A History of English Public Opinion in 43 Monarchs

Some late-breaking book promo, cunningly disguised by some content.

Feb 24, 2025

I don’t normally email you on a Monday, I know, but the offer I need to promote runs out at 23:59hrs this evening, so I’m making an exception. Two actual articles – one a repeat from darkest 2021; the other brand new – to follow, and thus justify this otherwise shamelessly self-promotional email.

Before the ~content~, though, that EXCITING SPECIAL OFFER! The UK paperback of A History of the World in 47 Borders: The Stories Behind the Lines on Our Maps is published on 27 March. Pre-order before midnight tonight, and Waterstones will give you a whole 25% off. Brilliant! Just order via Waterstones.com or in the Waterstones app and use the code “PREORDER25” to bag yourself a bargain.

The code works with lots of other books, too, not least Lewis Baston’s excellent Borderlines: A History of Europe in 29 Borders, so if you’ve read my book and still want more I suggest that. Order before midnight tomorrow, to avoid disappointment!

Right, that’s enough sales. Here’s some brand new stuff loosely connected to the book through the words, “Errrr, history, I guess?”

Finally, an official ranking of England’s eight King Henrys!

Not for the first time, Matthew Smith of YouGov has been asking voters stupid questions about non-political topics that I suspect could be angling at a write-up from me personally. (This is not just ego speaking1, they do actually do that.) This time the topic is the fame and popularity of every English monarch since 1066, and the results are delightful.

The most popular monarchs are no surprise: the recently departed Elizabeth II, and her great great granny Victoria. After that it depends how you count – Charles III has the most favorables, but also unusually high unfavourables, presumably because he’s in the news a lot which presents a regular flow of opportunities to aggravate people with his kinging. (Love, love, love the 12% who claim not to have heard of the actual reigning king.)

The other challengers are all either recent (Georges V and VI, Edward VII) – though not so recent anyone can plausibly remember them being on the throne, which raises questions – or have excellent branding (Henry V, Elizabeth I, Richard I, who we even call the Lionheart even though he was barely here and repeatedly made it obvious he’d quite happily sell England to the highest bidder if it allowed him to fund just one more crusade).

The only exception here is William I – William the Conqueror – who invaded England, decimated its ruling class then harried the north, yet still gets a better rating than Henry V.

I’m starting to suspect a lot of the respondents don’t actually know that much about history.

The least popular monarchs are mostly pretty “well you can see how they got there”, too. Henry VIII is extremely well-known (shock, that): the issue is that most of those who know of him hate him, presumably because of the whole serial uxoricide thing. The same applies to Oliver Cromwell which is – given history, Ireland, and Britain’s baffling but reliable enthusiasm for monarchism – unsurprising.

Edward VIII is the only recent monarch to be widely hated, though whether that’s because he quit the job to get his end away with an American divorcee, or because he was a tiny bit Nazi, is not entirely clear. I’m faintly surprised that even 3% of people like King John.

Talking of nepoticides, it’s hilarious that Richard III has 19% support, and is more popular than his near predecessor Henry VI.

The familiarity rankings – those of, essentially, which monarchs people have actually heard of – are also fairly predictable. Top of the chart come those who are recent, or get a lot of stories told about them.

The other end of the chart is more striking. Stephen of Blois may have presided over 20 years of civil war known as the Anarchy, but it’s been nine centuries since that was a big theme of the news, so fair enough that he doesn’t often come up. But how is John less famous than his great great uncle William II? There’s a whole Shakespeare play about John! He was in Disney’s Robin Hood!

The obscurity of the assorted Edwards also seems a little harsh. Edward III was really important in the Hundred Years War! Edward IV in the Wars of the Roses! Edward V is barely any more popular than, and vastly less famous than, the man who had him killed!2

Oh, and Tudors are generally better known than the average English monarch. This is perhaps, given BBC drama commissioning choices, unsurprising.

The ranking of King Henrys, incidentally, goes V, I, II, IV, VII, III, VI, VIII. I only dug this out to give me a joke title, but now I’ve seen it I’m kind of infuriated that the reforming Henry VII ranks below another usurper who couldn’t even be bothered to start building the modern state – again, I blame Shakespeare – and that II and I are the wrong way round. Goddammit.

Lastly, I said that this was every monarch, but that’s not quite true. To be fair to YouGov, the pollster actually just says “43 rulers of England and Britain since 1066”. But I suspect this is more about trying to stop Scottish and Welsh readers from writing in – good luck with that – than it is an acknowledgement that there are gaps, and it is a source of some shame that YouGov seems unaware of the work of Lady Jane Grey, or Richard Cromwell, without even getting into the status or more debatable figures like Empress Matilda, Louis VIII or Phillip II of Spain. I demand a recount.

The could-have-been kings and queens

Long-running institutions tend to produce two things that appeal to my nerd brain. One is lists; the other is errata. Should anti-popes really be included in the full complement of Bishops of Rome? Was John Hurt a proper Doctor Who? Hours of fun to be had.

One list with which I have been familiar since childhood is the one that inspired the annoying mnemonic that begins, “Willie, Willie, Harry, Stee”. There’s a clear and uncontested list of kings and queens of England and the dates on which they ruled, and if we’re more familiar with that list after the Norman conquest than those that came before, we do at least know that there is a list.

