Languages of English monarchs

Factual Questions
1

Is there a list of English (and, from 1707, United Kingdom) monarchs and their native languages? It would be interesting to see how the language of the ruling family changed over time, and would help to answer the following questions:[ol]
[li]Who was the most recent monarch not to speak English as his or her native language?[/li][li]Who was the most recent monarch not to speak English at all?[/li][/ol]
I presume that the regal language was (Old) English from 871 to 1016, Danish from 1013 to 1042, English again from 1042 to 1066, and French from 1066 for some time onwards. I’m not sure when the kings switched from French to English. I presume there was a brief interruption from English with William III (1689–1702), who must have been a native Dutch speaker. The Hanoverians George I and II (1714–1760) spoke German, and thereafter all kings and queens have spoken English natively. Right?

In a related question, I’m told that British monarchs as recently as Victoria tended to speak mostly German in their households, even though George II was the last native speaker. Is this true? If so, when did the practice end? Or is German still the preferred language within the royal household?

2

I don’t have an online cite, but one of the best books I have read is *“The Isles: A History” *by Norman Davies. c1999 ISBN 0-19-513442-7

3

Henry IV began the shift from French during his reign (1399-1413). He is said to have spoken English pretty much exclusively from the time of his accession.

Right.

George I and George II were both born in Germany and came over to England in 1714 when George I succeeded Anne. George I was 54 at the time and, apparently, never bothered to learn English. He spoke to his ministers in French. George II did learn English. George III, the first Hanoverian king to be born in England, spoke English as his native language.

4

Actually, Edward I began the shift to (Middle) English a century earlier, making decrees in both languages, etc. By the end of Edward III’s reign (in 1377) the everyday language of the court was English, with French used only formally. But Chez is right that it was the early Lancastrians who essentially made it official.

This was basically true. The bit with Victoria, which is often overstated, is quite simple: both her mother and her husband, and her tutors as well, were German, so of course she used German regularly in her early life and right up through her marriage – alongside fluent English. After Albert’s death there seems to be no record of her using German except in formalized circumstances that would call for it (formally receiving a German ambassador, for example).

5

He’s not a monarch, but what is considered to be Prince Phillip’s native language? I know he was educated in England from the age of 12, but as he was born a prince of Greece and Denmark, are Greek and Danish the languages he was primarily raised with?

6

Philip was a member of the Greek royal house, which is a cadet branch of the Danish royal house of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg, his father being a younger brother of one of the Kings of Greece. They were, however, rescued from an antimonarchist revolution in Greece when Philip was very young by British naval vessels (“gunboat diplomacy” at its most literal). Philip’s mother was a Battenberg > Mountbatten, the sister of Lord Louis/Earl Mountbatten of Burma, the WWII strategist. I suspect they were polyglot; I do know he’s known English from a very young age.

7

Makes me think of this anecdote that I’ve always liked from The Story of English, by Robert McCrum, William Cran and Robert MacNeill:

“Going by the written record alone, the supremacy of Norman French and Latin seems total. In 1154, the English monks who wrote The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle abandoned their work forever. A great silence seems to descend on English writing. In court, church, and government circles, French was established as the smart and Latin as the professional language. There is, for instance, the story of Bishop William of Ely, Chancellor of England during the reign of Richard the Lionheart (Coeur de Lion). Disgraced politically, the bishop tried to escape from England in 1191 disguised as a woman and carrying under his arm some cloth for sale. He reached Dover safely but was discovered when he was asked by an English woman what he would charge for an ell of cloth. He could not reply because he knew no English – and it was inconceivable that his low-born captors could speak French.”

The authors go on to say:

“At the end of the thirteenth century, Edward I, who was very conscious of his Englishness, whipped up patriotic feeling against the king of France, declaring that it was ‘his detestable purpose, which God forbid, to wipe out the English tongue’.”

And the bubonic plague gets a mention:

"The Hundred Years War with France (1337-1454) provided a major impetus to speak English, not French. At the same time, the outbreak of the mysterious disease known as ‘The Black Death,’ by making labor scarce, improved and accelerated the rise in status of the English working man (a process that culminated in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381). It caused so many deaths in the monasteries and churches that a new generation of semi-educated, non-French and Latin speakers took over as abbots and prioresses. After the plague, students at school began to construe their French and Latin lessons in English not French, to the obvious detriment of French.

