The arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, brother to King Charles III, on suspicion of misconduct in office has come as a shock to many. Numerous articles in diverse media have described the arrest of a member of the royal family as “unprecedented”.
It has been argued that the last royal arrest was that of King Charles I (reigned from 1625 to 1649) by parliamentary forces in 1646. This episode famously ended with Charles’s execution in 1649. But although royal arrests had dwindled by the 17th century, Charles I’s was not the last.
In the kingdom of England and later the UK, a total of 58 arrested royals (34 males and 24 females) from the Norman conquest in 1066 up to the early 18th century can be identified. Of these, 19 were released, one escaped, 12 died in custody, 21 were executed, three vanished and two were murdered.
Mountbatten-Windsor is not the first sibling of the monarch to have been arrested. Perhaps the most well-known case is that of George, Duke of Clarence, younger brother of King Edward IV (reigned from 1461 to 1483), who imprisoned him for treason. The king stripped him of his titles, removed him from the succession and executed him in the Tower of London in 1478. According to legend, he was drowned in a barrel of malmsey wine.
The last sibling of a monarch to have been arrested, however, was the future Queen Elizabeth I, imprisoned by her sister, Mary I (reigned from 1553 to 1558), in 1554. Accused of conspiring against Mary, Elizabeth spent a couple of months in the Tower before being moved to house arrest on May 19, the anniversary of the execution of her mother, Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth was eventually pardoned in 1555, after King Philip, Mary’s husband, interceded on her behalf.
Adult royals suspected of conspiracy and treason were not the only ones to have been put in custody. Innocent royal children were also imprisoned, ostensibly to be guarded and protected, but in reality as a means to control the succession. The famous Princes in the Tower were kept there by their usurping uncle, Richard III (reigned from 1483 to 1485) after he took the throne in 1483, but vanished shortly thereafter. Richard is widely considered to have murdered them, but alternative theories have emerged.
Another pair of royal children put in custody by their uncle were Eleanor and Arthur of Brittany. Their uncle, King John (reigned from 1199 to 1216), had been the youngest son and the existence of the siblings from Brittany, children of his elder deceased brother, endangered the future of his position. They were both imprisoned in the early 1200s. Arthur vanished after 1203 and it is assumed he was murdered. Eleanor languished in prison for the rest of her life, dying in custody in Bristol Castle in 1241.
About the author
Gonzalo Velasco Berenguer is a Lecturer in History at the University of Bristol.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Most arrested royals were accused of treason and conspiracy, but these charges were often compounded with accusations of heresy and witchcraft. Henry V (reigned from 1413 to 1422) had his stepmother, Joan of Navarre, arrested on suspicion of sorcery.
His son and successor, Henry VI (reigned from 1422 to 1471), had his aunt by marriage, Eleanor Cobham, confined in 1441 under charges of necromancy. Although both women were arrested under the rule of law of their time, their imprisonments might have masked ulterior motives; financial ones, in Joan’s case and political ones in Eleanor’s.
The most prolific reign for royal arrests was, unsurprisingly, that of Henry VIII (reigned from 1509 to 1547), who placed 12 close relatives in custody, including three wives, a niece and a first cousin.
The last royal imprisonment was that of Sophia Dorothea of Celle in 1694. The wife of George of Hannover, who later became king as George I in 1714, she was accused of adultery. Despite being the mother of the Prince of Wales, Sophia remained locked up after her former husband became king, dying in custody in 1726.
So Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is only the latest in a line of royal arrests, a practice that was fairly constant until the late 17th century.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.independent.co.uk ’
