Dan Snow's History Hit - Royal Siblings, Scandals and Crises

Episode Date: February 20, 2026

The arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly Prince Andrew (who denies any wrongdoing and is innocent until proven guilty), has encouraged news outlets to look at the precedent of royals falling foul of the law. Many have referred to the trial and execution of Charles I over 350 years ago as the last British royal to be arrested, but that isn't technically the case...in this bonus episode, Dan gives a potted history of the many times royals - princes in particular - have found themselves in trouble with the law and with their monarch siblings. From the rivalries of the Anglo-Saxon and Norman kings to the scandals of the Plantagenets and the Georgians, this is a tumultuous account of Britain's monarchy through the ages. Written by Dan Snow, produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.Dan Snow's History Hit is now available on YouTube! Check it out at: https://www.youtube.com/@DSHHPodcastSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There's a long history of royal siblings. Well, I say siblings, usually brothers, who end up in serious trouble. It's just fascinating how often our royal history brothers have ended up in court, in cells, in exile, with their heads on the block and in shallow graves. The news this week that Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, formerly Prince Andrew, formerly the Duke of York, was arrested and released under investigation, has prompted, yes, I'm a moment. afraid to say this emergency episode, like all the other ones you've been bombarded with this week, so apologies for that, but this one is great, you're going to love it. We do, of course, have to say that Andrew is innocent until proven guilty. He strenuously denies any wrongdoing. But it did make me think of the many times in history that particularly the youngest sons of monarchs

have gotten themselves into astonishing trouble and how that trouble has shaken the monarchy to the core. I want to explore some of those in this episode. We've got Odo of Bea, younger brother of King William, the first King, well, William the Conqueror. He rode on his big brother's coattails. He liked to swagger on the international diplomatic scene. He dreamt of important and powerful jobs that never quite seemed to happen for him. He pushed his luck and eventually pushed his brother to the point of washing his hands of him. He ended up losing his possessions. He ended up a prisoner. Or you've got William Sons, who spent most of their waking hours plotting against each other

and the hope that they could secure the throne for themselves. In the past, brothers have often been bitter rivals. It is baked into the system, sadly. Is that the terrible closeness of that power? it must be very difficult to be so near and yet so far from the throne. And that proximity can impel those men towards usurpation, towards defiance. They often try and make themselves players. They want to sample that sweet, sweet feeling of being the main character.

Others seek earthly pleasures, perhaps to dull their pain and frustration and disappointment, their boredom, they give themselves over to wild dissipation, they get into all kinds of embarrassing scrapes. The Georgians were particularly good at this. George, the third little brother, the Duke Cumberland, he was always getting into, I think politely we could describe it as romantic trouble. He was continentalic for his brother, and you get a sense of how he was regarded by the fact that he was nominally an admiral, but it was absolutely clear that he was on no account to actually be allowed to command any ships at sea. Inherited monarchy is a system that bestows enormously different fates on brothers,

men who differ only in status by the date on their birth certificate. And that has driven many in history, to treachery, to licentiousness, to breakdown, sometimes all of the above. I picked out a few examples for you folks coming up. You're listening to Dan Snow's history. Enjoy. T-minus 10. The Thomas bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king.

No black white unity till there is first in black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift-off and the subtle has cleared the power. Betraying your royal brother is a tradition as old as the crown itself. In Britain we hear about it at the very dawn of our written history. I love this example. Two thousand years ago, we got the ruling dynasty, the mighty, Catavallani tribe. They control an area from the southeast up to the East Midlands in what is now

England. And members of this dynasty fell out with each other. One brother, Adminius, fled to Rome, where he took the knee to Caligula, the shockingly bad emperor, in the hope that the mad tyrant would invade and put him on his brother's throne. And this sets a useful pattern. We're going to escape past the Romans because their empire was a little bit different, although there is plenty of sibling rivalry in that imperial history. I think we should probably give an honourable mention on the way past to the brothers Gita and Caracalla because of the British dimension. They were at their father's side, Septimius Severus, the very, very martial, astonishingly effective emperor, emperor of Rome. He died in York during some genocidly violent campaigns against what is now

