Queen Elizabeth II and Queen Mother

Factual Questions
1

I was watching a video of Elton John performing at Princess Diana’s funeral, and the commentary of the news broadcaster mentions the “Queen Mother.” I didn’t know much about her so i did some wikipedia research and according to them:

“After the war (WW2), her husband’s health deteriorated and she was widowed at the age of 51. Her elder daughter, aged 25, became the new Queen.”

My question is, why did her daughter become the new Queen once she was widowed? Are Queens not allowed to reign without a King?

2

She was not in the line of succession, she was just married to the king.

3

Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, was Queen by virtue of marrying the King - a Queen consort, not a queen regnant. That is, she was not queen in her own right. The right to the throne passed from her husband to her daughter. Queen Elizabeth II’s husband is titled as a Prince (and Duke) instead of a King, so it’s more clear, but I sympathize with your confusion; I did not understand it myself until I actually looked into it more.

4

There are two kinds of queen, a queen regnant (a queen who reigns in her own right) and a queen consort (a queen who doesn’t reign, but gets her title through being married to the king). Elizabeth II is the former kind, her mother was the latter.

ETA: I’ve read that the reason that the husband of a queen regnant is called a prince and not a king consort is that people were generally uncomfortable with the idea of a queen outranking a king of any kind.

5

The first Queen Regnant’s Queen Mary, Philip was given the title of King. After that, Elizabeth was unmarried. Queen Mary II was a joint Soverign with her husband. Queen Anne’s husband was a Prince and died early in her reign.

So the precedent was not set in stone until Victoria. As it is, Parliament choose to give Queen Mary the title of Queen-Regnant. They could have easily said she was “King”.

6

Supposedly Queen Victoria did want to make Albert a king-consort, but her ministers were adamantly opposed to the idea. I don’t think we’ll see any monarchy have a king-consort anytime soon; though I could see Sweden doing for the sake of gender equality. Maybe Spain too in a few decades when Leonor ascends the throne, in that case it’d be a node to Iberian tradition.

7

Heck, in theory Spain could have a Queen regnant and a Queen consort, but hopefully if that’s how Leo swings she won’t marry another woman also called Leonor (who would then be known as “the Queen consort, Doña Leonor” to distinguish her from “the Queen, Leonor I”). Right now Juan Carlos is referred to as “the king emeritus, Don Juan Carlos” (note that he’s lost the numeral), but Sofía is still “the Queen, Doña Sofía”. If Felipe VI’s wife had happened to be another Sofía, then the older one would be referred to as “the Queen mother, Doña Sofía”.

8

I think Philip was called King Philip because he was the King of Spain., Portugal, Naples, and Sicily. At least that would have helped with the title. I think he might have asked for it as a condition of the marriage, too.

I only knew about Spain. I learned about the other areas when I looked him up on Wikipedia.

9

Upon his marriage to Mary he was conferred with the titles of King of England, King of Ireland, King of France. (At the time the English monarchs still mantained a claim to the French throne.) But he was more than just a king-consort; he was supposed to co-reign with his wife. Nevertheless his claim to reign was derived from hers, and was only to last as long as the marriage did. On her death, he lost his status, position and title in England and Ireland.

Worth noting that before he married Mary he was but a humble prince; his father, Charles V, was still alive, and was King of Spain. Charles died about two years later, whereupon Philip became King of Spain, etc, as well as King of England and Ireland. Mary became Queen of Spain, etc, at the same time, but she had no role in co-ruling Spain.

10

Albert did not become Prince-Consort until near the end of his life, although he was probably the most influential male Consort there was.

Philip only became a Prince of the UK in IIRC 1960, it was considered unseemly for him to be junior to his sons. Princess Alexandra was given precedence over Camilla after the later’s marriage, probably as a final fuck you.

11

As long as Prince Charles isn’t with Camilla!

I find it rather confusing that precedence changes depending on whether you’re accompanied by your husband or not.

12

It hardly matters most of the time.

13

Just to complicate things further, it wasn’t as if the Queen Mother was the only widowed Queen Consort when George VI died in 1952, as her mother-in-law, Queen Mary, widow of George V, was still alive. Which gave rise to the most famous photograph of George VI’s funeral. That was why she started calling herself ‘Queen Mother’ - there was now another Queen Elizabeth and the other possible title, ‘Queen Dowager’, could be interpreted as referring to Queen Mary.

14

Neither Philip II nor his father had the titles of King of Spain, since this thread is about specific titles. In both cases, “King of Spain” is shorthand for “King of Aragon, King of Castille and King of Navarre”. Charles I of Castille and of Aragon, IVth of Navarre, Vth of Germany etc. etc. didn’t even access all three spanish thrones at the same time; Philip II did, upon Charles’ death.

15

Ah. He wasn’t “King of Spain” in Spain. But in England, between 1556 and 1558, he and his wife were " by the grace of God King and Queen of England, Spain, France, both the Sicilies, Jerusalem and Ireland".

16

For an explanation of why there were two Sicilies, see Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. (The other Sicily was the Kingdom of Naples, occupying the southern part of the Italian peninsula.)

17

If we’re nitpicking, there was no such thing as the King of Germany. There were Kings of the Romans/Emperors of the Holy Roman Empire.

18

Up to a point, Lord Copper. The notion of Germany as a discrete territory is absent from an inscription I saw in Austria, but at least one eighteenth century Emperor was claiming something close to kingship of it, or of Germans as a people (if memory serves, you might also find the formulation “Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation”):

Karl VI, Roman Emperor and German King, King in Castile, Aragon, Leon, the Two Sicilies, in Jerusalem, Bohemia, Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, Navarre, Granada, Toledo, Valencia, Galicia, Mallorca, Seville, Sardinia, Corsica, Cordoba, Murcia, Jaen, Algarve, Algeciras, Gibraltar, of the Canaries and West Indian Islands of the American Continent, and King of the Atlantic Ocean; Archduke in Austria, Duke in Burgundy, Brabant, Milan, Styria, Carinthia, Krain and Limburg, Luxembourg, Geldern, Wurttemberg, Upper and Lower Silesia, Calabria and Athens, Prince in Swabia, Catalonia and Asturias, Margrave of the Holy Roman Empire in Burgau, Moravia, Upper and Lower Lausitz, Prince-Count in Habsburg, Flanders, Tirol, Pfirt, Kieburg, Gorz and Artois, Landgrave in Alsace, Margave in Christano, Count in Namur and Roussillon, Lord of the Wendish March, in Portenau, Biscaya, Molins, Salins, Tripolis and Mechelen

http://www.flickr.com/photos/patricklondon/9125754826/in/album-72157634297091715/

19

He was Emperor Charles the Vth of the Holy Roman Empire, often abbreviated as “of Germany” same as “of multiple locations in Spain” is abbreviated as “of Spain”, and I never said he was “King Charles the Vth of Germany”: you added the underlined word in your mind.