Is Britain's Real Monarch Living in Australia?

today I'm going to discuss a theory that was made popular in the 2004 documentary Britain's real monarch you can view that documentary right here on youtube by following the link in the description britain's real monarch was hosted by actor Tony Robinson who is best known for playing Baldrick in the show Black Adder in the documentary he argues that the current queen is not the legitimate monarch and that the rightful monarch is actually a rather ordinary guy living in Australia so I'm going to show you some family trees in order to explain the theory and then at the end I'm going to give you my opinion on it [Music] let's start off with a quick recap of the Wars of the Roses in the late medieval period England had a king named Edward the third from the House of Plantagenet he had a nice long reign of fifty years he had five sons but because of his long life he actually outlived his first two sons now you might think that the throne would therefore pass to his third son however most European monarchies follow a system known as primogeniture which means that whenever possible titles get passed down from firstborn to firstborn and so on so the firstborn son of a firstborn son actually takes precedence over all of his uncles so when Edward the third died the throne passed directly to his grandson richard ii but richard ii ended up being quite a nasty king so in 1399 many of the nobles rallied together and had him deposed now richard ii did not have any children and by then john Duke of Lancaster had died so the next most senior male in the line of succession was Henry Bolingbroke who therefore became King Henry the fourth and this is where the roots of the Wars of the Roses began you see at this point it hadn't yet been firmly established whether England should follow male-only primogeniture or whether it should follow male-preference primogeniture male-only of course means that only males can inherit and this is what Henry the fourth based his claim on being that he was the next most senior male however if male-preference had been followed it would have meant that the line could pass through a female so long as that female did not have any brothers so being that Philippa here was an only child under the male-preference system the throne should have passed through her now she was actually dead by $13.99 and so was her firstborn son Roger but Roger had a son named Edmund who was living at the time so really the throne should have gone straight from Richard ii to Edmund but it didn't it went to Henry the fourth and then it went to Henry the fifth and then it passed on to Henry the sixth but by this point the situation had changed first of all Edmund died childless however he had an older sister who had a son named Richard so when Edmund died Richard became the most senior person in this line and not only could Richard claim that he was the legitimate King of England based on the male preference rules he also happened to be a direct male only line descendent of Edward the third through his father so based on these facts the Wars of the Roses began the Yorkists represented by the white rose argued that Richard was the true king the Lancastrians represented by the red rose defended King Henry the sixth now if you were to just look up here at the sons of Edward the third you might think that well Lancaster comes before York and therefore the Lancaster's were more senior however the Yorkists did not stake their claim based on their York roots they based it instead on this female line here initially the Lancastrians held on to power and Richard of York and his second son Edmund were killed but the eldest son continued to fight and eventually scored a big victory he became king in 1461 Henry the sixth managed to take back the throne briefly but then Edward the fourth won again so with the Yorkist win it looked like things were back on track but when Edward the fourth dined things got complicated yet again his son Edward v was only 12 at the time so basically his uncle Richard over here was left in charge and before the young boy was crowned uncle Richard dropped a bombshell he claimed the Edward the fourth had had a secret first marriage and that therefore Edward v and his siblings were all illegitimate being that their parents marriage was illegal suddenly young Edward and his brother Richard went missing never to be seen again and Richard the third was named King now you might ask why did the throne pass to Richard when there was a more senior line here well you see George had fought alongside the Lancastrians and although he was later forgiven for this he later became involved in a plot against his older brother and was executed for treason at the same time he was stripped of all his titles which meant that his descendants became illegitimate as well so this left Richard as the only remaining heir which brings us to Henry the seventh and the tutors Henry had several ties to the Lancastrians his father was the half-brother of Henry the sixth and through his mother he was actually a descendant of John Duke of Lancaster albeit through a non royal line originally John Beaufort was considered illegitimate because his mother was a mistress of the Duke of Lancaster when he was born however John was later declared legitimate bona Richard the second and then later Henry the fourth said yeah he's legitimate but he and his descendants are never allowed to be in the line of succession so Henry's case for becoming King was not really based on his descent from Edward the third instead it was based on two other things first it was based on the right of conquest which means that he and his are fought Richard the third and his armies and Henry won therefore just like William the Conqueror he became king by force but second in order to cement his claim even further he married Elizabeth of York daughter of Edward the fourth he convinced people that this marriage had in fact been legal and that the whole story of the first wife had been made up by Richard the third in order to seize the throne this made Elizabeth the most senior heir according to the male preference rules and it also meant that all of their future descendants would have a better claim to the throne than anyone else so this marriage was seen as the end of the Wars of the Roses a unification of the Yorkist side with the Lancastrian side and this was symbolized by the tudor rose which combined the white rose with the red rose so again things were back on track from this point we get the rest of the Tudor monarchs before the throne then passes to the Stuart's this was the point in which England and Scotland began to share a monarch but remember the Stewart's did not take the throne of England by force they were actually the most senior descendants of Henry the seventh after Henry the eighth's line died out the later hanover monarchs which include queen victoria were all direct descendants of this line although there's the whole Jacobite debate and if you're interested in that I've got a separate video on that topic which I'll link to in the description after the Hanover's you get the house of saxe-coburg and