Last week, we looked at the difference between having a royal title and having a place in the line of succession. We discovered that you don’t need to be a prince or princess to have a perfectly legitimate claim to the British throne.
But there’s another misconception worth clearing up.
If you visit the Royal Family’s official website, you’ll find a numbered list of people in line to the throne. It begins, unsurprisingly, with William, Prince of Wales, and works its way through his children, his brother Harry and Harry’s children. Then come the descendants of King Charles’s siblings.
And then, rather abruptly, it stops.
At number 26, we find Lucas Tindall, the youngest child of Zara and Mike Tindall and a great-grandson of Queen Elizabeth II.
So what happens if, through some spectacularly unlikely sequence of events, all 26 people ahead of Lucas become unable to inherit the throne? And then Lucas himself?
Would Britain have to find a new royal family?
Not at all.
The official list stops at the descendants of Queen Elizabeth II. But the line of succession certainly doesn’t.
To see where it goes next, we need to take a short tour through the descendants of her grandfather, King George V.
Meet the family
George V and his wife, Queen Mary, had six children. Two became kings, one became a princess royal, two became dukes and one died tragically young.
Their children were:
Edward (1894–1972), who became Edward VIII.
Albert (1895–1952), who became George VI.
Mary (1897–1965), who became Princess Royal and Countess of Harewood.
Henry (1900–1974), Duke of Gloucester.
George (1902–1942), Duke of Kent.
John (1905–1919), who died aged 13.
We can dispose of two of these branches immediately.
Edward VIII, famously, abdicated in 1936 to marry Wallis Simpson. The couple had no children, so there are no descendants to consider.
Prince John, the youngest child, suffered from epilepsy and died in 1919, aged just 13. He also left no descendants.
That leaves four branches. We’ve already met most of the descendants of George VI, so we’ll begin there.
The Snowdons and Chattos
George VI had two daughters: Elizabeth and Margaret.
Elizabeth became Queen Elizabeth II, and her descendants occupy the first 26 places in today’s succession.
Her younger sister, Princess Margaret, married the photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones in 1960. He was subsequently created Earl of Snowdon, and they had two children.
Their son, David Armstrong-Jones, succeeded his father as the second Earl of Snowdon in 2017.
And here’s our answer to the question in the title.
Number 27 in the line of succession is David Armstrong-Jones, Earl of Snowdon.
He’s followed by his two children, Charles, Viscount Linley, and Lady Margarita Armstrong-Jones.
Next comes his sister, Lady Sarah Chatto, followed by her sons Samuel and Arthur.
Already we’re encountering a rather different-looking royal family. There are earls and viscounts, ladies and ordinary Mr Chattos, but no princes or princesses.
As we saw last week, that’s because the rules governing royal titles are quite different from those governing succession. Princess Margaret’s children were grandchildren of George VI through his daughter, rather than through a son. They weren’t entitled to princely titles under the general provisions of the 1917 Letters Patent.
Their places in the succession, however, were never in doubt.
And once we’ve finished with Princess Margaret’s descendants, we can move further back through George V’s family.
The Gloucesters
Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, was George V’s third son and the younger brother of George VI.
He married Lady Alice Montagu Douglas Scott in 1935, and they had two sons: William and Richard.
Prince William of Gloucester died in a flying accident in 1972, aged 30, without children.
His younger brother Richard inherited the dukedom when their father died in 1974. He is still the Duke of Gloucester today.
Richard and his wife Birgitte have three children: Alexander, Earl of Ulster; Lady Davina Windsor; and Lady Rose Gilman. They also have grandchildren.
This branch gives us another demonstration of how royal titles gradually disappear from a family.
Richard is a prince because he is a male-line grandson of George V. His children, however, are great-grandchildren of George V, and therefore fall outside the normal provisions of the 1917 Letters Patent.
Alexander uses the courtesy title Earl of Ulster, and his sisters have the courtesy title Lady. Their children have their own mixture of titles and ordinary names.
There’s another interesting change coming for the Gloucesters.
When Prince Richard dies, his eldest son Alexander, currently Earl of Ulster, is expected to inherit the dukedom. But Alexander isn’t a prince. He’s a great-grandson of George V, rather than a grandson.
So the title will continue, but it will cease to be a royal dukedom. The present holder is styled His Royal Highness The Duke of Gloucester. His successor will instead be His Grace The Duke of Gloucester, just like other non-royal dukes.
Exactly the same thing is expected to happen to the Dukedom of Kent when Prince Edward’s eldest son, George, Earl of St Andrews, inherits it.
The dukedoms aren’t disappearing. They’re simply passing beyond the generations entitled to royal status.
But every eligible descendant remains part of the succession.
The Kents
Prince George, Duke of Kent, was George V’s fourth son. He died in an aircraft accident in Scotland in 1942, leaving three young children.
All three are still alive today: Prince Edward, Duke of Kent; Princess Alexandra; and Prince Michael of Kent.
And all three have descendants of their own.
Edward inherited the dukedom at the age of six. He and his wife Katharine had three children: George, Earl of St Andrews; Lady Helen Taylor; and Lord Nicholas Windsor.
The family has grown considerably since then, and it contains some particularly interesting complications.
Three descendants in this branch have converted to Roman Catholicism: Lord Downpatrick, Lady Marina-Charlotte Windsor and Lord Nicholas Windsor.
Why does that matter?
Because the Act of Settlement established a Protestant succession. Being a Roman Catholic remains a disqualification from inheriting the British throne.
It’s important to distinguish that from the old prohibition on marrying a Catholic. We’ll come back to that in a moment.
