British Bastards - Illegitimacy in the English Monarchy

The laws and customs pertaining succession to the throne in the Kingdom of England were, in normal times, simple. The eldest legitimate surviving son of the monarch automatically succeeded his father on the throne after his father's death. If the monarch did not have surviving sons or grandsons but had surviving brothers, then the eldest of those would rule. The formal name for this succession method is agnatic primogeniture. But what if the King had no surviving legitimate male heirs? Then things became a little more complicated and invited the rule of men and women whose legitimacy was not beyond reproach. I will examine the famous cases where men and women obtained or almost obtained the crown despite the stain of being born or alleged to have been born in sin (out of wedlock.)

William the Conquering Bastard

William I

The first illegitimate monarch known to rule the Kingdom of England was William I, the first Norman king of England. He became known as William the Conqueror but in his time he was often called William the Bastard by his enemies. William was the son of Robert I, Duke of Normandy and his concubine, Herleva, and born around 1029. Robert never married and Herleva's low birth prohibited their union, so she was married off to one of Robert's vassals. Robert died in 1035 and William overcame the disadvantageous circumstances of his conception to succeed his father as Duke of Normandy He was able to impose his will on rebellious vassals and keep ambitious rivals from taking over his Duchy.

Across the English Channel, the King of the English, Edward the Confessor, chose William to succeed him and promised him the throne in the 1050s. William was Edward's first cousin once removed (they shared a common ancestor in Robert I of Normandy but Edward was one generation closer), he was not picking a stranger to the bloodline. Edward chafed under the challenges to his authority from the powerful English Godwin family and had no children, thus he had reason to favor William. On his deathbed in 1066 Edward named Harold Godwinson as successor, one of his brothers-in-law. Harold was in England and able to seize the throne in 1066 as Harold II. 

Harold also had pledged fealty to William upon being captured after a shipwreck in Normandy in 1064. He also pledged to support William after Edward's death, but broke his supposed promise. William was outraged, invaded England and defeated and killed Harold at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 to win his crown. He would spend much of the next decade bringing England and its native peoples to heel under the rule of the Normans. 

The Illegitimacy of the Roses

A. House of York

Edward IV

For the next nearly 400 years, the line of succession would not be seriously challenged by illegitimate candidates. This began to change when the House of York overthrew the House of Lancaster during the Wars of the Roses. The weak kingship of the Lancastrian Henry VI led to a successful revolt by his relative, the Edward, Duke of York, who became Edward IV in 1461. Edward IV's early reign began with the crucial support of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick and known as "the kingmaker". In time Warwick became disenchanted with Edward and sought to undermine his crown by the end of the decade. To further this end he spread rumors that Edward IV's paternity was not legitimate because his father was supposedly away campaigning during the period when he would have been conceived. While Warwick was temporarily successful in driving Edward into exile in 1470 and restoring Henry to the throne, Edward reclaimed his kingdom the next year and Warwick was killed in battle.

Edward V

The issue of true parentage was raised more prominently when the House of York began to deal with the problem of succession. When King Edward IV died in 1483, his eldest son Edward V was intended to succeed him. Edward V was twelve at the time of his father's death, and while he was initially recognized as King he too young to rule in his own right. His uncle Richard, Duke of Gloucester was named Lord Protector by Edward IV. He did not get on Edward V's mother, Elizabeth Woodville, or her supporters. Only Edward IV's lifespan prevented open violence between the two factions. Once he died, each side tried to eliminate the other.

Even though Richard had been able to secure the person of the young king and his younger brother, Richard of Shrewsbury, his brother's only surviving sons, he realized that his security was only temporary. When Edward came of age and no longer needed a Lord Protector to act as regent, Richard would become superfluous and vulnerable to Elizabeth's faction. His choices for survival were not particularly attractive, exile or rebellion.

