God bless you ma'am

For one reason or another (ahem Alain de Botton) I have been involved in discussion recently about the "popular" versus "academic" presentations of philosophy and I was feeling glad that Anglo-Saxon history doesn't have these issues to quite the same degree. Then I saw this attempt to trace the "real" heir to the throne of England, i.e. someone connected with Edward the Confessor, Harold, or Edgar the Ætheling -- a question which no one satisfactorily resolved after the death of Edward on 5th January 1066, and which is unlikely to have become any clearer in the intervening 940 years (and one week). Obviously it's all Tony Robinson-fodder and not expected to be taken seriously. (A similar exercise but only going back to the Queen of Bohemia was in one of Jane Stevenson's excellent novels.)

If we assume that Edward the Confessor had no right to give away his throne either to the Normans or the Scandinavians, and then ignore the ancient right of the king's council to choose the next king on the grounds that the hereditary principle was well established by this point (although we might think back just fifty years to the Danish Conquest of 1016 and question that idea), then obviously the next king should have been little Edgar the Ætheling, the last male line descendant of the House of Wessex and Alfred the Great, etc. He had two sisters, but of the three siblings the only one to have children was St Margaret of Scotland. I've just published a well-illustrated book about her, as it happens, very reasonably priced, and written in a style which coming from a Cambridge Fellow might startle Alain de Botton. (I.e. I'm not expecting to earn any RAE points from it.) So I probably ought to be bending my knees and scanning the horizon for an approaching bandwagon here.

Anyway for once I actually know what I am talking about, but I'm afraid it's not going to make very good TV. Three of Margaret's sons became kings of Scotland and the third, David, established a long-lasting Scottish royal dynasty with which all subsequent Scottish royalty were connected. One of Margaret's daughters became Henry I's queen Edith-Matilda, mother of that William the Ætheling who died in the White Ship, and also of the Empress Maud, who was mother of Henry II, and from then on Margaret's descendants were thoroughly ensconced on the English throne too. With the unification of the English and Scottish thrones under James the Ist and VIth we got a double dose of Margaret. And given that Archbishop Parker was undoubtedly right that the Anglo-Saxons were Protestants, the heir to the kingdom of the English is obviously: Queen Victoria. But, I don't think anyone's going to get very excited that the heirs to the English royal throne are the English royal family.

During the English Revolution the Diggers and other radicals talked a lot about Charles I representing the Norman Yoke, and exiled royalists countered with St Margaret to show that the Stuarts were precisely who ought to be on the throne by anyone's reckoning. You can read all about it in my fascinating new book (only when I say "all" I actually mean "a smattering of things I think interesting").