Scotland in northern Britain. And as soon as he died, they galloped back to Rome. separately. They wouldn't eat together, they wouldn't stay together, and obviously they're in competition for the purple to wear the imperial diadem. And it wasn't long before Caracalla had Gita murdered in his mother's arms. So there is a long history of this. If we go back to British monarchs, the early English, the angles, the Saxons, the like, brotherly conflict, exile, arrest and murder were really quite common. We got Edward the martyr. He was briefly king of England in the 10th century. He was killed by followers of his brother Ethelred, the man who would become Ethelred the unready. I bet those followers regretted that decision. The sons of Cunute in the 11th

century, King Cunute were competitors for the crown. We've got a very famous example that I'll dwell on. We've got the terrible fall of the house of Godwin, Harold Godwinson, who was Britain's leading magnate in the 1050s and 1060s. He was a sort of the leading military and political figure in the kingdom. You've got a king, Edward the confessor, who's old and childless and on his way out. And Harold's brothers have many important earldoms and positions around the kingdom as well. In particular, his brother Tostig, who was Earl of Northumbria. And Tostig's people, the Northumbrians, revolted against him. They rebelled. And Harold had to make a terrible decision. Edward the confessor sent Harold to deal with this. He could either

back his brother and sort of enforce his brother's rule on Northumbria and enrage everyone in the north of England, or he could cut a deal with that sort of northern elite, with the northern lords. He could get rid of his brother, sacrifice his brother in return for the support of the north when the inevitable succession crisis came. Harold decided to do just that. He turfed his brother out, Tostig went into exile, and he never forgave Harold. He found ships and men. He raided the south coast. He negotiated with foreign adversaries. men who wish to conquer England, William of Normandy and Harold Hardrada, King of Norway. In 1066, Tostig invaded the north of England at Hardrada's side.

And he was hacked down at the Battle of Stamford Bridge near York by an army commanded by his brother Harold alongside a great multitude of the Viking host. not all royal brothers betray. We should say, in fact, there are many are profoundly loyal and useful to their brothers. I mean, King Harold had two other brothers, a bit more reliable than Tostig. They were called Girth and Leifwyn, and they served him loyally. They fought alongside at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. We think they were killed sometime before Harold on that terrible day. And so he went to his death. He fought to the end of that day, knowing that his brothers had died for his crown already. and he would soon follow. But anyway, we can do another pod about loyal, nice brothers some other time. Might be a slightly shorter pod.

But anyway, there are several out there. William the Conqueror, Harold's successor, as I've just mentioned at the top, he allowed his brother, Odo of Bayer, to be tried for fraud. He was found guilty. He was stripped of many of his assets. A few years later, Odo was imprisoned, perhaps because he was planning to invade Italy.

He was going to go on a sort of foreign military adventure and try and make himself Pope. And as he sat in his cell, he must have raged at his brother, William. Clearly, William was allowed to invade and win a kingdom, but he believed there was only room for one conqueror in that family. William's kids, they followed the tradition. My God, did they. Robert, William, Henry, they schemed.

As children, they dumped chamber pots on each other, we hear, and as adults, they fought battles against each other. I mean, where do we even start with that? William II seized the throne of England. his big brother Robert objected to this. There was fighting and then an uneasy peace. Then William II and his little brother, Henry, went hunting together, very near where I'm recording now, the new forest in the south of England.

They went hunting together, and William II, the king suffered a terribly unfortunate and not at all deliberate accident. An arrow smashed into him and killed him stone dead. Little brother, Prince Harry, very sad, left the corpse on the ground, galloped off to get himself crowned and seized the royal treasury. Brother Robert was absolutely not having this, and then there were years in which Henry and Robert went after each other. Robert was eventually captured in battle and imprisoned in a castle in Wiltshire,

and then following that Cardiff Castle for decades, he was imprisoned by his royal brother, by his kid brother, the king of England, the Duke of Normandy for decades. Now, he ruled as Henry the first. Henry the first daughter shot a crossbar at him once, but unruly daughters are not our business today. We can talk about that on another occasion. His problem was, well, he had lots of children. He didn't have enough legitimate children. He had one legitimate daughter by the time he died. But his great-grandchildren are probably the next set of siblings that we need to think about that really go after each other. You know them, you love them. They are Henry, Richard, Jeffrey and John, the ungrateful brats of Henry

the second and Eleanor of Aquitaine. They rebelled against their dad, they fought against each other, on so many occasions really that I cannot begin to cover it all here. But you'll be happy to know I have covered it all in an extremely long podcast I did recently on William the Marshall. It's one of my favorite figures in history. Go and check out the William the Marshall podcast. It's all there, the astonishing into Nissan fighting of this fantastically dysfunctional family. Richard and Henry, So young Henry and his brother Richard fought against each other. Later on, Prince John, another brother, treacherously allied himself to the King of France. I mean, I can barely get the words out.