“English now appears at every level of society. In 1356, the mayor and aldermen of London ordered that court proceedings there be heard in English; in 1362, the Chancellor opened Parliament in English. During Wat Tyler’s rebellion in 1381, Richard II spoke to the peasants in English. In the last year of the century the proceedings for the deposition of Richard I (together with the document by which he renounced the throne) were in English. Henry IV’s speeches claiming the throne and later accepting it were also in English. The mother tongue had survived.”

8

Merci mon ami, ma terminology was a bit loose.

9

Would James I (VI of Scotland) have spoken any Gaelic?

10

So was German a household language of any monarch after Victoria? Or did it die with Albert?

11

According to this source James IV was the last Scottish monarch to have any fluency at all in Gaelic.

12

He did have Scots as his native language.

13

Not true. Ragnhild Hatton, the author of what is still the standard biography of him, argued that he was actually quite a skilled - or should that be a cunning? - linguist, able to speak a surprising number of European languages, and that, although he was never fluent and was always uncomfortable about speaking it in public, he did have some knowledge of English.

As for the use of German at Victoria’s court, her grandsons, Albert Victor and George (the future George V), the two sons of the Prince of Wales, were, as teenagers, notoriously unable to speak German. This appalled Victoria, but the point was that she expected them to have been taught it, as there was never any question of them just picking it up from those around them. (It didn’t help that their mother, Princess Alexandra, as a Dane, hated the Germans.)

14

So who would have been the last king or queen not to speak any English at all?

15

That’s actually quite difficult to answer, as one must go back to a period when, if they did speak some English, one cannot assume that they would have been recorded as being able to. Formal documents have little to reveal about which other languages the king might have been able to speak and any records of any informal speech by them, in any language, are rare. Historians can really only speculate. But the assumption tends to be that Edward I and Edward II probably could speak some English, so the answer may well be Henry III.

16

Henry named his son Edward after King Edward the Confessor, and seems to have been an admirer of the Anglo-Saxons. I wouldn’t be surprised if he spoke some English.

It’s said that some Norman kings used English for swearing! English obscenities sounded better than French ones, apparently.

17

There appear to have been some holes in her fluency. She is said to have believed that the word “news” was plural, and would say things like “The news from India are worrying”. Nobody had the nerve to correct her.

18

Whether or not Hatton’s biography of George I can be regarded as the ‘standard’ work is arguable. It was revisionist and, as far as I’m aware, her opinions were not widely supported by other historians of the same period.

I can’t find any (other) source which contradicts the view that George I could speak no more than a few words of broken English.

19

I’ve found one now. From The Oxford Companion to British History:

The language he commonly used with his ministers was French but he arrived with a smattering of English and knew sufficient to write and converse in it by the end of his reign.

On the other hand, Roy Porter’s England in the Eighteenth Century claims that the Prince of Wales attended cabinet councils with his father because he understood English whereas his father did not. When George I quarrelled with the Prince, and excluded him from these meetings, the proceedings became incomprehensible to the king. To escape from an embarrassing situation, he therefore ceased to attend most cabinets, leaving the lords of the committee to conduct the business of the day. He then met his ministers in private (in his closet, it says here) and agreed or disagreed with what they had done.

If this cite is unacceptable I have others, but it does seem the point is moot.

20

But one can equally cite other works, textbooks and monographs, both to show that Hatton’s work is indeed emphatically viewed as the ‘standard’ biography (albeit in the absence of any real competition) and that many historians have taken on board her arguments about his knowledge of English.

Geoffrey Holmes and Daniel Szechi had no problem in describing her biography as ‘the best and most up-to-date study of his life and reign’ (The Age of Oligarchy, 1993, p. 31). Wilfrid Prest explicitly makes the point that George I’s inability to speak English has been exaggerated, paraphrasing Hatton’s arguments and citing her as his source (Albion Ascendant, 1998, p. 120). Then there is Hannah Smith, the most recent historian of George I’s court and someone who is generally sympathetic to Hatton’s view of him. While she accepts that he was ‘not adept with the English tongue’, she goes on to make the point that he was uncomfortable speaking in public in any language (Georgian monarchy : politics and culture, 1714-1760, 2006, p. 204), while elsewhere she has noted that he ‘initially spoke very little English’ (emphasis added) (Smith, ‘The Court in England, 1714-1760: A Declining Political Institution?’, History, vol. 90, no. 297, Jan. 2005, p. 27). Part of the point is recognising that his English got a bit better as his reign progressed. No one is claiming that he was fluent. But it is untrue that he made no effort at all.