Britain's Kings & Queens [antikvár]

Introduction From Alfred the Great, in the ninth century, to Elizabeth II today, 56 very varied men and women have reigned as Icings or queens of England. The royal line of Scotland merged with that of England only in the seventeenth century. Some of these sovereigns occupied the throne for no more than a few months or, lilce Henry VI and Edward IV, disputed its possession with a rival, and not all were formally crowned; others, such as Elizabeth I and Victoria, reigned in splendour for so long that they set the seal of their names on whole periods of history. Some were esteemed as saintly, some were conspicuously sinful, some were feared and strong, others were despised and weak. The wide differences in personality of these kings and queens are matched by the variety of circumstances in which they reigned. The powers and the functions of a monarch of England have never ceased to evolve, the rules of succession have differed from one period of history to another, and the very extent of the kingdom has changed. So we must not imagine William above: Egbert, King of Wessex 802-839. left: Alfred the Great's statue at Winchester, where he is buried. opposite: a coin of Cnut. the Conqueror wrangling with a Parliament, any more than we should imagine George III leading warriors into battle. In fact, to go back to the beginnings of the British monarchy is to explore a landscape so different from the one in which we now live, that only the similarity of the place names allows us to assume that we are still in the same country. What we now call England was roughly carved up by immigrant Saxon war bands in the fifth and sixth centuries, to make tribal territories and principalities. Historians at one time liked to write of the Heptarchy - the Seven Kingdoms of Saxon England -but this was too neat a name for an untidy, constantly altering picture, in which powerful tribes inevitably conquered weaker ones, and then in turn went down before still greater neighbours. In the seventh century, the kingdom of Northumbria - the area north of a line between Humber and Ribble - led the other kingdoms in strength, wealth and cultural distinction: in the eighth century primacy passed to the midland kingdom of Mercia; while the ninth century saw the rise of Wessex, in the south. It was the varied achievements of the rulers of Wessex that ultimately gave rise to the kingdom of England itself, with a royal house descended from the line of Alfred the Great.