What’s in a name?

‘Dynastic periodization was of course natural to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historians. Its widespread persistence into the twentieth century, not only in the English case, may perhaps be ascribed to institutional inertia’. ¹ Thus declared C.S.L. Davies in an article propounding his findings that although ‘the word “Tudor” is used obsessively by historians . . . it was almost unknown at the time’, cautioning against the ingrained ‘insidious and misleading’ popular and academic use of concepts like ‘Tudor era’ or ‘Tudor monarchy’. His argument against using dynastic nomenclature was essentially two-fold: that it implies a social, cultural and political hegemony over a vast number of years through which the only unifying factor was the genetic relationship of the reigning monarchs, and that it implies a conscious and contemporary self-promoting and public acceptance of linear connections between the policies and events of each successive reign within the grouping, which in fact can only be (questionably) elucidated through retrospective organization by historians. ² While Davies’ arguments in relation to the labelling of concurrent social legislation are hard to disagree with, this is not so clearly the case with regard to the history of monarchy itself, both in Britain and the wider world. Dynastic appellations have been convenient solutions to inevitable necessities of periodization in historical writing, but recent work has also illustrated that dynasty is both an identifiable component of past elite societies and a useful analytical dimension through which to study royal identity. As Jeroen Duindam observes, ‘almost all peoples across the globe until very recently accepted dynastic rule as a god given and desirable form of power’. ³ This chapter suggests that dynastic periodization is still a ‘natural’ and valuable way in which to analyse the history of the monarchy in England, in terms of both individual monarchs and the institution as a whole of both monarchical self-fashioning and external representations. For case studies, it will take the six queens regnant, Mary I (r.1553–8), Elizabeth I (r.1558–1603), Mary II (r.1688–94), Anne (r.1702–14), Victoria (r.1837–1901) and Elizabeth II (r.1952– ). This chapter does not intend to examine the now well-studied minutiae of female succession and rule, but to use the complication of royal dynastic identity brought about by each of their reigns (partly through the nature of female identity in a patriarchal society, partly because of their peculiar accessional circumstances) to highlight uses of dynastic continuity and/or change within the mechanics of monarchy as the institution’s role has evolved since the 1500s.