Mother of the King (or Queen) Trivia Quiz

Answer: Queen Mary II

While several women have been the mother of two English kings (Matilda of Flanders, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Mary of Teck to name just three), Anne Hyde was the first woman to be the mother of two English queens. Her elder daughter reigned from 1689 to 1694 as Queen Mary II, while her younger daughter, Anne, was queen from 1702 to 1714. Equally notably, Anne herself was not of royal blood, but the daughter of one of King Charles II's courtiers who held the position of Lord Chancellor and was granted the title of Earl of Clarendon. The reason for her marriage to the future King James II (then known as the Duke of York) in 1660 would have been blatantly obvious to all of the wedding guests as she was seven months pregnant at the time. Anne died of breast cancer shortly after giving birth to her eighth child in 1671, so never had the chance to become queen consort. Sadly, of those eight children, only Queen Mary II and Queen Anne survived infancy.

Queen Mary II became the first woman in British history to rule alongside her husband in her own right and their joint reign is generally referred to in history as the period of "William and Mary". This name was also given to the College of William & Mary, the second-oldest university in the USA, which was founded by the couple in 1693. When Mary died of smallpox in 1694, William continued to reign alone until his death in 1702 brought Mary's sister to the throne. Queen Anne's reign was notable for the succession crisis caused by the death of all of her children in infancy or childhood and for the Act of Union of 1707 that made Anne the first monarch of Great Britain.

Answer: King George III

King George III, one of Britain's longest reigning monarchs, is sadly remembered in modern times for the mental illness that blighted his reign, which was later attributed to him suffering from a disease called porphyria. Although he was on the throne from 1760 until 1820, his eldest son - also called George - was his official regent for the final ten years of his life. His reign spanned several important points in history, including the American War of Independence (also known as the American Revolutionary War), the impact of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. However, he was also a devoted husband and father - he and his wife, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, had 15 children - and had a somewhat homely reputation as evidenced by the nickname of 'Farmer George' that he gained from the British press.

George III's mother, Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, never became a queen because her son inherited his throne directly from his grandfather in 1760. His father, the Prince of Wales, had died in 1751 - apocryphally after being struck in the chest with a cricket ball - and from that point Augusta became known as the Dowager Princess of Wales. The Duchy of Saxe-Gotha was one of the many minor states belonging to the Holy Roman Empire and covered an area that corresponds to part of the modern day German state of Thuringia. Augusta was born in Gotha in 1719 and her arranged marriage to Prince Frederick, the eldest son of King George II, took place in 1736 when she was just 16 years old and spoke no English. Although Augusta enjoyed significant popularity as Princess of Wales, this dissipated rapidly after she was widowed thanks to her political support for (and alleged affair with) the Earl of Bute, who proved to be a particularly unpopular Prime Minister. She also lost control over her younger children, several of whom were married off without her consent. She died of cancer in 1772, having lived long enough to witness the first evidence of George III's descent into madness.

Answer: King William III

Princess Mary was born in 1631 as a member of the House of Stuart, the ruling house of both England and Scotland. She was the eldest daughter of King Charles I and his wife Henrietta Maria of France. She was the first English princess to hold the title of 'Princess Royal', which was created in response to her mother's desire to emulate the French court's use of the title 'Madame Royale' for the king's eldest daughter. Mary married William II, Prince of Orange in 1641 and was therefore safely out of the country in the Netherlands when the English Civil War broke out and culminated with her father's execution in 1649. After her eldest brother was restored to the throne in 1660 as King Charles II, Mary returned to her homeland only to die of smallpox just months later.

Mary's only son, William, inherited the title of Prince of Orange at birth as his father had died a week before he was born. He gained the additional and much grander title of King of England, Scotland and Ireland when he was invited to invade England and claim the throne during the Glorious Revolution of 1688. He was the preferred choice of the English lords and politicians because of his religion - he was a Protestant while his uncle, King James II, was Roman Catholic. Once William's army landed in England, James fled to France leaving his nephew to become King William III and his daughter to become Queen Mary II.