What a terrible thing to do in order to steal territory and maybe even the crown itself from his big brother, King Richard. Richard foolishly forgave John saying he was a mere child. He had evil advisors. He was badly advised. Brackets, John was 27 at the time. He knew exactly what he was up to. Richard died, nothing to do with his brother on that occasion, although he was sort of actually

cleaning the catastrophic mess that his brother had helped to create. But anyway, Richard died during a siege, and John did inherit the throne after killing his other brother's son. But on John's deathbed, he had the unhappy but perhaps poetically just news that one of his own half-brothers, a legitimate brother, William Longspay, had betrayed him. William Longspey had gone over to the French invaders that. were overrunning the south of King John's Kingdom in 12-16 at the time. And so, yes, another royal sibling bust up there. More troublesome Royal Brothers coming up.

Probably. I suppose that we can shift a few generations down. We get to Edward II's brothers. Thomas, the first Earl of Norfolk and Edmund Earl of Kent. They were Edward II's brothers. Unsurprisingly, they rebelled against him. You'd have been crazy not to rebel against Edward II, really. But they rebelled against him in that fateful year

when the King's realm was invaded by his own wife. So in that year, 13 at 26, Edward II's realm was invaded by his wife and her lover, and his two brothers went over and joined their sister-in-law in fighting against their brother, the king. Pretty bad, folks. I mean, the Plantagenet family, where do you even start? Let's scoge forward to Henry IV. His sons had their moments. When his son, Henry V,

was alive, they behaved themselves because, well, you know, Henry V, you're going to think twice before betraying him. But once Henry VIII had died, Henry VIII's brothers realized there was a baby on the throne, and they got a little loose with each other. They fell out pretty bad. The Duke of Gloucester, for example, was constantly undermining the Duke of Bedford. And there was an ongoing power struggle. Speaking of power struggles and babies who are not suitable for rule, when that baby grew up, he was Henry VI and he was embroiled in a massive civil war, a big family civil war, the wars of the roses. But actually, it was fought between the various descendants of the third, but mostly the violence was between cousins. So it was a cousin's war,

perhaps more than the siblings war, but actually not exclusively. Oh no. It does really kick off and give us one of the all-time classic brother rivalries. In 1470, Edward VIII appears to have won. He smashed the house of Lancaster, but he was deposed by a group of rebel lords that included his kid brother. And those brothers York, where do we start with them? You've got Edward, you've got George, you've got Richard.

Their father was the Duke of York. He was killed during the Wars of the Roses, and he left three sons. They seem to be pretty close to each other. Edward was the oldest, he was fair-haired, he was a beautiful-looking man, he was an athletic giant, he was a warrior, he put the Lancasterian army through the woodchipper at the Battle of Tauton when the defeated rabble had fled across a river using a bridge of their own dead as the snow fell alongside the iron tips of their enemy's arrows. That was a terrible day.

And upon winning that battle, following it up, gaining the throne, he showered his little brothers, George and Richard, with wealth and offices. Ten years later, George was now in his early 20s, and as I said, he shockingly, he rebelled, and he helped install the old king, Henry VI, the king from the House of Lancaster, back on the throne. Edward IV was livid, and this was a problem, because at his best he was simply unbeatable, and he invaded, he crushed the force of Henry VI. His brother George saw which way the banners were blowing and begged forgiveness,

and he was forgiven. Edward IV took him back. He was given plum jobs and plenty of castles. but he did not really take this second chance. And I think there were always suspicions now between the brothers. There's a chronicle from the time that reports that both men, George, Duke of Clarence and then his older brother, over the fourth, they had spies in each other's households.

And this source says that now each began to look upon the other with no very fraternal eyes. You can say that again. George, Duke of Clarence, so this younger brother of Edward VIII, he suffered a bereavement that seemed to send him wild. His wife died, and he was sure that she'd been poisoned. He put one of her ladies in waiting to death and kind of went on a mad, rough justice rampage. Now, the king, his brother, was very jealous of his right to dispense justice and execute people.

You couldn't just set up kangaroo courts and torture people to death. And they argued. The Duke Clarence, his younger brother at this point, may have circulated rumours that his big brother, was illegitimate, which is the sort of worst thing you can ever say about a king in the 15th century, because so much of your claim to rule rests on bloodline, on legitimacy. In 1477, therefore Edward V. Fourth lost his patience entirely with his little brother. The Duke of Clarence was arrested. He was sent to the tower. Clarence tried to save himself by offering to fight a trial by combat,

offering to fight Edward himself, which is very stupid because Edward was one of the better. warrior kings, but unsurprisingly, Edward refused to take this seriously. And Clarence was tried for conspiring against the king, for sorcery, use a patient the whole works. They threw the book at him, and he was killed in the Tower of London. According to Shakespeare, famously, he was drowned in a butt of marmsy or sweet Greek wine. Edward ruled for another few years, but when he died that third brother I mentioned a while ago, Richard, well, he declared Edward's children illegitimate, locked them in the Tower of London, put himself on the throne, ground himself king, and shortly after those princes, those sons of Edward IV disappeared.

