Since then, the history of these islands has been littered with famous second \u2013 or third, or fourth \u2013 royal siblings (or, more specifically, royal sons<\/em>, since gender continued to trump age right into the 21st century), who for better or for worse have done much to shape the monarchy that we know today. Here are 10 of the most famous\u2026<\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section> It wasn\u2019t Richard the Lionheart<\/a>, but his elder brother, Henry, who was crowned \u2018the Young King\u2019 of England, unusually during their father\u2019s lifetime. In the event Henry predeceased his father, but perhaps the fact Richard hadn\u2019t been raised for the job explains why the crusader showed so little real enthusiasm for hands-on rule of England, spending only a few months in the country during his 10-year reign.<\/p>\n Richard was himself succeeded by his younger brother, John. Fairly or unfairly, King John has gone down in popular history as a disastrous monarch whose reign was epitomised by his losing the crown jewels in the Wash \u2013 but he did inadvertently help to give us Magna Carta.<\/p>\n By contrast to John I, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster \u2013 fourth son of the prolific Edward III \u2013 has traditionally been accorded a good measure of respect for the steering hand he kept on the country during the minority of his nephew, Richard II.<\/p>\n His harsh fiscal policies, however, made him a particular target of the Peasants\u2019 Revolt \u2013 while almost as soon as John himself died, Richard II was deposed by John\u2019s exiled son, the Bolingbroke of Shakespeare\u2019s plays, who took the throne as Henry IV. These were the family divisions that, half a century later, would produce the Wars of the Roses. The best-known casualty of those wars was of course Richard III<\/a>, whose death at Bosworth ushered in the Tudor dynasty. Richard was only the fourth son of the York family, but by the time he seized the throne the first, second and third sons were all dead \u2013 Edmund killed by the Lancastrians, and George, Duke of Clarence (after plotting against Edward) drowned in the famous butt of malmsey.<\/p>\n The grounds upon which Richard took the throne in 1483 \u2013 chiefly the supposed invalidity of Edward\u2019s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville \u2013 are still debated today. So too, of course, is the fate of Edward IV\u2019s sons, the princes in the Tower, and Richard\u2019s role in their possible murder. Either way, Richard \u2013 his brother Edward\u2019s most loyal supporter during his lifetime \u2013 provides the most dramatic prism through which to examine both the royal sibling bond, and the question of sibling rivalry.<\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section> It wasn\u2019t Henry but his elder brother, Arthur, Prince of Wales, who was expected to lead the Tudor dynasty through the 16th century. But Arthur died in 1502 \u2013 and if anyone ever forgot that in the glorious early days of Henry VIII<\/a>\u2019s reign, they had ample cause to remember two decades later, when Henry\u2019s marriage to Catherine of Aragon was endlessly debated, and ultimately declared invalid, on the grounds that she had been his brother Arthur\u2019s widow.<\/p>\n Indeed, there has been speculation that Henry\u2019s position as a mere second son \u2013 reared with his mother and sisters, while Arthur was sent away to Ludlow \u2013 affected his later attitudes, and his infamous marital history. Elizabeth<\/a>\u00a0was Henry\u2019s second surviving legitimate child; her sister, \u2018Bloody\u2019 Mary, Henry\u2019s eldest. But both women accepted that first place in the succession went to their younger brother, Edward VI<\/a>.<\/p>\n After Edward\u2019s premature death in 1553, however, differences between the sisters led to Elizabeth being imprisoned in the Tower, in danger of her life. This was no simple case of sibling rivalry, of course, since religious differences led to real dispute as to whether the Catholic Mary or the Protestant Elizabeth had best claim to the throne. All the same, no one looking for the model of a happy family is ever going to pick the Tudors!<\/p>\n Read more | 7 things you (probably) didn\u2019t know about Elizabeth I<\/a><\/strong> When James VI and I<\/a>\u2019s eldest son, Prince Henry, died in 1612 of what was probably typhoid, shock waves went through the country. At 18, the vibrant Henry was already the great hope of the Stuart dynasty. His brother Charles<\/a>, by contrast, was a sickly 11-year-old considered unlikely to survive. Perhaps early insecurities left the adult Charles, as a monarch, particularly susceptible both to the influence of his favourite Buckingham [George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham] and his Catholic wife, Henrietta Maria, and to an inflated conception of the monarchy. It may seem like cheating to list two siblings as separately important, but it\u2019s the descendants of Elizabeth of Bohemia, not of her brother, Charles I, who sit on the British throne today. When Charles I\u2019s eldest surviving son, Charles II, was succeeded by his own younger brother James, the latter\u2019s unpopularity and Catholicism led to his deposition in 1688.<\/p>\n The \u2018Glorious Revolution\u2019 of that year brought in, instead, James\u2019s Protestant daughter Mary and her husband, William of Orange, while the Catholic descendants of James\u2019s second marriage dwindled to the status of pretenders. When William and Mary died without children, the crown passed to another younger sibling. Mary\u2019s sister, Anne, came to the throne under the Act of Settlement of 1701, which effectively secured the throne to the Protestant Hanoverian dynasty, since it was already apparent that Anne too was unlikely to bear a surviving child, despite 18 pregnancies.<\/p>\n Upon Queen Anne<\/a>\u2019s death the throne was offered to the Elector of Hanover, a grandson of Elizabeth of Bohemia, who became Britain\u2019s George I. He and his Hanoverian descendants would reign, however, on very different terms from those earlier rulers had enjoyed. The stage was set for a modern, \u2018constitutional\u2019, monarchy (a position confirmed more than a century later when George\u2019s great-great grandson William IV \u2013 succeeding his elder brother George IV \u2013 ceded yet further royal powers).<\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section> You might think that in the modern age the importance of the royal second sibling is outdated \u2013 we are, after all, past the days of high infant mortality.<\/p>\nMore royal history<\/h4>\n
Richard I (1157\u201399)<\/h3>\n<\/div>
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<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>John of Gaunt (1340\u201399)<\/h3>\n<\/div>
Richard III (1452\u201385)<\/h3>\n<\/div>
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<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>More Richard III articles<\/h4>\n
Henry VIII (1491\u20131547)<\/h3>\n<\/div>
Elizabeth I (1533\u20131603)<\/h3>\n<\/div>
![\"""\"](\""https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2019\/04\/GettyImages-50685617-2-514704c.jpg?quality=90&resize=310%2C413"\" "\\"\"\"\\"\/")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>Charles I (1600\u201349)<\/h3>\n<\/div>
Elizabeth of Bohemia (1596\u20131662)<\/h3>\n<\/div>
Anne (1665\u20131714)<\/h3>\n<\/div>
Read more articles about Queen Anne<\/h4>\n
George V (1865\u20131936)<\/h3>\n<\/div>