Has there ever been a case where a king or queen died and their mother or father became the new king or queen?
That’s what happened on Game of Thrones show. King dies and his mother is now queen. His biological father is still alive but all his brothers/sisters are dead. There is a living guy who is the son of the previous king but nobody knows where he is now.
If this situation happened in real life I think they would pick a cousin to be the new king or queen?
The dowager empress Cixi of China ruled the country after (and before) the death of her son. She started out as regent, but never quit.
The only way it could have happened legally sans conflict if Mom/Dad were also in line in their own right.
Say Charles becomes King. Then a disaster kills him and hundreds of others in line until it reaches Philip survives and who “coincidentally” becomes the first in line to survive.
I should add for those that have not seen the show, the king killed himself after his mother (new queen) killed his wife/queen and a whole bunch of other people. She blew up a building where they were getting ready to put her on trial for various crimes.
It happened in Greece in 1920, but the father (Constantine I) was also a former king. He had been forced to abdicate in 1917, and was invited back after his son died of an infected monkey bite (which coincided with the government that opposed King Constantine losing an election). Nothing in that period in Greece was very orderly, so it’s not a surprise that it didn’t work out. His second reign lasted less than two years before he was forced to abdicate once again.
Some limited form of Salic Law would be the likeliest cause. In Britain, for example, the law was that women were eligible to become monarchs but all male members of the royal family were placed ahead of them in the line of succession.
So you could have a situation where old King Adam is dying and his living heirs are his daughter Betty and Betty’s son Cain. Cain is the heir apparent because of his penis. Adam dies and his grandson Cain is crowned. But a year later King Cain dies. His mother Betty is the next in line of succession and become the queen.
To be fair, Game of Thrones is an extremely tangled web. The King (Robert) was supposedly the father to Joffrey and Tommen. In reality, both were the sons of Cersei (Robert’s wife) and her brother, Jaime. While the truth about Joffrey and Tommen’s true father isn’t exactly a well-kept secret, publicly, Cersei and Jaime have denied the claim.
George R.R. Martin often bases plot points around things that actually happened in history. A lot of the Starks vs. the Lannisters are (admittedly somewhat loosely) based around the War of the Roses, for example. But if Cersei’s family tree is based on any historical figures, I’m not aware of it.
Regardless, putting Jaime on the throne would give legitimacy to the rumors that Jaime boinked his sister. Even though that’s true in this case, it’s not something that Cersei and Jaime want to admit to publicly. There’s no legal issue of succession here with Jaime, at least not until the major parties involved fess up to who has been boinking who.
Also, singing the Disney song “I’m my own grandpa” in relation to the Lannisters is probably not a wise thing to do in Westeros, at least not in territory that the Lannisters control.
There are also people who have a much clearer claim to the throne legally than Cersei, which muddies the waters quite a bit, legally. Cersei wasn’t given the throne because everyone thought she was next in line. She took the throne. If you disagree with her, feel free to take it up with the Mountain.
I think the theory has been mostly discredited by now, but for a while a lot of folks had the idea that something similar happened with Nefertiti in Egypt. The theory, as I understand it, was that Nefertiti took control as regent when her husband and son died, then ended up making herself a Pharaoh (women generally weren’t Pharaohs). After her death (or murder), the people went out of their way to erase her name from history. While I think the theory is no longer believed by many Egyptologists, George R.R. Martin may have borrowed from it for his books.
[Moderating]
Since this gives away some major plot points from last season, I have put in a spoiler warning in the title and added some space so it doesn’t show up on mouseover.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I think we established in one of the Game of Thrones threads that Cersei was not in the legal line of succession in any way but simply usurped the throne. There are lots of examples from history where someone who only had a tenuous claim or no claim to a throne has seized it. Jaime was also not in the line of succession. He would have even less claim than Cersei, since if he were acknowledged as having been the father of the king it would mean that king hadn’t been legitimate either.
King Robert had no known surviving close relatives after the deaths of his brothers and niece. He had at least one surviving illegitimate son, but he couldn’t inherit legally. Like Cersei, if he were placed on the throne it would be ignoring the rules (although as a blood relative of the king he had a better claim than Cersei).
In the show (books? not following this series closely), does the Queen actually hold the throne or is she claiming it? I gather there’s a massive civil war going on and vaguely understand that civil and military authority had completely broken down, and even small-time warlords have more power than the monarchy.
she did not claim the throne in the books because the books only go up to season 5.
She claimed the throne at the end of season 6 of the show. Season 7 starts this summer.
She’s the only claimant to the throne and controls the capital and more-or-less most of Westeros. The North, Dorne and Iron Islands are broadly not under her control, Probably also the Vale. That leaves the Capital and the Westerlands completely on her side, the Stormlands and Riverlands not in revolt, and the Reach now without a ruling family and so posing no threat.
So holding, but with immediate threats on all sides, but the internal threats all dead.
Couple of things wrong here.
Britain never had any form of Salic law. Until 2013, the rule was male-preference primogeniture, in which sons come before daughters, but that did not give other male members of the family precedence over those daughters. For example, when George VI died in 1952, he had no sons, so his elder daughter Elizabeth became queen; her son Charles was second in line even though he had a penis (and Elizabeth also preceded her uncle and four male cousins on her father’s side).
