Children of the King (or Queen) Quiz

Answer: King George VI

King George VI was married to Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon and had two daughters, Elizabeth (born 1926) and Margaret (born 1930). As the second son of King George V, Prince Albert (as George VI was previously known) would not have been expected to take the throne himself. However, he was forced into that position when his elder brother, King Edward VIII, abdicated in 1936 in order to marry the American divorcee Wallis Simpson.

George VI was suffering from lung cancer when he died in his sleep in February 1952; he was succeeded by his elder daughter, who became Queen Elizabeth II and went on to set a new record for the longest-reigning British monarch of all time before her death in September 2022. Her sister Princess Margaret died in 2002 at the age of 71.

Answer: King Edward VII

These siblings were all children of King Edward VII and Alexandra of Denmark. The eldest son, Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale was the heir apparent but unexpectedly died at the age of 27 in 1892 after contracting influenza and pneumonia. At the time of his death he was engaged to marry Princess Mary of Teck, who instead ending up marrying Albert Victor's younger brother, the future King George V.

Of Edward and Alexandra's three daughters, Princess Louise married the Duke of Fife in 1889 and Princess Victoria remained single until her death in 1935. Princess Maud married Prince Carl of Denmark and became Queen of Norway when her husband was chosen as the new King of Norway in 1906.

Answer: King George I

King George I was the first British monarch from the House of Hanover. When he inherited the throne on the death of Queen Anne in 1714, he had been divorced from his wife, Sophia Dorothea of Celle, for 20 years and she was imprisoned in a German castle. Their two children, the future King George II and Princess Sophia Dorothea, were brought up by their father with no contact with their mother.

Princess Sophia Dorothea (the daughter) had married the King of Prussia before her father acceded to the British throne, so never moved to England from her native Germany. She spent 27 years as Queen Consort of Prussia and had a total of 14 children, 11 of whom survived to adulthood. Her brother became king on the death of their father in 1727 and held that position until his own death in 1760.

Answer: King Henry I

King Henry I of England was the youngest son of William the Conqueror and reigned from 1100 to 1135. Although he was married twice and probably had at least 20 illegitimate children by a string of mistresses, he had no living male heir at the time of his death in 1135 because his only legitimate son, William Adelin, had died in the White Ship disaster of 1120. He was succeeded (against his wishes) by his nephew, Stephen of Blois, the son of Henry's sister Adela of Normandy. Henry's only surviving legitimate child, the Empress Matilda, then spent many years fighting for what she saw as her crown and England descended into the civil war known as 'The Anarchy' as a result.

The Empress Matilda claimed that title as a result of her short-lived early marriage to Henry V, the Holy Roman Emperor. However, she later married Geoffrey of Anjou and was the mother of Stephen's successor, King Henry II - who had eventually won the right to be named heir on the basis of his mother's claim to the throne.

Answer: King Henry II

Three of the siblings included in this list - all the offspring of King Henry II - became a king of England. The eldest son to survive infancy was crowned as Henry the Young King during his father's reign, but predeceased his father so is not counted as a king in his own right. When Henry II died in 1189 he was actually succeeded by his son Richard, who became known as Richard the Lionheart because of his military successes in the Third Crusade. When Richard died in 1199 at the age of 41, he was in turn succeeded by his youngest brother John as Geoffrey had died in 1186. John didn't have such a good reputation and is most famous for being forced by his nobles to grant the charter of rights known as the Magna Carta in 1215.

Like most medieval princesses, Henry II's daughters were all married off to foreign royalty at a young age in order to strengthen political alliances. Matilda married the Duke of Saxony and Bavaria in 1168 (when she was 12 and he was in his late 30s); Eleanor became Queen of Castile at the age of nine when she married the 15-year-old King Alfonso; and Joan was 11 when she married King William II of Sicily (aged 23).

Answer: Queen Victoria

The siblings listed here are the nine children of Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert. Their eldest son Albert (known within the family as Bertie) inherited the throne from his mother in 1901 but chose to take the regnal name Edward VII rather than be known as King Albert. His stated reason being that he didn't want his name to overshadow the memory of his father, for whom the "name should stand alone".

