a male child wasn’t born to take the thrown?
You mean monarchies, as in “no one to become king, let’s switch to a republic,” not dynasties, as in " no male heir? Let’s have a war to see which family gets the throne?"
I guess. I mean, “The poor King and Queen couldn’t have a son, so there will be no more King and Queen.”
But the King not having a son usually means that the throne goes to some other relative…the King’s brother, or the King’s brother’s child. Or to the king’s daughter. And it was very common for kings to be elected by the nobility, rather than through inheritance.
I can’t for the life of me think of a situation where monarchy was abandoned due to the lack of an heir. Maybe certain kingdoms disolved into smaller kingdoms when no person who could be heir to the throne of each kingdom existed. For instance, for a long time the king of Spain and the king of Portugal were the same person…but Portugal was never annexed, and eventually they split. Or the question of whether the king of England was also the king of Scotland, and vice-versa.
In some monarchies, both males and females can inherit, though in some (e.g., the British monarchy) males inherit before their older sisters.
In England in 1603 the Tudor dynasty ended because Elizabeth died unmarried and childless, and without a younger sister (her older brother and older sister had already reigned before her and died). But the monarchy didn’t end – it went off to a distant cousin, James VI of Scotland, who became James I of England. The English weren’t quite ready to become a republic, even though they become a republic less than 50 years later.
Historically, there have been three mechanisms in such a situation.
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The rules were charged to allow for a female heir to take the throne, as Japan was considering. (IIRC, there were some cases in which the female was called a “king.” Perhaps in a Scandinavian country? Please, somebody, jog my failing memory.)
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The closest living male relative or else a close male relative who was acceptable to all factions took the throne.
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Another family usurped the throne and started a new dynasty. (This includes cases by coup, by war, or by guile.)
What would the alternative have been? You think that the monarchy - in many times and cultures, anointed by heaven as their divine representation on earth - would just go, “oops,” no male heir, let’s let the peasants rule?
Actually, random sidebar question, is England a republic? I always interpreted a Republic as having all the leadership positions at least nominally be elected by the people rather than inherited (ie: the US Senate vs. the British House of Lords). Don’t get me wrong, apparantly what the UK has works quite well, I just always assumed it was something different from a republic.
It’s officially a constitutional monarchy – it has a monarch, but the post is mostly ceremonial and Parliament holds the real power.
No, not now. However, it was a republic between 1649 and 1660 (using a variety of systems, including having Oliver Cromwell has head of state with the title of Lord Protector between 1653 and 1658. England has also had at least two interregnums, when there was no effective government, in 1659-1660 and 1688-1689 (the latter also being called the “Glorious Revolution”, because it involved throwing the Catholic Stuart king out of the country, and replacing him with a Protestant king).
Almost certainly not what you were thinking of, but [Queen] Hatshepsut fits the bill, and is cool enough to be mentioned anyway.
Slight correction: Edward VI was Elizabeth’s and Mary’s younger (half) brother.
Gesundheit. 
Sweden?
Yes, you’re right. And Edward inherited before them because (1) he had a Y chromosome, and (2) by the time of Henry VIII’s death there were doiubts about the validity of the marriages of Catherine of Aragon and of Anne Boleyn, so that the princesses Mary and Elizabeth were of doubtful legitimacy*. In addition, there were religious questions which considerably muddied the waters.
- In the case of Catherine of Aragon, because she had been married to Henry VIII’s older brother, Arthur. In the case of Anne Boleyn, because she had been convicted of treasonous adultery.
During the British Raj in India, there were two parallel systems of government. There was “British India,” consisting of provinces (17 in 1947) ruled by a lieutenant-governor appointed directly by the British government. However, about 40 percent of the territory of India was not part of British India – they were the Indian/native/princely states (about 600 as of 1947), which were nominally sovereign and ruled by hereditary monarchs (under various titles, such as maharaja, nawab, etc.). These sovereigns were not subordinate to the British government, but were subject to treaties in which they recognized the British monarch as their suzerain.
Under this system, there was a rule called the “Doctrine of Lapse,” under which if the hereditary ruler of a princely state did not have a legitimate heir, then the state would lose its sovereignty and be absorbed into British India.
In the Indian tradition, there were many ways in which a monarch could get an heir, including by adoption. However, as time went on, the British instituted progressively narrower definitions of who could be a legitimate heir until by the end, if the monarch did not have a natural, legitimate son of his own body who had attained majority (and, further, one whose character was not approved of by the British), then his dynasty was doomed by the Doctrine of Lapse. So, many Indian monarchies did end for the absence of an heir (at least one who was allowed to inherit by the British).
Doesn’t the Principality of Monaco only survive as separate from France so long as the Grimaldi family produces legitimate male heirs?
Well if you start throwing your male children around there won’t be enough of them left to take over much of anything besides an emergency room. 
Asencray brings up an interesting point. During the expansion of the Roman Empire there were several kings who left their kingdoms to Rome, so the independant kingdom became part of the Roman republic. So in that case we have the end of monarchial rule due to the lack of an heir. But…these were kingdoms that were already clients of the Rome, they would have given up their independence eventually by conquest if they didn’t join the empire semi-voluntarily.
And there are many other examples where small kingdoms lose their independence because the monarch’s heir is already monarch of some other kingdom. That’s how the Hapsburgs eventually came to rule over most of Europe. But in the Hapsburg case and Indian cases there was still a monarchy.
Indeed. Or at least it used to be so. However, a new treaty has been signed between France and Monaco some years ago, giving the principality more independance, so maybe this rule was changed at the same time, though I don’t think so.
In any case, this provision was included mainly to avoid that, in case the Grimaldi lineage would die out, the throne would go to a relative who would be a foreign prince, or worst a foreign sovereign, or, worst of all, a German prince.
Nowadays, if such a situation happened, given that the Monegasques don’t seem to be interested in becoming fench citizens and given that nobody would be bothered by a Hohenzollern (or whatever else) prince in Monaco, I strongly doubt this provision would be enforced, and if it were, it would piss off the onegasques in a major way. However, France could try to do it it it had some major problem with whoever would be chosen as Prince.
As has been pointed out already, England ceased to be a republic in 1660 (although it was never called a republic - it was a “commonwealth”.) But the modern definition of “republic” is rather different from the original definition, which equated more or less to what we would call a “democracy”. By that definition, the UK is a republic because we have regular elections and the Queen has no political power (though she has lots of influence).
Also, since reform in the 1990’s, the House of Lords is no longer a hereditary body. Most of the hereditary peerage no longer have the right to sit there. There are 94 hereditary peers who still have seats, but they had to be elected to those seats by the other members (the “life-peers”). Ironically this means that from a democratic point of view the remaining hereditaries actually have a better mandate to sit in the HoL than the life-peers, since they have at least won an election of sorts. The life-peers are simply appointed by the government of the day.