But half of the fun of learning about history lies in the discovery that things are never quite as simple as you thought. That familiar list is, if not exactly wrong, then at the very least incomplete. Here are some people who don’t tend to make the official list but may, nonetheless, have at least thought of themselves as monarch of England, along with their regnal dates.

Ælfweard (924): Second son of the great king Edward the Elder, and may have briefly reigned after his father’s death (the relevant chronicles are divided). Even if he did, though, he died within a few weeks, to be succeeded by his brother Æthelstan, who was the first to call himself “King of the English”. (What Edward ruled was really just an extended Wessex.)

So, it’s not clear Ælfweard ruled something one might call “England”, it’s not clear he ruled at all, and also, let’s be honest, if I chucked a bunch of vowels together with a couple of Ws and told you they’d been a king of anglo-saxon England, you probably couldn’t confidently tell me I was lying.

On the whole, then, an underwhelming start.

Edgar Ætheling (1066): A distant cousin of Edward the Confessor3, grandson of Edmund II Ironside, elected king by the “Witan” – a sort of ruling council – after the Norman Conquest of October 1066. But his supporters can’t have been that enthusiastic about his claim: firstly, they’d not pushed it when Edward’s death created a succession crisis the previous January; secondly, they all wussed out the moment they came across any heavily armed Normans. Edgar, too, swiftly paid homage to William the Conqueror, which was probably sensible because it meant he got to live to a ripe old age, rather than being brutally murdered by some French Norwegians at some point in his early teens.

Now we’re getting to the good stuff.

Matilda (1141): Has a claim to be England’s first reigning queen. The daughter of Henry I, she was left as an only child after her younger brother died – alongside most of the court – when the White Ship sank in the channel.

Matilda probably knew a lot about power politics – she was an empress, married first to the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V, then to the count of Anjou – but 12th century England wasn’t quite ready for feminism, and her cousin Stephen seized the crown before she could. She did manage to control England for some of the civil war known as The Anarchy; but ultimately she had to accept Stephen’s reign, in exchange for recognition of her son’s right to succeed him as Henry II.

Henry the Young King (1170-83): That same Henry II crowned his eldest surviving son as co-king while he was still very much moving about, in an attempt to avoid the kind of succession crises that had dogged England for centuries. The older Henry seemed to have planned to divide his cross-channel empire among his sons.

*A rough map of the Angevin Empire: territory it controlled in yellow, territory it received homage from in yellow hatching. Image: Wikimedia Commons.*

This would probably have been a good plan, except the younger Henry got the hump that his crown came with no actual power, and in 1173 raised an army to overthrow his father. The two made it up, but a decade later he rebelled again, this time going to war against his brother Richard the Lionheart, too. Then he died of dysentery, so that solved that problem.

Louis (1216-17): Three of Henry II’s sons would be crowned king of England: the two I’ve already mentioned, plus John, who was so bad at it that basically everyone rebelled.

You already know that story – Magna Carta et al. – but what you might not know is that he was so bad at it that the King of France invaded and was welcomed in London with open arms. Barely a month after being proclaimed king in St Paul’s Cathedral, Louis VIII of France controlled half of England and had the support of most of the barons. A couple of months later, John gave into popular pressure and copied his older brother by, yes, dying of dysentery.

The following year, supporters of John’s baby son Henry III beat Louis in battle, then said that they’d give him a load of gold if he said he’d never been rightful king of England after all and went away again. Louis liked gold. So he did.

Jane (1553): By the mid 16th century, the English monarchy had come of age. Succession crises caused simply by squabbling siblings were out; succession crises caused by squabbling siblings convinced they had God on their side were in.

So, as the young Edward VI lay dying, he re-wrote his will to exclude his suspiciously Catholic half-sister Mary as illegitimate, and ensure the crown would go to his firmly protestant cousin, Lady Jane Grey. Jane was declared queen, and hung around the Tower – always a mistake – awaiting her coronation for a week and a bit.

The problem was, it quickly became blindingly obvious that much of the public and a large chunk of the ruling class preferred Mary: after just nine days, she was declared queen, deposing Jane by default. Initially, the new queen showed some mercy towards her cousin, executing her father-in-law [see correction in footnotes4] but merely holding her nine-day predecessor prisoner in the tower. By the next year, though, it was obvious that Jane’s continued existence as a focus for protestant rebellion was going to be a pain, so Mary had her executed, too.

That same year, Mary married, giving us one last disputed king:

Philip (1554-8): Make no mistake: under the terms of Philip II of Spain’s marriage to Mary, he was definitely King of England. The two monarchs were depicted on coins together; all state business was enacted in Spanish or Latin, because the king didn’t speak English. Denying his royal authority was an act of treason.

Unfortunately, though, his wife died, childless, in 1558, which under the terms of their arrangement meant Philip no longer counted as king. As England moved more firmly into the anti-Catholic camp, it became a bit embarrassing to acknowledge the existence of King Philip. So, we just stopped. And now, treasonous bunch that we are, we act like he was never king at all.

If our definition of a disputed monarch is “someone who thought of themselves as king or queen”, then surely there’s a case for James III & VIII, the Old Pretender, the son of James II? But if I get onto the Jacobite Succession we’ll be here all week so perhaps this is where we should get off.

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