Lethargic Man (anag.)

A few years ago there was a big hoo-har when the then (just) Duchess of Cambridge was pregnant with her first child, to get all the Commonwealth countries to agree to change their law so that if that child turned out to be a girl, she wouldn't be disinherited of the throne in the event of the later arrival of a brother.

A propos of very little, I found myself wondering recently how often the principle of male primogeniture had actually disinherited the heir to the throne. The answer turned out to be less often than one might think:

Most famously, the governments of England and Scotland put up with James II and VI converting to Catholicism because the throne would be inherited by his daughter Protestant Mary, but when James had a son, the prospect raised itself of a Catholic succession, which led to the English Parliament inviting Mary's husband William of Orange in the Glorious Revolution of 1684 to invade the country and kick James out. (This is where the term "revolution" in the political sense comes from.)

And, a century beforehand, both Mary and Elizabeth Tudor were skipped over in favour of their younger brother Edward VI, though his death without issue resulted in both of them becoming Queen regnant in due course.

Aside from that, in reverse chronological order, here are the women who but for the subsequent arrivals of younger brothers might have become Queen in the UK or its predecessor countries:

• Augusta, daughter of Frederick, Princes of Wales (whose death before that of his father George II meant he never got to be king); skipped over in favour of her brother George III.
• Elizabeth, daughter of James VI and I; skipped over in favour of her brother Charles I. She married Frederick V, Elector Palatine of the Rhine; her grandson would become George I of Great Britain.
• Margaret, daughter of Henry VII, skipped over in favour of her brother Henry VIII. She would become Queen consort of Scotland; her great-grandson James VI would become James I of England.

And that, it turns out, is it, or at least as far back as when England was a third-world country of little account on the fringe of the civilised world, at which point my interest in its history fades away (though I am interested in the ninth to twelfth centuries too).