Succession to the Crown Act which replaced male-preference primogeniture with absolute primogeniture for those in the line of succession born after 28 October 2011, which means the eldest child, regardless of gender, precedes any siblings. The Windsor’s therefore assert that the descendants of Elizabeth II remain the main branch. This breaks all historical precedent except for a few exceptional circumstances. Therefore, the claim of which house currently controls the UK depends on how history views it.