Richard III

Richard learned of a marriage contract between Edward IV and Lady Eleanor Butler prior to his marriage to Elizabeth Woodville. In those days a marriage contract was often considered a union in the eyes of God even if no marriage ceremony or consummation took place. Richard was able to convince Parliament to deem Edward IV's sons illegitimate because of this marital contract and by the Act titled Titulus Regius to name him King Richard III. Edward V, whose coronation had been continually postponed, and his younger brother Richard of Shrewsbury were effectively prisoners in the Tower of London by this time. They eventually disappeared after they were declared bastards and presumed to have been murdered by Richard's henchmen (the "Princes in the Tower.") Their mother was also deprived of her royal title by this Act. Richard quickly defeated a rebellion by one of his earlier supporters, Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham. But even with homegrown rebels crushed Richard was still not secure on his throne.

B. House of Tudor (Lancaster)

The Yorkists had won the throne through the Wars of the Roses when they deposed the previous ruling dynasty, the House of Lancaster in a civil war. Henry VI was the last Lancastrian king and most of the major Lancastrian claimants had been killed or died during the war. Only Henry Tudor, Earl of Pembroke, remained as a male claimant to the throne, but once Edward IV had regained the throne in 1471 and had Henry VI killed, Henry Tudor fled to France and stayed there until he invaded England in 1485.

Henry VII

Henry Tudor's claim to the throne was questionable on both sides of his family line. Through his father, Edmund Tudor, he was a grandson of Henry V's wife, Katherine of Valois. She married Owen Tudor, a descendant of Welsh nobility, after Henry V's death. This lineage would give him a better claim to the crown of France than of England were it not for the Salic law that prohibited the French throne from descending in the female line. However, Catherine's sons were half-brothers of King Henry VI, so they were brought up at the English court.

His mother, Margaret Beaufort, was the great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster and third surviving son of King Edward III. However, her great-grandmother was Katherine Swynford, Gaunt's longtime mistress. Katherine gave birth to Margaret's grandfather, John Beaufort, in 1373 while John of Gaunt was married to his second wife. After that wife's death John of Gaunt married Katherine in 1396 in part to legitimize his children with her. He obtained the sanction of Pope Boniface IX to this union and their legitimization. Royal recognition of his children by Henry IV may have included a proviso denying them a royal claim or that may have been a much later addition to the document. The marriage was considered scandalous at the time by many not just due to the sinful familiarity shared prior to their sanctified union but also because John was of royal blood and Katherine (the daughter of a knight) was a commoner.

Henry Tudor defeated Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 and Richard was killed in the fighting. As King Henry VII he had his new Parliament enact a law recognizing him as king (as of the day before Bosworth, thereby nominally making anyone who fought against him a traitor) and repeal and order the destruction of all copies of the Titulus Regius. The repeal posthumously restored Edward V to the line of kings and their mother was again recognized as the Queen Dowager (and was Henry VII's mother in law as he had married her daughter Elizabeth of York). The next King Edward would officially be numbered Edward VI.

Tudor Trueborn Troubles

Henry VIII

In his sons Arthur and Henry, King Henry VII  enjoyed the benefits to his dynasty that an heir and a spare provided. His successor Henry VIII never had that security, only managing the first but not for a lack of trying.

A. Henry VIII & Catherine

Henry VII married his son Arthur to Catherine of Aragon, the youngest daughter of King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castille by proxy in 1499 and in person in 1501. Arthur died in 1502. Catherine was then betrothed to Prince Henry, but the marriage did not take place until 1509 when he ascended to throne.

Henry VIII and Catherine had one surviving child, Mary, in 1516. Their sons were stillborn or died shortly after birth. Henry feared for the future of his dynasty, having only a female heir, and Catherine was no longer young or able to bear children by the 1520s. In the mid-1520s Henry had become infatuated with one of her ladies in waiting, Anne Boleyn, and sought a way to end his marriage to Catherine.