Answer: King Henry IV

King Henry IV was one of several medieval English monarchs to nab their throne from an unfortunate cousin rather than be born to a king and his queen consort. Henry, who was known as Henry Bolingbroke until he was proclaimed king, was the eldest son of John of Gaunt (the fourth son of King Edward III) and Blanche of Lancaster. Blanche was probably the most desirable heiress in the country as she was the daughter of one of its richest noblemen - the Duke of Lancaster. In addition she had no brothers and when her elder sister died without having any children, Blanche inherited his entire fortune and vast estates. Blanche's heritage was the reason why Henry IV and his direct descendants were known as the Lancastrians - a name that is best remembered for the bitter Lancastrian versus Yorkist battles of the Wars of the Roses.

Henry reigned from 1399 to 1413 after deposing his first cousin, King Richard II. He had a long history of rebellion against his cousin, having participated in the Lords Appellants' rebellion of 1387 (from which he somehow escaped punishment) and had been accused of treason in 1398, which led to his exile from the kingdom. When his father died in 1399, Henry was prevented from claiming his inheritance. This proved to be a misjudgement on Richard's part as an infuriated Henry returned from exile, raised an army and gained enough support to be proclaimed king and have Richard imprisoned!

Answer: King Stephen

King Stephen (c.1092-1154) was the son of Adela of Normandy, one of the daughters of William the Conqueror. She had been married off to Stephen, Count of Blois - Blois being a city on the River Loire in central France - at the age of about 15 and had around 10 children by him before his death in 1102. Adela spent several years as Regent of Blois during her husband's absence at the First Crusade and after his death. After her eldest son was able to rule Blois alone, she retired to a prestigious convent and settled for attempting to maintain her influence by correspondence. She died in 1137 and was canonised by the Roman Catholic church as Saint Adela.

Stephen became king in 1135 on the death of Henry I. As he had been brought up at the court of his maternal uncle, King Henry I, after the death of his father, he was a well-known and popular figure in England. However, his 19 years on the throne were marred by civil war and later remembered as one of the most destructive periods in English history. The reason behind this was that he had seized the throne away from the Empress Matilda, Henry's daughter and designated heir. She retaliated by raising an army to regain her birthright and with the support of the English barons split between her and Stephen, a long period of civil war became almost inevitable. Eventually the argument was sorted out when Stephen agreed to accept Matilda's son as his heir.

Answer: King George II

When King George II was born in 1683, his father, the future King George I, had not yet succeeded to the British throne. His mother was Sophia Dorothea of Celle, the daughter of the Duke of Brunswick-Lüneberg. Although Sophia was still alive when George I became King of Great Britain in 1714, she did not become his queen consort because their marriage had ended in divorce 20 years earlier after Sophia Dorothea had embarked on a scandalous affair with a Swedish count. Sophia Dorothea then spent the rest of her life imprisoned in Ahlden Castle in what is now the German state of Lower Saxony. She died in 1726 at the age of 60.

George II had a poor relationship with his father, partly due to the imprisonment of his mother. As Prince of Wales he sided with the opposition politicians to his father's government and he also ended up banished from his father's court and separated from his children. Ironically, he also had an extremely poor relationship with his eldest son because he and his wife, Caroline of Ansbach, had left him behind in Hanover while the rest of the family moved to England. George inherited the throne in 1727 and reigned for 33 years before his death in 1760 at the age of 76.

Answer: King Henry V

When the future King Henry V was born in 1386, his father - the future King Henry IV - had yet to seize the throne of England and the young Henry was simply the son of a nobleman, albeit one who was a powerful member of the royal family. His mother was Henry IV's first wife, Mary de Bohun. However, she was never able to claim the title of queen consort because she died in 1394, five years before her husband's accession to the throne. She was the younger of the two daughters of Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford and his co-heiress along with her sister Eleanor. Mary nearly ended up facing life in a convent after her sister's husband, Thomas of Woodstock, planned to obtain his father-in-law's entire fortune by ensuring that Mary was unable to marry and have children. However, she was rescued by an aunt who obtained the support of John of Gaunt and enabled her to marry into the royal family instead - presumably a double blow for the scheming Thomas.

