I couldn’t find this with a couple minutes of Googling, so I turn to you. In any monarchy, who’s been the most distant relative to take over upon the death of the monarch? I’m not looking for things like conquests or coups, but things like “The king is dead with no sons or siblings, so his fifth cousin twice removed is the new king.”
Would you consider ‘and all the close relatives are the wrong religion’ to be a conquest/coup situation? George I of Great Britain inherited from his second cousin Anne; the Act of Settlement disqualified her nearer relatives on the grounds that they were Catholics.
The term you want to search for is “cadet branch”, which are patrilineal descendants of a monarch’s younger sons.
Adolphus of Nassau, Grand Duke of Luxembourg. Earlier thread on the same subject.
Not necessarily; the heir to Sancho VII of Navarre (BIL to Richard the Lionheart) should have been his distant cousin and will-sharer(*) Jaime I of Aragon, but instead it was the son of his sister Blanca, Teobaldo or Thibault of Champagne. There are multiple instances where the crowns of the Christian Kingdoms of Spain went through a female branch.
Not every crowned house insists on patrilineal descent.
- Under Navarrese law, two or more people can share a will, called de hermandad, “brotherhood”(+), by which they declare each other universal heir. Sancho VII and Jaime I did so, but at the time of Sancho’s death Jaime was busy elsewhere and didn’t bother fight his aunt over the inheritance of Navarre.
- Under the same laws and in order, a person’s natural heirs are their children (then grandchildren), then their siblings (then the siblings’ children): this kind of will does not disinherit the children and makes the people involved equivalent to being siblings, hence the name. Children would still take precedence but the part of the estate of which they’re forced recipients is tiny.
You are correct about inheritance, but have misunderstood by statement. As far as I know, “cadet branch” only refers to patrilineal descent from a younger son. The term “distaff branch” refers to descendants from a daughter.
Thank you. I figured this had to have been discussed here before.
OK, but that still doesn’t provide a direct link between “cadet branch” and “inheritance by a third-cousin twice-removed”.
James VI of Scotland was, what third cousin to Elizabeth I when he succeeded her as James I of England and Ireland?
(I just looked it up - he was first cousin twice removed.)
Louis XIV of France lived so long (76 years) that he survived his children and oldest grand child. He was succeeded by his great grandson.
There was quite a big genealogical gap between Henry III and Henry IV of France, but I’m not sure of their relationship.
For some reason the newly independent Greeks wanted a king so the great powers gave them Otto.
They weren’t happy with him so the overthrew him and picked George I from the Danish royal family. He was apparently 7th cousin once removed from Otto.
(All the remaining Kings of the Hellenes were sons of previous kings. But not in the usual order.)
Another example of a person picked to be king without being related to the previous one is Charles XIV John of Sweden (and Norway) nee Jean Bernadotte. One of Napoleon’s generals that the Swedes thought was just this swell guy, you know. I don’t know his family relationship to Charles XIII but the Bernadottes were (and still are) a fairly prominent family so no doubt has more than the usual smidgen of royal blood.
This is what I was thinking of. It was well known that the Bourbon cadet branch was next in line should the main branch of the Capetians die out, but it had been quite a long time since the lines separated, and the main branch had failed to spread out any more than among the immediately family. Wikipedia indicates the Bourbon branch was initiated in 1272 by a younger son marrying the heiress of Bourbon, and the senior male representative (who was not of the initially most senior branch - two other male lines senior to him had died out) of that branch became the senior line of (what was) the Capetians in 1589.
Not quite as bad as 1100 -> 1900, but the crown was definitely more significant than that of Luxembourg, and it occurred during a very tumultuous point in French history, so I’m surprised it hadn’t been mentioned before. I suppose I’m just sorta biased towards this period of history though, given it’s the only history I studied in college (I didn’t do well and hated it, but I remembered a lot of it and have relived it in the grand strategy video game Europa Universalis).
I don’t know if this would count for the OP, but many of the Roman Caesars were adopted as heirs, often from rather distant family relatives.
For example Octavian (Augustus Caesar) was maternal great nephew of Julius Caesar, but was adopted as his ‘son’ and heir. (Julius Caesar’s actual biological son (by Cleopatra) did not inherit and was eventually killed by Romans.)
The Japanese did that as well. In much earlier times the position was rotated around several cadet families. They would never French be quite distantly related on the paternal side, although perhaps more closely related on the maternal side through inter marriages.
They also went through a period where there were two main lines and the position rotated between them, the Northern and Southern Emperors.
King Henry VII of England was more closely related to French monarchy than to English monarchy. On the one side, his connection to the French crown was via a woman, so didn’t count in French law, but on the other it was through an illegitimate birth.
Henry Tudor’s father (Edmund Tudor) was the son of Catherine of Valois, the widow of King Henry V of England, and the daughter of King Charles VI of France. So his grandmother was Queen Dowager of England (which doesn’t count for succession rules), and his great grandfather was King of France.
Henry Tudor’s mother was Margaret Beaufort. Her father was John Beaufort, 1st Duke of Somerset. His father was John Beaufort, 1st Earl of Somerset. In turn, his father was John of Gaunt, but John Beaufort was an illegitimate child. John of Gaunt’s father was King Edward III of England. The means Henry Tudor’s great-great-great grandfather was King of England, but the line was broken by an illegitimate birth.
(In addition, Henry VII’s mother outlived him, so that if he had a right to be King, she had a greater right to be Queen of England.)
It’s fairly safe to say that the vast majority of Henry’s VII’s “right” to rule was being victorious in battle. Certainly a vague claim on the throne helped him recruit people to his standard, but it was being the leader of the last army standing that made him king.
A side effect of that was that even for Henry VIII - he was well aware of his tenuous claim even decades later. I have a book - The Lisle Letters - which is a collection of the letters of Lord Lisle, one of the last of the Plantagenets. As Henry VII found, and Lady Jane decades later, anyone who has even a small claim to the throne can become a rallying point or a figurehead for those determined to execute (heh heh) regime change. Henry VIII had spies watching any potential threats and we have the large collection of Lisle’s letters thanks to henry’s paranoia because they were seized and put into the royal archives when Lisle was arrested (but later released) on suspicion of treason.
Henry VII married Elizabeth of York so that he could take over her claim from her father, Edward IV. Her little brothers had better claims, but they mysteriously died …