The Queen's Title Trivia Quiz

Answer: Kenya

By 1950, King George VI was suffering from increasingly poor health, which led to his daughter, Princess Elizabeth, filling in for him on more occasions, including at Trooping the Colour and on a number of official tours, including one to Canada in October 1951. At the end of January 1952, Princess Elizabeth and her husband, Prince Philip, were seen off from London Airport by the King on a planned tour of Australia and New Zealand, which would be preceded by a trip to Kenya.

On 5 February, the couple arrived at Treetops, a game-viewing lodge in the Aberdare National Park, where they spent the night, before driving to the town of Sagana. While there, the official party received news from Government House in Nairobi that the King had died during the night. Prince Philip, having heard the news, took his wife for a walk to tell her that she had become Queen. The same day, the new queen and her husband began the journey back to London, where they arrived on 7 February.

Answer: Henry VIII

The phrase "By the Grace of God", meaning that a monarch rules through the divine will of God, which therefore gives him or her absolute authority over their subjects, had been used on and off by English monarchs for centuries, first by William II and Henry I from 1087 to 1121, and then from 1199 to 1259 by John and Henry III. In 1521, Henry VIII had been awarded the title "Defender of the Faith" by the Pope following his defence of the church against the ideas of Martin Luther. The King incorporated this title as part of the official style of the monarch, alongside which he restored the phrase "By the Grace of God".

Despite the subsequent English Reformation, and the break from the Catholic Church leading to the foundation of the Church of England with the monarch as its head, the idea that the monarch's authority came directly from God remained, which saw the phrase retained as part of the official style. This remains the case to the present day.

Answer: Wales

Although in its history Wales had been independent, although it had rarely been a single nation. Instead, it had usually been formed of a number of smaller states, ruled over by an Overlord who was usually the most powerful of the Welsh rulers at the time. This ruler usually adopted the title "Tywysog Cymru", which translates as "Prince of Wales". Until the late 13th century, this title was recognised by the English king, on the proviso that Wales itself submitted to the overlordship of England. In 1274 however, tensions arose between King Edward I of England and Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, the Prince of Wales, which led to England invading Wales. Over the course of two campaigns, in 1277 and then 1282-83, England overran Wales, as well as the other small principalities within its borders, and incorporated the territory as part of England.

The title "Prince of Wales" was then adopted Edward I and given to his eldest son, with the tradition retained that the eldest son of the reigning monarch is styled as Prince of Wales. Wales itself was fully incorporated into England, with the extension of English laws to Wales, by the Laws in Wales Acts 1535 and 1542, which effectively made England and Wales into a single state.

Answer: Anne

Following his accession as King of England in 1603, James I made an attempt to amalgamate England and Scotland (of which he had been king since 1567) into a single Kingdom of Great Britain. Although the parliaments of England and Scotland rejected the idea of a full political union, James used his own power to institute a union of the two kingdoms that was personal and dynastic. This saw the institution of host of new symbols, including a joined flag, coat of arms and coinage. England and Scotland remained as separate kingdoms until, in the first years of the 18th century, the Scottish economy found itself under significant pressure and led Scotland to seek a full union with England. The Treaty of Union was negotiated in 1706, and was ratified by the parliaments of England and Scotland in 1707.

This saw the abolition of the individual English and Scottish parliaments, and the establishment of a single Parliament of Great Britain (in practice simply taking the place of English parliament), with Queen Anne ceasing to be the monarch of the two individual countries, and instead becoming the first monarch of the single, unified, Kingdom of Great Britain.

Answer: Antrim

County Antrim is the most north-easterly of the traditional 32 counties of Ireland, forming as it does the extreme north-east of the island. It is the most populous county in Northern Ireland, as it contains a number of the province's largest towns and cities. Antrim has land boundaries with County Down to the south and County Londonderry to the west, while to the east it has a coastline on the Irish Sea - Ballycastle in Antrim is the closest point in Ireland to Great Britain, as it is just 16km away from Campbeltown on the Kintyre Peninsula in Scotland.

Answer: Mauritius

The island of Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, had formed part of the British Empire since it was captured by the Royal Navy from the French in 1810. By 1965, as part of the United Kingdom's efforts to divest itself of its colonial possessions, Mauritius was given the opportunity for independence, which came following a general election in 1967 that saw the Independence Party gain a majority in the Legislative Assembly. Mauritius gained independence in 1968, with Queen Elizabeth II becoming the separate Queen of Mauritius. By 1990, the ruling Militant Socialist Movement (MSM), which had been in government since 1983, began campaigning for the country to become a republic.

