by Paul James
November 27 2005

It is traditional among royal families that a queen should produce “an heir and a spare” in order to ensure the succession. If the heir doesn’t survive, then the spare is there to take his place. This has happened several times in British royal history, but there have also been numerous occasions when the spare has not been required and has lived his life in the shadow of his elder brother.

Excluding those currently living, the two most recent second sons of a monarch or heir apparent have found themselves inheriting the throne, having been brought up in the expectation of a quieter life as a younger son. The most recent, George VI, was the most extraordinary, having become king while his elder brother was still alive, and, indeed, pre-deceasing him by 20 years.

The cause of this extraordinary turn of events was, of course, the abdication of Edward VIII. Edward grew into a fit and healthy adult and George, known before his accession as Prince Albert, Duke of York, should have been able to live a relatively peaceful life with his wife and daughters, carrying out royal duties but not at the forefront of the monarchy. This would have been his preference. He was a shy and awkward man, with a bad stutter, popular as a royal family man with a beautiful wife and daughters, but lacking the charisma of his brother. As Edward grew further into middle age without marrying, the possibility that Albert or his daughter Elizabeth would succeed to the throne increased, but, ironically, it was Edward’s decision to marry which eventually brought the Duke of York to his unwelcome destiny. Even at the time of the abdication, some thought that Albert was unlikely to be a successful king, and the idea of skipping him in favour of a younger brother was considered.

The case of George VI’s father, George V, was more straightforward. He was the second son of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, but his elder brother, Albert Duke of Clarence, died in 1892 at the age of 26. Thus George was still a young man when his future was decided, and he had eighteen years in which to prepare for the throne. Not only did George inherit the throne which should have been Albert’s, but he also married the woman who was to have been Albert’s wife, in what proved to be a successful forty-four-year marriage.

No other second son inherited the throne in preceding 225 years, and each had to find his own destiny.

George V’s uncle, Alfred Duke of Edinburgh, found his own throne beyond British shores. He was offered the throne of Greece in 1862, but was unable to accept for political reasons. However, as the sons of Prince Albert, he and his brothers were also in the line of succession to the ducal throne of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. In order to keep the ducal throne separate from that of the UK, Alfred’s elder brother, the Prince of Wales, and his issue were excluded from the Saxe-Coburg throne, making Alfred heir presumptive to his childless uncle, Duke Ernst II. After a distinguished career in the Royal Navy, he succeeded to the duchy in 1893 and became a popular ruler until his death seven years later. He exercised more power over his subjects than his elder brother, Edward VII, was able to do in Britain’s parliamentary system.

The previous Duke of York (Frederick) was the second son of George III and has the distinction of being the youngest bishop in history. Electors of Hanover were entitled to select every other Prince Bishop of Osnabrück, and when the office became vacant in 1764, George III nominated his six-month old son! He remained bishop until 1803, but pursued a career in the British Army, rising to be Commander-in-Chief. Since his elder brother, George IV, had no surviving children, the duke might have expected to become king in due course, but he had the misfortune of pre-deceasing his brother by three years.

George III’s younger brother, Edward Augustus, Duke of York, was heir presumptive to the throne for two years, until the birth of the future George IV, and died at the age of 28 in 1769. His predecessor as the royal “spare”, Henry Duke of Cumberland, is infamous as “Butcher Cumberland”, the military commander who put down the second Jacobite rebellion (1745) with brutal force.

George II had no younger brother, making him the only first-born son of a king not to do so since Edward VI in the 16th century.

In the 17th century, the Stuarts produced two second sons of monarchs. Both came to the throne, and both reigns ended in failure. James II was the second son of Charles I and brother of Charles II. As Duke of York, he had been a successful Lord High Admiral, but as a Catholic, he earned the suspicion and distrust of the anti-Papist Protestant establishment, especially when, as King, he tried to force through policies which permitted greater religious toleration, and used methods which many felt were unconstitutional. In 1685, James had to put down a rebellion by his illegitimate nephew, the Duke of Monmouth, and in 1688 he had to flee the country in the face of a Parliament-sponsored invasion by his son-in-law, William of Orange. Parliament declared him to have abdicated, and he lived the remaining fourteen years of his life in exile in France.