A conversion doesn’t necessarily remove an entire branch of the family tree from the succession. The disqualification applies to the individual. Their descendants can still be eligible if they meet the relevant conditions.
This means that the genealogical family tree and the legal line of succession don’t always contain precisely the same people.
Someone can be a descendant of George V without being eligible to become monarch.
The prince who came back
Prince Michael of Kent provides perhaps the most entertaining legal curiosity in the whole family.
In 1978, he married Baroness Marie-Christine von Reibnitz, who was a Roman Catholic.
At the time, the law disqualified not only Catholics themselves but also anyone who married one.
Consequently, Prince Michael lost his place in the succession.
His children, Lord Frederick Windsor and Lady Gabriella Windsor, were raised in the Church of England and retained their own succession rights.
Then Parliament changed the rules.
The Succession to the Crown Act 2013 abolished the disqualification for marrying a Catholic. When that change came into force on 26 March 2015, Prince Michael regained his place in the line of succession.
He hadn’t changed his religion. He hadn’t divorced or remarried. His ancestry hadn’t changed.
The law had simply stopped treating his marriage as a disqualification.
But the Act didn’t remove the prohibition on a Catholic becoming monarch. That distinction remains important for other members of the Kent family.
There’s a further complication when we try to establish precisely who should be excluded for being Catholic.
What happens to a child born into a Catholic family? Is a Catholic baptism sufficient to disqualify them, or does the law require some personal profession of faith, perhaps at confirmation?
This isn’t just a hypothetical question. During a parliamentary debate in 2013, MPs discussed exactly this uncertainty. The legislation doesn’t specify a particular religious ceremony as the moment at which someone becomes disqualified.
And confirmation doesn’t necessarily happen at a predictable age.
For anyone trying to maintain an accurate list of the more distant successors, this presents a real problem. Births, deaths and marriages can generally be established from public records. Whether someone has been baptised or confirmed into a particular church may be much harder to discover.
The family tree tells us who is descended from whom. But sometimes the information needed to establish their legal eligibility is considerably more elusive.
The Ogilvys
The third child of Prince George, Duke of Kent, is Princess Alexandra.
She married Angus Ogilvy in 1963. He declined the offer of an earldom, so their children, James and Marina, grew up without noble or royal titles.
Their descendants include the Ogilvy, Vesterberg and Mowatt families.
We’re now a long way from the familiar names on the Buckingham Palace balcony. But these people are still descendants of George V, and those who meet the legal requirements remain in the succession.
Once again, a royal surname or title tells us surprisingly little about someone’s eligibility.
The Harewoods
We’ve now covered the descendants of George V’s sons who had children. But there’s one more branch to explore.
George V’s only daughter, Princess Mary, married Henry Lascelles, 6th Earl of Harewood, in 1922.
They had two sons: George and Gerald.
Their elder son, George Lascelles, became the 7th Earl of Harewood in 1947. He had four sons: David, James, Jeremy and Mark.
David succeeded him as the 8th Earl in 2011, and the family continues through several generations of Lascelles descendants.
Princess Mary’s younger son, Gerald, also had children and descendants of his own.
The Harewoods are a particularly good illustration of just how far royal ancestry can extend into families that most people would never think of as royal.
There’s another complication here, too.
Some descendants of the 7th Earl were born outside marriage. British succession law does not automatically recognise every biological descendant as eligible: the legal rules concerning legitimacy matter as well.
Once again, tracing the family tree is only half the job. We also have to apply the law to determine who actually belongs in the line of succession.
By this point, we’ve encountered people with titles ranging from Prince to Earl to Mr, people who have lost their succession rights through religious conversion, and a prince who lost his place and then got it back.
And we’ve still only been exploring the descendants of one king.
But surely it ends somewhere?
You might reasonably think that once we’ve exhausted all the descendants of George V, we’ve reached the end of the succession.
Not even close.
The present succession is based on the Protestant descendants of Sophia, Electress of Hanover, who died in 1714.
Sophia was a granddaughter of James VI of Scotland and I of England. The Act of Settlement 1701 established her and her eligible Protestant descendants as the heirs to the English throne, bypassing closer relatives who were Catholic.
Her son became George I in 1714, beginning the Hanoverian dynasty.
George V was one of Sophia’s many descendants, but by no means the only one with descendants of his own.
So, after the last eligible descendant of George V, the line continues through other branches of the family. These include the Norwegian royal family, descended from George V’s sister Maud, who became Queen of Norway in 1905. The current Norwegian monarch, King Haakon VIII, is a third cousin of King Charles III. And from there, the family tree stretches into aristocratic and ordinary families across Britain, Europe and beyond.
There are thousands of potential successors. The exact number is difficult to establish, not least because births, deaths, religious affiliations and questions of eligibility continually change the list.
Which raises one final question.
The other end of the queue
Who is the very last person in line to the British throne?
In 2011, The Wall Street Journal interviewed Karin Vogel, a 38-year-old therapist living in Rostock, Germany, who had been identified by genealogists as the last person in their enumeration of Sophia of Hanover’s descendants.
That enumeration, compiled by William Addams Reitwiesner, wasn’t quite the legal line of succession. It included Catholics, who are excluded under British succession law.
And the numbering will certainly have changed since the list was compiled.
But there’s an intriguing symmetry here.
Prince William is securely first in line to the throne. New births further down the family tree cannot displace him.
And Karin Vogel may be almost as secure at the opposite end.
Unless she’s had children, acquired a younger sibling, or a previously overlooked branch has been discovered, there’s no obvious reason why she shouldn’t still be last in that genealogical ordering.
One at the very front. One at the very back.
And an extraordinary family tree stretching between them.
The Royal Family’s published list stops at number 26.
The line of succession doesn’t.