English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish ruling houses.
3 dynasties
England · 1154 – 1485
The royal house that ruled England for 331 years, from Henry II's accession in 1154 to Richard III's death at Bosworth Field in 1485. At its zenith under Henry II it controlled the Angevin Empire stretching from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees; at its end it split into the warring Lancaster and York branches whose dynastic struggle became the Wars of the Roses.
19 figures
Scotland and England · 1371 – 1714
The royal house of Scotland from 1371 and of England, Ireland, and ultimately Great Britain from 1603 to 1714. The Stuarts inherited the English throne through Margaret Tudor and lost it through a sequence of constitutional crises that produced the only public execution of an English king, the bloodless overthrow of another, and finally the parliamentary supremacy that defined the modern British state. The Acts of Union under the last Stuart, Queen Anne, fused England and Scotland into a single kingdom; her childless death ended the dynasty and brought the Hanoverians to London.
12 figures
England · 1485 – 1603
The Welsh-Lancastrian house that took the English throne by force at Bosworth in 1485, ended the Wars of the Roses by marrying its rival into peace, and reshaped England in 118 years more decisively than any dynasty before it. Across five reigns the Tudors broke with Rome, founded the Church of England, suppressed the monasteries, defeated the Spanish Armada, and presided over the literary golden age of Shakespeare and Marlowe. The dynasty ended with Elizabeth I in 1603, the crown passing to her Stuart cousin in Edinburgh.
15 figures