Catherine of Aragon

His fears for his dynasty and the peace of the Kingdom were not without precedent. If the monarch only had surviving daughters, then it was believed at that time by Henry and many in his Court that the succession to the throne would likely be contested through war as was the case when Henry I died in 1135 leaving his daughter Matilda as his only surviving legitimate heir. Her claim to the throne of England was disputed by her first cousin Stephen, who quickly had himself crowned in London while she was on the continent. (In those days Norman nobles often held lands on both sides of the Channel) Their resulting dispute over the crown of England lead to a civil war of fifteen years known as the Anarchy that lasted more-or-less until Stephen died in 1154. This was the first time when a woman attempted to claim the throne in her own right in the recorded history of the Kingdom of England and she had powerful men supporting her claim. Despite their support she never held sway over the whole of England. The Anarchy ended only when her son Henry Plantagenet was recognized by Stephen as his successor and succeeded him as Henry II.

When Catherine married Henry, a papal dispensation had to be granted due to the Biblical passage in Leviticus 20:21 which said "And if a man shall take his brother's wife, it is an unclean thing: he hath uncovered his brother's nakedness; they shall be childless." Henry had come to the believe that his marriage was unlawful in the eyes of God because he had taken his brother's wife as his own in violation of God's law. God had punished his transgression with dead sons. The dispensation was therefore mistakenly granted.

Henry sought an annulment from the Church but Catherine protested that she had not consummated her marriage to Arthur before his death and thus was free to be married to his brother. Pope Clement VII vacillated for years and would not issue a decision on the annulment petition. To grant the annulment would admit that the Church had erred in granting the original dispensation in 1503. As a practical matter Clement VII for much of this time was also a captive of Catherine's nephew, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and thus might have found it physically uncomfortable to offend the Emperor. Henry's patience wore out and persuaded Parliament to pass laws in 1533-34 declaring himself Supreme Head of the Church of England and denying the pope any authority or jurisdiction over his realm.

B. Henry VIII & Anne

Anne Boleyn

Henry married Anne on January 25, 1533. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cramner, declared the marriage between Henry and Catherine annulled and void on May 23, 1533, as if they had never been married. The annulment made Mary a bastard. Archbishop Cramner declared the marriage between Henry and Anne as lawful and valid five days later. The Pope excommunicated both men. Catherine died on January 7, 1536. 

Anne had one surviving daughter, Elizabeth, in 1533. All her other children were miscarried or stillborn. Henry grew tired of her and came to the conclusion that their marriage was cursed and he had been bewitched by her. Again he had his eye on one of Anne's ladies in waiting, Jane Seymour. Anne's enemies brought the most outrageous charges against her, trying and finding her guilty of adultery, incest and high treason. Cramner had once again pronounced that the King's marriage to Anne was invalid and annulled it on May 17, 1536.  Anne was executed two days later. 

C. Henry VIII & Jane

Henry married Jane on May 30, 1536 and had his long desired son, Edward, with her the next year. She died in childbirth and none of Henry's three subsequent marriages produced any children. 

Jane Seymour

The Catholic church forbade bigamy, recognizing a man could only have one wife at a time. Under Catholic law, Henry's marriage to Anne was invalid because it took place during the lifetime of Catherine. While Henry replaced the Pope as the ultimate religious authority in England, the English Church remained largely Catholic in doctrine during his lifetime. Henry's marriage to Jane was valid under Catholic law or the Church of England's law because a man was free to remarry after the death of his wife. Edward was unquestionably legitimate and as his only male heir, dutifully recognized as King Edward VI by all when Henry died in 1547. He died in 1553, only 15 years old, having ruled through regents due to his young age.

Commonly Henry has been said that he sought to divorce his wives, but this is not correct. Divorce was not recognized by the Catholic church as a religiously correct way to dissolve a marriage as it was in the pre-Christian Roman Empire. Husband and wife could not be separated from the bonds of marriage due to infidelity, infertility, cruel treatment, non-support, abandonment, insanity or mutual loathing. A marriage could be only dissolved absent death of one of the parties if it was annulled. An annulment treated the marriage as if it never happened due to some flaw in its inception such as consanguinity, procurement through force, bigamy or incompetency of one of the parties. Divorce was commonly used by Henry's opponents to refer to his dissolution efforts because they believed he had insufficient ecclesiastic grounds to undo his union with Catherine.