Queen Victoria was apparently a carrier of the gene for haemophilia and passed that disease on to her youngest son, Leopold. Two of her daughters, Alice and Beatrice, were also known carriers and their descendants passed haemophilia into the German, Russian and Spanish royal families. Eldest daughter Victoria, Princess Royal (later the German Empress) and her sister Helena are not believed to have been carriers as none of their children or grandchildren suffered from haemophilia. It is unknown whether Princess Louise was a carrier as she died childless.

Answer: Queen Elizabeth II

Queen Elizabeth II took the throne in 1952 on the death of her father, King George VI. At that time, she was a mother of two - her heir apparent, Prince Charles (born 1948) and only daughter, Princess Anne (born 1950). She and her husband, Prince Philip, later went on to have two more sons, Princes Andrew and Edward in 1960 and 1964 respectively.

In 2011, Charles became the longest-serving British heir apparent to the throne when he surpassed the record of 59 years, 2 months and 13 days set by his great-grandfather prior to becoming King Edward VII. As he was not formally created Prince of Wales until 1958, it took him until 2017 to break Edward VII's record as the longest-serving Prince of Wales. He later ascended to the throne as King Charles III following his mother's death in 2022. Charles' younger siblings also gained additional titles over the years - Anne became the Princess Royal in 1987, Andrew was named Duke of York on his marriage to Sarah Ferguson in 1986 and Edward was granted the title of Earl of Wessex when he married his wife Sophie in 1999.

Answer: King George V

King George V and his wife Queen Mary had six children, including two sons who both went on to take the throne themselves. When George V died in January 1936, he was succeeded by his eldest son Edward, who became King Edward VIII. However, famously Edward was in love with a twice-divorced American woman named Wallis Simpson and British society in the 1930s was not prepared to accept her as their queen. As a result, 11 months later Edward abdicated from the throne in favour of his younger brother, Prince Albert. Like his grandfather before him, Albert (or Bertie as he was known) chose not to reign under that name and instead became King George VI. Edward became Duke of Windsor and later married Wallis in France, where the couple then spent most of the rest of their lives.

Princess Mary was named Princess Royal in 1932 after the death of the aunt who previously held the title. Prince Henry and Prince George (the Dukes of Gloucester and Kent respectively) both served in the armed forces during the Second World War - while Henry survived his stint with the army, George was killed in a RAF plane crash in 1942. The youngest sibling, Prince John, suffered from epilepsy throughout his childhood and was kept out of the public eye. He died in 1919 at the age of 13.

Answer: King Edward IV

These princes and princesses were all born in the 15th century and were the children of King Edward IV and his wife Elizabeth Woodville. The Yorkist King Edward IV had taken the crown from the Lancastrian King Henry VI during the Wars of the Roses and briefly lost it again in 1470-71 when the Earl of Warwick briefly managed to restore Henry VI to the position. Edward was forced to flee into exile and his wife Elizabeth had to seek sanctuary in Westminster Abbey - which is where the couple's eldest son, Edward, was born. The children's position became equally perilous on the death of their father in 1483. While Edward was briefly proclaimed King Edward V, his position was soon usurped by his uncle, who became King Richard III after declaring all of his nephews and nieces illegitimate. Edward and his brother Richard then became known to history as the "Princes in the Tower" when they mysteriously disappeared from the Tower of London and were presumed murdered.

Edward IV's daughters generally had better lives than their ill-fated brothers (with the exception of Mary, who had died in 1482). Elizabeth married King Henry VII and became his queen consort. Cecily, Anne and Catherine all married noblemen and Bridget became a nun.

Answer: King Henry VII

Arthur, Margaret, Henry and Mary were the four children of King Henry VII and Elizabeth of York who survived infancy. Undoubtedly the most famous of the group was the younger son Henry, who succeeded his father as King Henry VIII and went on to marry six different wives (and have a couple of them executed). However, Arthur, Prince of Wales is remembered for being the first husband of his brother's first wife, Catherine of Aragon and it was his death at the age of 15 in 1502 that opened up Henry's path to the throne and made possible the major events of English history that occurred during the reigns of Henry and his children.

Arthur and Henry's two sisters both became queens. The elder sister Princess Margaret married King James IV of Scotland and was the ancestor of the Stuart dynasty and the modern day royal family. The younger sister Princess Mary was briefly married to King Louis XII of France. After his death she went on to marry Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk and was the grandmother of the ill-fated "Nine Days' Queen", Lady Jane Grey.