James had followed the successful reign of his brother, Charles II, but that of his father, Charles I, was an even greater disaster, culminating in civil war and his own execution.

Charles was the younger son of the first Stuart king, James I, and had spent the first twelve years of his life expecting to remain Duke of York. His elder brother, Henry Prince of Wales, was widely regarded as a talented and intelligent prince, but his life was cut short by typhoid when he was 14.

Like his later counterpart, George V, Henry, the second son of Henry VII, acquired not only the throne which would have gone to his elder brother, but the wife too; an event which was to have momentous consequences. The elder son, Arthur Prince of Wales, had married Catherine of Aragon, but died at the young age of 15. His brother took his place as Prince of Wales and, after succeeding to the throne as Henry VIII, married Catherine. Twenty years later, when Catherine had produced no male heir, let alone a spare, Henry came to believe, or at least claim, that the lack of sons was God’s punishment for the sin of marrying his brother’s widow. This was the pretext under which he sought an annulment of the marriage, creating a conflict which led to the Church of England’s break with Rome. Despite five further marriages, Henry sired only one surviving son, who didn’t live to produce heirs of his own. Had there been a spare, there would have been a good chance that the Tudor dynasty would have survived, and there would have been no union with Scotland.

The House of York produced the two most unfortunate second sons. Richard, Duke of York (the first second son to bear the title), son of Edward IV, fell victim to the ambitions of his uncle, Richard III, and while still a young boy was imprisoned in The Tower, where he died in mysterious circumstances. Edward IV’s brother, George Duke of Clarence, became embroiled in plots against the king and was executed for treason. According to Shakespeare, George was allowed to choose his method of execution and selected to be drowned in a butt of Malmsey.

George was the third second son to be Duke of Clarence. His predecessor, Thomas, was the brother and heir presumptive of Henry V. He served the king faithfully in his campaigns, and acted as Henry’s lieutenant in France, but pre-deceased his brother by a year.

Thomas’s great uncle, Lionel Duke of Clarence, was the second duke to be created in England. His daughter, Philippa, was passed over for the throne when Henry Duke of Lancaster, son of a younger son of Edward III, seized the throne from Richard II, but it was through the marriage of Lionel’s granddaughter, Anne, to the Duke of York that the House of York acquired its claim to the throne.

Edward III had one younger brother, John, Earl of Cornwall, who died at the age of 20, while Edward II had no living brothers, his three elder brothers having all died in childhood before he was born.

The two previous second sons were both proclaimed kings of other realms, although in neither case did they actually rule them. Edward I’s son, Edmund Crouchback, Earl of Lancaster and Leicester, was offered the Kingdom of Sicily by Pope Innocent IV, who was in conflict with the existing king, Conrad of Hauenstaufen. Edmund was never able to assume the throne. In 1257, his uncle, Richard, Earl of Cornwall (younger brother of Henry III), was elected King of the Romans (in effect, Holy Roman Emperor-designate), but, like his nephew, never actually achieved power in the conflict-torn empire.

Henry and Richard’s eldest uncles were also called Henry and Richard. Richard became heir to his father, Henry II, on the death of his older brother, Henry “the young king”, and went on to reign as Richard I, known as the Lionheart and famous as the absentee crusader king of the Robin Hood legends.

The fates of the first two “spares” of the Norman era were very different. William, second son of King Stephen, could have expected to succeed to the throne after the death of his brother Eustace in 1153, but in the settlement of his conflict with his cousin Matilda, King Stephen passed William over and designated Matilda’s son as his heir (Henry II). By contrast, the first Norman king, William the Conqueror, designated his second son, who succeeded as Henry I, as heir to the kingdom of England, leaving Robert, the eldest son, with only the Duchy of Normandy.

Second sons have had mixed fortunes in the English and British monarchies – passed over, executed, offered foreign thrones, and eventually succeeding to the English or British throne. It looks likely that the Queen’s second son, Andrew, Duke of York, will remain only a junior British prince, moving further and further from the throne as Princes William and Harry marry and have children of their own. A similar fate is likely to await Harry, but only time will tell.