Heir Club for Men: Difference between revisions

** Nowadays, the UK partially averts this: Women may inherit, [[Double Standard|but only if they have no living brothers]]. Moves are underway to at least talk about changing it. In Britain we prefer seismic changes to happen [[Department of Redundancy Department|gradually over time if at all necessary]]. [[The House of Stuart|Big changes in a short period]] can be very unseemly.

** The Kingdom of Hannover was once in a personal union with the United Kingdom, but they only allowed male heirs causing a split when [[Queen Vicky|Victoria]] became Queen.

* Absolutely [[Truth in Television]] throughout most of history, and in much of the world. You were an unfortunate queen if you couldn't bear a son—if you were lucky, the king wouldn't set you aside. Otherwise, you'd end up divorced, beheaded, poisoned, locked up in a convent, etc. Princesses becoming queens regnant (ruling queens) had all sorts of problems. No one wanted a female ruler, because if she married her kingdom would, most likely, be combined with that of her husband. The Iberian kingdoms solved this problem by having their queens marry their close blood relatives, so the crown stayed inside the kingdom. Queen Maria I of Portugal married her UNCLE to avoid marrying a foreign prince. They had three surviving children, and their eldest son in turn married his aunt (Maria's sister). Mercifully, this marriage produced no children. A lot of kingdoms (notably France) refused to allow women to inherit the throne at all.

** The Iberian example above was not the worst in that corner of Europe. The House of Hapsburg lucked into Castile/Aragon/Burgundy/the Low Countries because the Houses of Valois and Trastámara married a princess into their dynasty and failed to pop out a male heir. To avoid being on the receiving end of this the two branches of their house swapped most of their princesses between the Spanish and Austrian courts. The long term effects of [[wikipedia:Image:Carlos segundo80.png|this policy]]... did not [https://web.archive.org/web/20091027030202/http://www.xs4all.nl/~monarchs/madmonarchs/carlos2/carlos2_bio.htm work out too well] for the [[wikipedia:War of the Spanish Succession|Madrid branch]], and the male line of the Vienna branch puttered to a halt not long afterwards with [[wikipedia:War of the Austrian Succession|predictable results]] (luckily for them, the people who ended up the heirs were content to ''call'' themselves Habsburgs).