Killed by their uncle Richard, the debate continues, folks. But the brothers York, they're not quite the band of brothers that they thought they were on setting out on life's great adventure. At almost exactly the same time, and actually very much linked with the drama that was going on in England, we get something pretty huge going down in Scotland, the border. Alexander was the second surviving son of King James II. So he's a royal prince, and he fell out with his big brother, James III.

Surprise, surprise, because of the usual, really. Alexander was acting like a sort of mini king in his own lands, generally causing headaches for his big brother. And so he fled into exile. He ended up in Paris, where he tried to get support for an invasion of Scotland. That didn't quite work out. So then he went to England, the traitor, down to the English, where he made a deal with King Edward VIII, that he would swear loyalty to the English throne,

and he would hand over southern bits of Scotland in return for Edward's military support to put him on the Scottish throne. And so the English march north with Alexander in their army. They captured Berwick. So Alexander became the de facto ruler of Scotland for a bit, but the English sort of seemed to lose interest at that point. Edward VIII died a bit later on. Rich the third, well, he was rather busy during his short reign.

and Alexander fled south to England once more. He was thrown out by his big brother and the Scottish nobles. He then came back. I mean, there's quite a lot of back and forth, but eventually he was on the losing side of it. And he died in a duel. Strangely, the same month, the Rich of the Third, was killed in the Battle of Bosworth

by the man who became Henry the 7th, and we get the dawn of the Tudors. Let's keep going. The Tudors didn't leave the opportunity to fall out with the brothers because there was a profound lack of brothers in the Tudor dynasty. Henry the 8th only had one legitimate son. Mary had no sons. Elizabeth had no sons. Now, let's quickly hear it for the sisters here. Queen Mary did have her sister Elizabeth confined in 1554. There was a rebellion against Mary's rule, and Elizabeth may have had some contact with some people connected with it. So she was sent to the

tower for a couple of months. Then she was placed under house arrest for a year or so. So if we are looking for the last time that a sibling of an English or British monarch was arrested or detained or seriously caught up in the justice system, it would be Elizabeth, and before that it would be George Duke of Clarence. But I've got a couple other examples coming up, folks, that you might find amusing. Despite the urgings, I should say, of some of Mary's closest advisers, they said put Elizabeth to death. That's the only way of ensuring that Catholicism will endure in England. But despite their urging, Mary couldn't bring herself to kill her half-sister, and Elizabeth survived, and obviously she would follow her on the throne. James Ith of Scotland followed her,

became James I first of England. His sons, we think, probably didn't like each other very much. There's one or two accounts, Henry Prince of Wales, his oldest son, but he died a teenager, and his younger brother, Charles, came to the throne as Charles I first. Now, he was imprisoned, famously, a few times, and he was then tried and indeed executed, but not by his brother. That was obviously by parliamentary slash army authorities. So Charles the first sons got on okay, actually. They're going, all right, Charles II and James second in particular. They were pretty good collaborators. Charles II's sons, well, he had so many, they're always going to be issues. They were all illegitimate, of course. He had no legitimate children. But many of them were acknowledged. They were ennobled,

so they were people that certainly left a big imprint on the history books. Two of them, I think, ended up on different sides of the Franco-Dutch War. As I say, there were so many sons, they're all going to look for fun and adventure somewhere. They're going to end up fighting each other. A notable example is in 685, after Charles II's death, his oldest son, James Duke of Monmouth,

invaded England to claim the throne, which had gone to Charles II's brother at James II. King James' troops defeated Monmouth, and at least one of his half-brothers, the Duke of Grafton, was serving for the king against him. So two of Charles II's sons ended up on either side of that particular conflict. Monmouth and the Duke of Grafton. Monmouth was imprisoned.

Monmouth was executed. So that's the last person whose dad was the monarch that did any serious time in a prison. So that was 1685. It has not happened since then. Despite a couple of people trying reasonably hard. The Hanoverians, well, they were all vile to each other, nearly all. George II's oldest son, Frederick, apparently didn't like his little brother, the Duke of Cumberland, who I think it's fair to say was their father's favourite.

But Frederick died before him and Cumberland could really fall out. I think that could have been quite a problematic relationship actually, but Frederick died. His young son, George III took over. Now, George III struggled with his brothers and struggled with his sons, and his sons struggled with each other. One of George III's brothers was called Henry Duke Cumberland Strathurn, and they fell out over Henry's endless affairs and scandals.