In semi-Salic succession, such as was practiced in Luxembourg until recently and in imperial Russia, it is true that all male members of the family precede females. However, I don’t know of any royal house practicing semi-Salic succession in which a daughter’s children would have been considered to be members of the royal house in the first place–they belonged to their father’s house, and had no claim on their mother’s father’s throne.
For example, Maria Vladimirovna claims to be heiress to the Russian throne as the closest female relative of the last male of the Romanov dynasty (her father Vladimir); her own son, although living at the time of his grandfather’s death, is behind her in the succession because his right to the throne derives solely from her, not from his grandfather, and he will be the first of the house of Romanov-Hohenzollern. (That is, he was not in the line of succession at all in his grandfather’s lifetime, because the old guy could theoretically have produced a son, and that son’s very existence would have deprived Maria Vladimirovna of any inheritance rights. Once Vladimir died without male heir, and in the absence of any other Romanov male dynasts, Maria Vladimirovna became the empress in pretense; then and only then did the boy have inheritance rights.) [Yes, I know Maria Vladimirovna’s claim is disputed by other members of the family. This is her version.]
The only way that a mother could succeed her own child legally (that is, without usurpation) is if she had an independent right to throne that was of lower precedence than her child’s. For example, if Prince Harry marries his cousin Princess Beatrice, they have a kid, that kid eventually become monarch, and then something bad happens to a bunch of people, Beatrice could succeed because she herself is in line. Similarly, in a semi-Salic system in which the mother is the daughter of a dynast and is married to another dynast, she could end up the last one standing.
In a close but no cigar case we have Joanna of Castile a.k.a. Joanna the Mad.
Daughter of Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand V of Aragon.
When her mom died she became Queen of Castile. But she was crazy deemed crazy after her husband/co-ruler died so Ferdinand was regent. He died and so she became Queen of Aragon as well. A few years later her son Charles I was old enough to be declared co-ruler and handled things from then on.
(I’m leaving out a lot of other titles held by these folk.)
I know there are a lot of regents for young kids, but this is a rare one where the regent is a high-status parent.
There have also been a few Chinese “Empresses” who ruled in all but name only over their sons/stepsons/whatever. But Wu Zetian declared herself Emperor after her husband/consort (and stepson) died.
I believe that’s the closest real life example. Even though her son was nominally king, Game of thrones’ Cersei de facto ruled the kingdom in his stead before he died and she had herself crowned.
I don’t think it works that way… It’s still the royal bloodline, and that’s Charles and his descendants; if none left, then Betty’s descendants in order (assuming she predeceased Charles) and if none of them, work your way back up - Any offspring of Princess Margaret? If David or Sarah are still kicking at the time, David or his descendants; if not, then Sarah or her descendants. If none, go back up to George VI’s father and check his other descendants, and so on…
So the mother (as in Elizabeth II’s case) would have already been Queen. It might be conceivable that say, a king’s aunt might become queen. (Say, if Charles was an only child, had no children and Margaret had survived him.)
Philip is in line in his own right as a descendant of Queen Victoria (Victoria -> Alice of the UK, Grand Duchess of Hesse -> Victoria of Hesse, Princess Louis of Battenberg -> Alice of Battenberg, Princess Andrew of Greece -> Philip). He’s way down the list, currently somewhere around 690th in line, but if something Really Bad happened then working your way back up the line could conceivably end up at him.
These sorts of things happened a lot in the era when royalty usually married relatives. For example, King George V and Queen Mary were both descendants of George III; during World War II, the dowager queen was herself around 200th in line for the throne (list of succession as of 1941). Similarly, Edward VII’s queen, Alexandra of Denmark, was descended three times over from George II and had her own right to the throne (way down the list). At the time the future King George IV married his first cousin Caroline of Brunswick in 1795, he was first in line for the British throne and she was 25th. (She was never crowned queen and their only child predeceased both of them, but a “what-if” version of events could have Charlotte becoming queen, in which case Victoria and the other royal babies of 1819 would never have been born [since they were products of the race to produce an heir after Charlotte’s early death]. That would have left Caroline’s Brunswick nephew as the new king, then you only need a tragedy in the Brunswick house and wiping out Caroline’s older sister’s family to make Caroline the rightful queen by working back through the royal bloodline.)
Based on a range of canonical through semi-canonical sources, Cersei actually has a separate claim to the throne, deriving from an intermingling of Houses Baratheon and Lannister several generations prior to the beginning of the story. Her seizing of the throne in the show isn’t really a legal claim, though, but a seizure based on power. I’m sure her future sympathetic historians will appreciate it.
Regents seizing thrones because armies were more loyal to them than anyone else is a story as old as the concept of monarchy. The back-door Dowager Heiress concept is much more rare, and slash2K’s example of Caroline of Brunswick is possibly as close as we might get.
Not really. She sort of did for a while, but saw herself kicked off the ruling council and confined to a wing of the castle, essentially without any political power. Her uncle was effectively running the kingdom until essentially everyone died and left a major power vacuum.
But if Charlotte survived to become queen, so (most likely) would the child whose birth was the occasion for her death - and possibly other children too.