Also, it is unclear whether-if Ælfweard was declared king-it was over the whole kingdom or of Wessex only. However, the fact that he ruled is not accepted by all historians. A 12th-century list of kings gives him a reign length of four weeks, though one manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says he died only 16 days after his father. There is some evidence that Ælfweard of Wessex may have been king in 924, between his father Edward the Elder and his brother Æthelstan, although he was not crowned. This marked the end of the Kingdom of England as a sovereign state. By royal proclamation, James styled himself "King of Great Britain", but no such kingdom was actually created until 1707, when England and Scotland united during the reign of Queen Anne to form the new Kingdom of Great Britain, with a single British parliament sitting at Westminster. Since that time, the eldest sons of all English monarchs, except for King Edward III, have borne this title.Īfter the death of Queen Elizabeth I without issue in 1603, King James VI of Scotland inherited the English crown as James I of England, joining the crowns of England and Scotland in personal union. The Principality of Wales was incorporated into the Kingdom of England under the Statute of Rhuddlan in 1284, and in 1301 King Edward I invested his eldest son, the future King Edward II, as Prince of Wales. The title "King of the English" or Rex Anglorum in Latin, was first used to describe Æthelstan in one of his charters in 928. His son Edward the Elder conquered the eastern Danelaw, but Edward's son Æthelstan became the first king to rule the whole of England when he conquered Northumbria in 927, and he is regarded by some modern historians as the first true king of England. Its king, Alfred the Great, was overlord of western Mercia and used the title King of the Angles and Saxons, but he never ruled eastern and northern England, which was then known as the Danelaw, having earlier been conquered by the Danes from southern Scandinavia. It was not until the late 9th century that one kingdom, Wessex, had become the dominant Anglo-Saxon kingdom. Likewise, in 829 Egbert of Wessex conquered Mercia, but he soon lost control of it. Historian Simon Keynes states, for example, that "Offa was driven by a lust for power, not a vision of English unity and what he left was a reputation, not a legacy." This refers to a period in the late 8th century when Offa achieved a dominance over many of the kingdoms of southern England, but this did not survive his death in 796. For example, Offa of Mercia and Egbert of Wessex are sometimes described as kings of England by popular writers, but it is no longer the majority view of historians that their wide dominions are part of a process leading to a unified England. Īrguments are made for a few different kings thought to control enough Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to be deemed the first king of England. Alfred styled himself King of the Anglo-Saxons from about 886, and while he was not the first king to claim to rule all of the English, his rule represents the start of the first unbroken line of kings to rule the whole of England, the House of Wessex.
This list of kings and reigning queens of the Kingdom of England begins with Alfred the Great, who initially ruled Wessex, one of the seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms which later made up modern England. Listed in red are The Heptarchy, the collective name given to the seven main Anglo-Saxon petty kingdoms located in the southeastern two-thirds of the island that were unified to form the Kingdom of England. Great Britain during the Early Middle Ages.
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