Another brother also enraged George III by marrying in secret again, but reasonably harmless stuff, that, just falling out. George IV and his brother, the Duke of York, didn't go on terrifically well. They found themselves, I think, on opposing sides during the crisis of their father's so-called madness. George Prince of Wales tried to get a sort of act of parliament in which would have seen George the Prince Regent, given the powers of the king,

and his brother, the Duke of York. did not want that to happen to his father, so they were on different sides in that. Two other brothers disagreed passionately of a Catholic emancipation. George the fourth apparently had to remove his brother William as Lord High Admiral because he sailed a fleet off to sea without telling anyone why or where he was going, which brings me actually to my last son of a king to go behind the bars. That same William, the William who was Lord High Admiral. As a young man, he was sailor, famously called Sailor Bill,

and he had been involved in a drunken brawl with fellow sailors in Gibraltar, and he was detained. And so he went behind bars. And so I've been reading up on the last few days, I think that is in fact the last person. You know, it's a very small example because, as you'll see, very quickly, he let it be known who he was and terrified jailers immediately let him out. So it's probably a matter of minutes. But in terms of the last son of a sovereign to be locked up, it could well have been William. Now, interestingly, William would go on to become King, who had begun to become William IV.

Well, let's keep going. The spawn of Victoria, they did their best to get in trouble. Lots of absolute wrongans there. Edward I ended up in court for the first time not locked up, but he ended up in the judicial process. He ended up in court as a witness in a gambling, cheating ring, which was deeply embarrassing at the time. But he'd gotten terribly with his parents,

but not that badly, I think, with his siblings. I think the final set of royal... brothers whose relationship resulted in a proper crisis was one that I'm sure you can tell what's coming. Edward the 8th and his little brother who would become George the 6th. So they fought as children, quite notably. But then they seemed to get all right, I think, as they got older. But then they fell out again when Edward, the man who would become Edward, the 8th, became infatuated with Wallace Simpson, the divorced American. And this was a taboo at the time.

She was divorced. She was American. She was old in him. and George and Edward really fell out, and the people around them fell out as well. George's wife, for example, could not stand Wallace Simpson. Edward abdicated from the throne. He chose love over his duty as king emperor and left George ruling the empire. And interestingly, after that, there was bad feeling.

I mean, Edward would ring him up on the telephone and harass him about money. He never thought he'd have money, and he'd also demand a royal title for his wife, Wallace, who was very upset that she wasn't absorbed into the royal family. And as many people know, Edward and Wallace estranged largely from the royal family, furious, probably a little bit ambitious. They were foolish in their association with the Nazis in the build-up and the early months of the Second World War. At best, they were naive.

At worst, they actively plotted with the Nazis. Either way, they were robustly offered. They were told to go. They were given the opportunity of spending the whole war in the Bahamas to keep them out of trouble. And after the war, the two brothers really never reconciled that the taint of that relationship with Hitler meant that George never really wanted Edward back in Britain as part of the family. And so that recent case, less than a hundred years ago, of Royal Brothers bringing the monarchy itself to a point potentially of existential crisis. I think, just reading about it, just thinking about it, that the system of winner-takes-all primogeniture means, you know, if it's winner-takes-all, it's loser, loses everything.

The crown is indivisible. The knights of the garta, the titles, the medals, the nice houses, they don't make up for the fact that you are not the sovereign. You are not God's anointed representative on earth. And every monarchy has struggled with this. We know that the Ottomans routinely strangled the ruler's brothers. The Mughals often had to meet their brothers on the battlefields to ensure their grip on the throne. The Ming would try and move royal princes to the frontiers, keep them out of trouble, but then they might get restless, and they're constantly working out what to do with these spares.

In British history, I think, to be a younger son is to slowly be pushed away from the centre of the magic royal circle, where they begin their life. They're so close when they're born, but they end up on the icy periphery. Some have fought against that. They've demanded relevance. They've demanded power, military command, wealth, influence. Others have hurled themselves into debauchery. Some have tried both at the same time. And so often the ambition, the weaknesses, the shortcomings, the eccentricities, the desires of the sovereign's siblings, have dragged that sovereign into conflict into crisis. And while so much has changed across, well, 2,000 years of history, this clearly hasn't.

Thanks, folks, thanks for listening to this emergency podcast. I think we'll be talking a bit more about this in the weeks to come. Make sure you follow or subscribe, or wherever it's called in your particular place, so you don't miss an episode. Thank you for listening.