For the 1991 general election, it formed an electoral alliance with the Mauritian Militant Movement (MMM), which had also campaigned for Mauritius to become a republic, gaining a majority in the Legislative Assembly. Following this, in December 1991 the country's constitution was amended and, on 12 March 1992, the new Republic of Mauritius was declared, with Sir Veerasamy Ringadoo, the last Governor-General, proclaimed as the first President of Mauritius. Under the constitution, the president is not directly elected by the people, but is instead indirectly elected by the members of the country's legislative body, the National Assembly. The first such election took place in June 1992, when Cassam Uteem became the first elected president.

Answer: Cyprus

The areas of Akrotiri, in southern Cyprus, and Dhekelia, in the south-east, are collectively known as the Sovereign Base Areas. These form a single Overseas Territory of the United Kingdom, under the control of the British Armed Forces, for whom they are a major garrison. British control over these two areas was retained as part of the 1959 Agreements that allowed Cyprus to gain independence.

This was as a result of the strategic location of Cyprus at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, as it could be used as a staging point to the Middle East, as well as an area for training. Because of their status as military bases, Akrotiri and Dhekelia are not administered like other Overseas Territories, instead coming under the direct authority of an Administrator, who is also the senior British military officer on the island.

Answer: Henry I

In November 1100, three months after he became king, Henry I married Matilda, the daughter of Malcolm III of Scotland. By 1103, Matilda had given birth to two children - a daughter who was also named Matilda, and a son named William Ętheling. As Henry's only legitimate son, William Ętheling was heir to the throne, but in 1120 he was killed in the White Ship disaster. As a result, Henry's only heir was his surviving daughter.

Queen Matilda had died in 1118, and so the King married again in 1121 in an effort to sire a new son and heir. However, his marriage to Adeliza of Louvain produced no children, which left his daughter Matilda as his only legitimate heir. In 1125, following the death of Matilda's husband, the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V, Matilda was brought back to England, with her father issuing a command that, should he die without a male heir, Matilda would become queen, and ordering his nobles swear to recognise her as such.

However, following Henry's death in 1135, the nobles rejected the oath that they had sworn to accept Matilda as queen, with Henry's nephew, Stephen of Blois, instead seizing the throne and having himself crowned king. This led to Matilda attempting an invasion to reclaim the crown, and was the start of almost twenty years of civil war that came to be known as "The Anarchy", which only ended in 1153, when Matilda agreed to forego her claim to the throne, and Stephen agreed to accept Matilda's son, Henry of Anjou, as his legitimate heir.

Answer: Mozambique

The Commonwealth of Nations traces its history back to the 1926 Balfour Declaration, which stated that the United Kingdom and its independent dominions - Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Ireland and Newfoundland - were all equal in status under a single British Commonwealth of Nations. In 1949, this was amended by the London Declaration, which took account of India's desire to remain as part of the Commonwealth even after it became a republic in 1950.

Although this statement only directly affected India, it led to the idea that republicanism and membership of the Commonwealth were not incompatible, following which a number of newly independent countries, which subsequently became republics, retained their membership. However, one of the criteria for membership was a constitutional link to another member of the Commonwealth, which usually meant being a former colony of the United Kingdom. However, in 1995, Mozambique, a former Portuguese colony, successfully applied for membership on the rationale that much of its trade was with Commonwealth nations surrounding it. As a result, the membership criteria were amended, with applications from countries without a previous link to the Commonwealth considered on a case-by-case basis. It was on this basis that Rwanda, a former Belgian colony, was admitted in 2009.

Answer: Leo X

In 1517, Martin Luther published his "Ninety-Five Theses", a document considered to be the birth of Protestantism, and seen at the time as a significant attack on the practices of the Catholic Church. Two years later, Henry VIII, who had by then been King of England for ten years, read Luther's work and, in outrage, began to write a rebuttal. This work, which came to be known as the "Assertio Septem Sacramentorum" ("Defence of the Seven Sacraments"), was initially private but, in 1521, came to be published as a book, containing both the King's original material from 1519, and new material written in response to Luther's 1520 work, "De captivitate Babylonica Ecclesiae" ("On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church"). Henry dedicated the "Assertio" to Pope Leo X who, as a reward to the King, bestowed on him the title "Defender of the Faith" in October 1521.

Although Henry was subsequently stripped of the title in 1534 and excommunicated upon the split from the Catholic Church and establishment of the Church of England, with Henry as its head, a decade later the English Parliament passed an Act that restored the title to the monarch officially. The title has been used by each subsequent monarch. In addition, both Canada and New Zealand also utilise the title in the official style of the monarch in their own countries.