What is that primogeniture thing, anyway?
This week’s dip into the archives concerns a question that’s been bothering me about history…
The recent Channel 4 documentary about the new adventures of Ricardian car park botherer Philippa Langley has got me thinking about the Wars of the Roses. It’s a bit of English history so complicated that it kept Shakespeare busy for eight entire plays: the conflict’s causes include, but are not limited to, noble ambitions, royal incompetence, and the exciting discovery, in 1399, that if you deposed and replaced a king then god would not, in fact, stop you.
But what struck me when I found myself reading about it recently was the difficulty of assessing, from this distance, which of the two rival factions actually had the better claim. Both were what are known as “cadet branches” of the Plantagenet dynasty, descended from younger sons of Edward III: the third (John of Gaunt) in the case of the House of Lancaster, the fourth (Edmund of Langley) in that of the House of York. One reason that two lineages so far down the apparent pecking order were in contention at all was that Edward’s second surviving son, Lionel of Clarence, was foolish enough to only produce a daughter. Another was that the son of the first, Edward the Black Prince, who predeceased his father, was Richard II: the king whose deposition by Henry Bolingbroke – Henry IV – started this madness in the first place.
At any rate, one cause of the instability was that, although the Lancastrian and Yorkist lines had stronger claims than anybody else, neither was particularly strong. Another, I suspect, is summed up by this sentence on the House of York’s Wikipedia page:
Compared with its rival, the House of Lancaster, [the House of York] had a superior claim to the throne of England according to cognatic primogeniture, but an inferior claim according to agnatic primogeniture.
I don’t know what that meant. I decided to find out.
First things first. Primogeniture – the system of leaving a realm to its ruler’s eldest child – is neither natural nor inevitable. The early Frankish kingdoms used partible inheritance, which means dividing things up between claimants: this is why, half a century after Charlemagne put so much effort into rebuilding the Western Roman Empire, it had already been split into half a dozen fragments once again. There have also been many monarchies – Anglo-Saxon England; the Papacy; the Holy Roman Empire – which used an elective system, in which a group of senior nobles get together and pick their next boss. (The Holy Roman Empire technically remained elective right up until Napoleon abolished the place because he found it annoying even though, for century upon century, those electors mysteriously ended up electing the next Habsburg in line every bloody time.)
Then there’s ultimogeniture, a system in which it’s the youngest child who scoops the pot. This sometimes makes sense with, say, family estates, since it’s the youngest who’s most likely to end up stuck at home looking after their ageing parents; but it doesn’t seem to be a thing with royalty very often, presumably because a child on the throne is exactly the sort of thing you’re generally trying to avoid.
So: a lot of monarchies end up with primogeniture, where the crown goes to the monarch’s eldest surviving child, then the next sibling in line, and so on; if you run out of kids, the inheritance instead passes to the monarch’s next sibling, then their kids and so on. In mathematical terms, this is what’s known as a “depth-first search”: you finish following one line of descent before moving back and looking at the next. This is why the line of succession for the British crown will run through Prince William and his kids, then Prince Harry and his kids, before looking to the current king’s siblings. All of which keeps the prospect of King Andrew I comfortingly far away.
This might seem straightforward enough, but there are a number of possible variants. Some systems – notably the famously lovely Saudi one – adopt a “breadth-first search”, exhausting one generation before moving onto the next (how, I’m not quite sure). The purpose seems to be to ensure age, wisdom and absolutely minimal change.
The bigger question is that of gender. Absolute primogeniture – of the sort a number of European monarchies adopted in the 20th century, and Britain in 2013 – gives women the same right of inheritance as men. Historically, though, the idea that women were as capable of ruling as men was seen as insane wokery or political correctness gone mad, partly because ruling tended to involve fighting, partly because of complicated issues surrounding marriage and property. (Would a kingdom ruled by a queen regnant end up to some extent controlled by her weird foreign husband?)
Separate to that was the question of whether the right to rule could pass via the female line. The king’s daughter may be too delicate and curvaceous to rule; but what of her sons? Cognatic primogeniture means they could, indeed, inherit; agnatic primogeniture means they can’t. Under the latter system, it doesn’t matter that maternal granddad was king: if you wanted the crown, you should have been more careful in your choice of parents.
There are other terms for these two different sets of rules. Strict agnatic primogeniture is also said to follow the Salic Law, rules dating from 6th century Francia which say, basically, that only those who descended from the male line could either inherit or pass on the right to inherit. But other, semi-Salic systems mean that women don’t tend to inherit but their sons can.
It’s the clash between those two systems which has triggered so many of the excitingly war-y interludes that make up so much of European history. One of the contributors to the Schleswig-Holstein question was that Denmark and Holstein had different attitudes to the Salic Law. Result: a bloody big succession crisis in 1863.
It was also (see, we got there in the end) one of the things that contributed to the Wars of the Roses. Under the strict agnatic interpretation implied by the Salic Law, Lancaster had the better claim, because the family was descended from Edward III’s third son, York merely from his fourth. Under a semi-salic interpretation, though York had the better claim: that’s because Richard of York was not only the grandson of Edward III’s fourth son, but the great great grandson of his second, the aforementioned Lionel of Clarence.
By my count, that made Richard his own cousin twice removed, which is very healthy. But it also meant it was not actually obvious even then who had the better claim: it all depended on what you thought the rules were. Throw in ambition, power-hunger and the fact everyone had realised a few decades earlier that you could depose a king, and nature took its course.
Until recently incidentally, the British royals followed male preference primogeniture: that means your sons inherit before your daughters, but your daughters inherit before your brothers (who inherit before your sisters, etc.). The Cameron government amended this in 2013 to give Princess Charlotte the same inheritance rights as her brothers.
There are other possible complications too, especially when talking about estates rather than kingdoms: complicated rules involving things like entailes and moieties, aimed at ensuring the estate didn’t get broken up. But on the assumption that you people are more interested in political units than why Cousin Matthew got to inherit Downton Abbey I’m not going to go into that stuff.
Some last points, to wrap up. An heir presumptive can be displaced in the line of succession by plausible future births; an heir apparent cannot. (Prince William is heir apparent; the late queen was, prior to the death of George VI, merely heir presumptive, because her parents could plausibly have given her a brother.)
The Roman Empire relied, in part, on a system of adoption, in which the emperor could nominate a successor by adopting him as a son. The benefit of this system was that it replicated the certainty you get from a familial system (no arguments over who gets to take over!), without the annoying issue that such systems sometimes inevitably produce heirs who are utterly unsuited to rule and there was nothing anyone could do about it. It feels telling that Rome’s golden age came to an end when Marcus Aurelius, last of the “five good emperors”, became the first of them to die with a son and natural heir, Commodus. Who was so great at the job that he would go on to be the baddie in Gladiator.
Lastly, there are matrilineal systems, in which it’s the female line which inherits: in certain periods of Ancient Egypt, the next pharaoh would be the guy who married the last one’s eldest daughter. That, though, is quite another story.
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