D. Henry VIII's Children - Edward, Mary & Elizabeth

Edward VI

Edward VI had been brought up a staunch Protestant while his half-sister Mary was an equally staunch Catholic. Henry had been permitted to name his successors by an Act of Parliament, the Third Succession Act. The Act stated that if his son died without children, then the throne would go to Mary, and if she passed without issue, then to Elizabeth. It said nothing about the validity of their mothers' marriages to Henry or reverse the annulment decisions of Archbishop Cramner.

When Edward was taken ill in 1553 he tried to prevent their succession. He opposed Mary on both religious and legitimacy concerns but as Elizabeth was also Protestant, he could only claim her bastardy as cause for her removal from the line of succession. He also favored male monarchs over the possibility of female monarchs. At first he named the male heirs of his first cousin once-removed, Lady Jane Grey, to succeed him. At this time Jane was about sixteen years old and had just been married, so those male heirs were far from certain. Later as he was dying he changed his devise to permit Jane to be made Queen in her own right. In this decision he may have been unduly influenced by John Dudley, the Duke of Northumberland, Lord President of the Council and Jane Grey's father-in-law.

Mary I

Unlike Mary and Elizabeth, Jane Grey had no Act of Parliament recognizing her right to the crown or Edward's authority to change his father's succession. Mary had the support of religious conservatives offended by the Protestant changes to the English church during Edward's reign as well as considerable sympathy due to how how meanly her father treated her and her mother. Jane only ruled for nine days before she was deposed by Mary and her supporters. Mary then ruled as Queen until 1558, marrying King Philip II of Spain, but their marriage produced no children. After Mary's death Elizabeth was proclaimed Queen. Elizabeth ruled until 1603, dying unwed and virgin. The House of Tudor thereafter came to an end and was replaced by the Scottish House of Stuart in the person of King James I of England and VI of Scotland.

If Henry and Catherine's union was valid, then any children he had with Anne were illegitimate as the product of bigamy. On the other hand, if Catherine's union with Henry was unholy, then Catherine's children were bastards. Both marriages cannot be valid under the ecclesiastical law of that time. 

One of Mary's first statutes passed in Parliament at the beginning of her reign recognized her mother's marriage to her father as legitimate and Cramner's divorce judgment as false and void. How much authority this could have over a matter in the ecclesiastic sphere is uncertain. Elizabeth's first Parliament also passed a law confirming her title and authority but that law did not mention the legitimacy of her parent's union. It focused solely on the succession law by which she was deemed the successor to her father, brother and sister. As the spiritual jurisdiction followed that of the religion of the reigning monarch, it would have been understood that the religious authorities of the respective Queens would have viewed their parents' unions as legitimate even if declarations of said belief are obscure or lost to time today.

Elizabeth I

As discoursing on the legitimacy of the ruling monarch was most unwise, throughout the reigns of the half-sisters, the English people were generally content to ignore the illegitimacy question. Not all the people were content, both Mary and Elizabeth had to crush a major uprising (Wyatt's Rebellion, 1554; the Rising of the North, 1569) founded in differences of religion between the monarch and her disaffected subjects. Undoubtedly the rebels would use a charge of bastardy against the ruling queen in their efforts to draw support for their cause.

In modern times, the concept of a "putative" marriage may save a child born from such a marriage from the legal impediments of bastardy. In a putative marriage, at least one of the parties had to have entered the marriage in good faith, unaware of facts which would suggest that the marriage was not valid. If a woman married a man who had previously unbeknownst to her had a living previous wife at the time, then her marriage to the man was invalid but their children could inherit property from the father. While it does not appear that putative marriages were recognized in the Catholic Church at that time, the majority of the English people may have considered it a de-facto justification for the rule of their monarchs because Henry wed both Catherine and Anne in good faith with the support of the religious authorities of their time.

The reigns of Mary and Elizabeth firmly established that the succession in England was not male-only or pure agnatic primogeniture but male-preference or cognatic primogeniture.

