On the death of Edward the Confessor without a direct heir, the Witan elected his brother-in-law, the powerful Harold Godwinson, Earl of Wessex, as King. Coin of Harold II Harold had been elected from ...

Edgar Atheling, the last surviving male member of the ancient Royal House of Wessex, was born in Hungary circa 1051. Edgar's father, 'Edward the Exile' was the eldest son of Edmund II known as ...

When Britain's last Stuart monarch, Queen Anne died in 1714, the crown of England passed by the 1701 Act of Settlement to the Stuart dynasty's German Protestant cousins, the House of Hanover, or ...

Henry seized England's crown on the death of his brother, William Rufus on 2 August 1100. He had been present on the hunting expedition in the New Forest which resulted in Rufus' death, either by ...

Louise-Renée de Kérouaille, an ancestress of Princess Diana, was born in September 1649 into a noble but relatively poor Breton family, she the daughter of Guillaume de Penancoët, Seigneur de ...

(1) Charles Emmanuel III, King of Sardinia, 1751-1819 ( great-great-grandson of Henriette Anne Stuart, youngest daughter of Charles I.) The Jacobite CHARLES IV (2) Victor Emmanuel, King of Sardinia ...

Arguably one of the most effective Kings ever to wear the English crown and the first of the great Plantagenet dynasty, the future Henry II was born at Le Mans, Anjou on 5th March, 1133. He was the ...

The charismatic Edward III, one of the most dominant personalities of his age, was the son of Edward II and Isabella of France. He was born at Windsor Castle on 13th of November, 1312 and created Earl ...

Egbert, in Old English Ecgbehrt, the first King of all England, was born around 770-780. He was the son of Ealhmund, King of Kent, who is mentioned in a charter of 784. Ealhmund was himself the son of ...

The Mortimers were a powerful aristocratic family of the Welsh Marches, centred around Wigmore Castle in Herefordshire, who from the fourteenth century held the title of Earl of March. The surname is ...

At the age of five, Richard was married to Anne Beauchamp, the sister of the Duke of Warwick, in 1434. On the death of the Duke of Warwick in 1446, the Earldom of Warwick and its vast estates were ...

Morcar was the younger son of Ælfgifu, daughter of Morcar and Ælfgar, earl of Mercia, one of the most powerful earldoms of Anglo- Saxon England, and grandson of Leofric and Godiva, who, according to ...