Gotha which ended up changing its name to windsor and the current monarch of the United Kingdom queen elizabeth ii is the current head of that house and the most senior descendant of the hanover line according to the rules of male-preference primogeniture so Queen Elizabeth sits on the throne today because she's a direct descendant of this guy and of this guy and of this guy and of course this guy and if we were to go back even further we could also trace things back to William the Conqueror Alfred the Great and even Charlemagne okay with that background we're now ready to talk about the documentary Britain's greatest monarch Tony Robinson's theory is based not on the claim that Edward the fourths children were illegitimate but that Edward the fourth himself was illegitimate and all of it is based on the timing of Edward the fourths birth Edward the fourth was born on April 28th 14:42 in France while his father was there fighting in the Hundred Years War but according to some records from the time Edwards father was off fighting at a location about 100 miles from where his mother was living for about a five-week period around the time in which Edward the fourth was likely conceived the conclusion is that his mother must have had an affair and that Edwards father was there for someone else if this was true Edward would indeed be illegitimate and if he was his children would also be illegitimate including Elizabeth of York and that means that everyone else from this point forward would also be illegitimate or at least not as senior because on his own Henry the seventh could only claim the throne based on conquest not on genealogy so we would have no tutors no Stewart's no Hanover's no Windsor's no Queen Elizabeth the second so if this theory were true who would be the rightful monarch well that's the question that the documentary Britain's real monarch answers and it starts with George Duke of Clarence who as I mentioned earlier was executed and stripped of all his titles by Edward the fourth but if Edward the fourth was an illegitimate then George really didn't commit treason did he and if Edward the fourth was an illegitimate King he didn't really have the right to strip anyone of his titles did he so if we put George Duke of Clarence back in the line of succession his line suddenly becomes the most senior one George had a son Edward who died childless as the last male only line member of the Plantagenet dynasty and how did he die he was executed by none other than Henry the seventh who worked hard to get rid of any possible rivals for the throne Edward did have a younger sister though and through her the line continued eventually the line married into the Hastings family and therefore they inherited the earldom of Huntington in fact when Elizabeth the first was queen and the nobles were wondering who her successor should be Henry Hastings was actually one of the people considered he of course wasn't chosen though and he actually died childless so the line then continued through his younger brother George eventually we get to the point where there wasn't a son to inherit so the line continued through the rod and Hastings family John Rawdon having been an Irish nobleman from there we come to Edith rod and Hastings who inherited the earldom of Loudoun in Scotland she married Charles Abney Hastings and had a son named pollen and now we're getting fairly close to the present pollen was followed by his daughter Edith Edith only son died in world war two so the line continued through her daughter Barbara instead Barbara was a member of the House of Lords until 1999 and passed away in 2002 her eldest son was named Michael and it is Michael who appears in the documentary Britain's real monarch Michael moved to Australia when he was a tene and ended up living as a farmer there for the rest of his life in the documentary Tony Robinson tracks down Michael in Australia walks up to his front door and gives him the news Michael finds the whole thing very interesting but doesn't sail off to London with an army to claim his supposed throne the documentary was filmed in 2004 and Michael passed away in 2012 his eldest son Simon is therefore the current Earl of Loudon and the most senior living heir of George Duke of Clarence so if one accepts that Edward the fourth was illegitimate then the argument is that Simon Abney Hastings is therefore britain's real monarch okay so what do I think of all of this well first of all let me say that for any country at any given time the real monarch is always the one who is actually sitting on the throne genealogy is of course important but what is even more important for a monarch is the support of the people in the past this mostly meant the support of the nobles if the nobles were happy the armies were happy and if the armies were happy you got to stay on the throne nowadays it's a bit more complex so long as the population of a country is happy with its monarchy the monarchy is likely to continue and it's actually the Parliament that gives legitimacy to the monarch not having the perfect bloodline that all being said were Edward the fourth and his children legitimate or not well we'll never be 100% certain but my opinion is that he was in fact the true son of Richard of York and that his marriage to Elizabeth Woodville was in fact legal several historians have looked into the claims made in the documentary Britain's real monarch and have countered that based on travel speeds length of gestation cord politics and so forth it is actually more likely that Edward was legitimate it is that he was not claims of illegitimate she did surface at the time likely due to all of this family rivalry but if those claims were true they likely would have been fairly easy to prove at the time and therefore Edward the fourth would never have become King but he did and again I'm not saying that we can know all of this for sure but I think it's safer to assume that he was legitimate than to assume that he was not and even if he was not there's still the fact that Henry the seventh claimed the throne based on conquest and that he was accepted by the people at the time just like every other monarch after him well except for Charles the first and there's also the fact that we have over 500 more years of British monarchs from 1485 to today and that the current queen is certainly more connected to all of those famous monarchs than simon avenue hastings is and who's to say that there's not some break in the chain somewhere in this line that we don't know about so sorry Simon I've got nothing against you you're a handsome guy but I'm gonna stick with Queen Elizabeth for now thanks for watching

Channel: UsefulCharts

Views: 1,520,032

Rating: 4.8614864 out of 5

Keywords: wars of the roses, wars of the roses family tree, yorkist family tree, lancastrian family tree, was edward iv illegitimate, plantagenet family tree, plantagenet heir, simon abney hastings, michael abney hastings, alternative succession, alternative succession to the british throne, george duke of clarence, richard iii, henry vii

Id: AT_1lErcIoM

Length: 17min 37sec (1057 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 22 2019