The Unroyal Stuarts, Illegitimacy's Last Gasp

A. James, Duke of Monmouth

James, Duke of Monmouth

The final royal bastard deserving a mention was James Scott, the Duke of Monmouth. He was the eldest illegitimate son of King Charles II with one of his many mistresses, Lucy Walter. When Charles II died in 1685 without any legitimate children with his queen his brother James II succeeded him. James II was a Catholic King of a Protestant Kingdom and earlier Parliamentary efforts to exclude him from the succession had failed due to Charles' opposition. When Charles died Monmouth was living in the Netherlands and as a Protestant believed the English people would flock to his banner and he sailed to England hoping to raise an army there.

Monmouth claimed Charles married his mother, but Charles swore he had never married anyone except his Queen, Catherine of Braganza. Monmouth landed in England a few months after his father's death and raised a force but his  rebellion was crushed. Monmouth was taken captive and beheaded. James II was not yet sufficiently unpopular to be overthrown, that would come in the Glorious Revolution of 1689. Among the contributors to that unpopularity was the severe treatment he and Judge George Jeffreys meted out to suspected supporters of the rebellion. Those trials were known as the "Bloody Assizes". He also refused to enforce English laws penalizing Catholics and appointed Catholics to the army. All these measures caused grave concern to the Protestant Establishment.

B. James the Old Pretender

James the Old Pretender

The first son of James II, James Francis Edward Stuart (later called "the old pretender") was slandered by his Protestant enemies as a bastard child by his mother, Mary of Moderna, with another man. They alleged that James II was impotent from contracting venereal disease. Alternatively he was accused have been substituted for the queen's stillborn child, the "baby in the warming pan" claim. This claim was vehemently denied by the many witnesses to his live birth. 

Prince James was born in 1688 and would be raised a Catholic. This was too much for the Protestant Establishment of England, which was content to wait until James II died to be succeeded by one of his Protestant daughters, Mary or Anne. Several of the leading Protestant figures of the kingdom invited Mary's husband, William, Prince of Orange and Stadtholder of the Dutch Republic, to invade England and depose James II. William's invasion was successful and he and his wife were crowned jointly as William III and Mary II. She died in 1692 and he in 1702, thereafter her sister Anne succeeded her brother in law without incident and ruled until 1714. In 1707 her title changed from Queen of England (and Queen of Scotland) to Queen of Great Britain upon the political union of previously-separate Kingdoms of England and Scotland.

Charles the Young Pretender

The Bill of Rights (1689) and Act of Succession of 1701 barred Catholics from the throne. The Act designated the German House of Hanover, the closest Protestant relatives to the Stuarts, as the successor to Anne if she died without issue. Anne's children predeceased her by 1700 and she did not have any pregnancies thereafter. At the time of the Act's passage, the heir-presumptive would have been Sophia, the Electress (Consort to the Elector) of Hanover and granddaughter of James I. Sophia died a few months before Anne, so her son George, the Elector of Hanover, was the most senior member of the Hanoverian line and enthroned as George I of Great Britain. George had never set foot in Britain prior to the death of Anne and did not speak English upon his ascension to the throne.

James Francis Edward Stuart never ended up ruling England, although he tried to invade it in 1715, again in 1719 and, through his son Charles Edward Stuart, in 1745. Every time these "Jacobites" failed, despite significant support in Scotland. The closest they came to success was in the 1745 rebellion when Prince Charles ("the Young Pretender" and "Bonnie Prince Charlie") arrived in Scotland, raised an his army, won several victories over the local Hanoverian commanders and marched into England. He and his supporters got as far as Derby because retreating back into Scotland. William Augustus, the Duke of Cumberland and youngest son of George II, commanded the army which caught up with the Jacobites at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. The Hanoverian forces destroyed the Jacobites and forced Bonnie Prince Charlie to escape from Scotland to the continent. Not content with just a victory over the rival royal house, the Hanoverians systematically dismantled the Highland-clan structure which had provided repeated support for the Stuart pretenders. The Jacobites would never attempt another rising.