Although Mary's highest ranking title was Countess of Northampton, she was the mother of both a king and a queen as her youngest daughter Philippa - who she had died in childbirth with - became Queen of Denmark, Norway and Sweden as the wife of Eric of Pomerania. Mary's son Henry became one of England's most successful monarchs. His reign, which started following his father's death in 1413, included England's victory over France at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 and various other military successes during the Hundred Years' War. However, it was cut short when he died in 1422 at the age of 36, leaving his throne to his only child - the nine-month-old King Henry VI.

Answer: King George I

Sophia of Hanover was the daughter of Frederick V, Elector Palatine and Elizabeth Stuart, the eldest daughter of King James VI of Scotland who later became King James I of England. She married Ernest Augustus, Elector of Hanover in 1658 and the couple went on to have seven children together. She and her descendants were a long way down the line of succession to the British throne until the Act of Succession, 1701 changed the law to require the monarch to be a Protestant and identified Sophia and her children as first-in-line. The Act was created in response to the succession crisis within the royal family caused by the death in 1700 of the future Queen Anne's only remaining child, Prince William, and the likelihood that neither she nor King William III would have any more offspring.

In fact, if Sophia had lived just two months longer, she would have become Queen Sophia in her own right following the death of Queen Anne. However, in the end it was her eldest son George who inherited the title and became King George I. At the time of his accession, George was 54 years old and unpopular in Britain due to his German heritage and the fact that English was not one of the main languages he was fluent in. Nevertheless he uprooted his family from their home in Hanover to move to London and made his new kingdom his main home. However, he remained Elector of Hanover and spent around 20% of his time during his reign in that country. He died at his home in Hanover in 1727.

Answer: King William I

King William I, better known to history as William the Conqueror, did not have an English queen for a mother because he took his throne by force at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Prior to that he was simply known as the Duke of Normandy and his claim to that position had been somewhat precarious given the fact that he was the previous duke's illegitimate son.

It is believed that William was born around the year 1028 at his father's ducal seat, the Chateau de Falaise. However, the history and background of his unmarried mother, Herleva of Falaise, has been the subject of much scholarly debate. While the commonly accepted story is that she was the daughter of a tanner - practically a peasant in Norman terms - some historians have pointed out that this background seems incompatible with her even meeting, let alone becoming the mistress of the region's ruler. While her early life is shrouded in mystery, it is known that Herleva later married a nobleman called Herluin de Conteville and went on to have at least four more children with him - one of whom was Odo, Bishop of Bayeux who fought with his brother William and was probably responsible for commissioning the Bayeux Tapestry.

Answer: King Richard III

Cecily Neville, the Duchess of York was in fact the mother of two English kings - King Richard III and his elder brother, King Edward IV. She was a member of the powerful Neville family and the aunt of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick who became known as "The Kingmaker" after he successfully masterminded Edward IV's military victory over and deposition of King Henry VI in 1461 (and later successfully reinstated Henry after he fell out with Edward). Cecily's sons took their claim to the throne from their father's position as Duke of York and heritage as a great-grandson of Edward III. However, Cecily herself was descended from the royal family as well - she was also a great-grandchild of Edward III, but her lineage included the legitimised children of John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford who had been barred from succeeding to the throne. However, that small fact never stopped her distant cousin Henry Tudor who became King Henry VII when he defeated Cecily's son Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485.

In later life, Cecily Neville was granted the title of "Queen of right" after having been known as "The King's Mother" for several years. However, she never held the title of queen consort. She died in 1495 at the age of 80 having outlived all but two of her 13 children and both of her sons who had been kings. She was buried at the Church of St. Mary and All Saints in the Northamptonshire village of Fotheringhay. Fotheringhay Castle had been one of Cecily and her husband's main residences and was the birthplace of King Richard III. Richard's burial place ended up being considerably less dignified; his body was found underneath a Leicester car park in 2012 (the church that had stood on the site at the time of his burial having been destroyed during the Dissolution of the Monasteries) and was reinterred in Leicester Cathedral in 2015.