Some crises take people by surprise. They are sudden, leaving little time to act. Other crises slowly creep up on people over many years. Many succession crises, though not all, were of the second kind. Perhaps, it had become increasingly unlikely an heir would materialise. Perhaps even after it was a certainty, the crisis did not become acute until precipitated by death. When Charles II of Spain died in 1700, it had been evident for a long time that he was unlikely to father children. Yet, despite this, his death set in motion a major war. And Spain’s slow-moving succession crisis was by no means unique. Another protracted dynastic crisis was the inexorable decline of the Stuart dynasty after the overthrow of James II in the Glorious Revolution. Despite seventeen pregnancies, the future Queen Anne had only one child who survived infancy, and he, her sickly heir William, Duke of Gloucester, died at the age of eleven. Even had he lived longer, though, the poor boy was unlikely to have lived long and his ability to eventually father children was uncertain. His death forced an Act of Settlement the following year to handle the approaching issue of the succession—a solution which ‘fused the elements of hereditary and elective monarchy with the guarantee of a succession acceptable to the political nation’.Footnote 1 Despite the magnificence of royal celebrations, the truth was that dynastic vulnerability plagued early modern ruling families.

Scholars have often emphasised the zeal to ‘perpetuate the dynasty’.Footnote 2 Indeed, it was an issue widely discussed as the time, as shown by Tom Tölle.Footnote 3 Success in producing an heir was celebrated both in court settings and for wider audiences. Lavish festivities were staged, medals struck and poetry and paintings deployed to celebrate heirs.Footnote 4 The pressure to produce an heir could prove very difficult for both kings and queens.Footnote 5 A miscarriage could destabilise the position of a monarch.Footnote 6 A queen seen as barren could be dismissed as a failure. The alternative of dynastic death could bring war and misery on a whole kingdom. Dynastic fragility or threat of dynastic extinction was a constant problem in most European monarchies. Little wonder that diplomats frequently discussed the frailty of childless monarchs.Footnote 7 Tölle analyses how diplomats wrote extensive reports on royal corporeality. Thus, the various bodily weaknesses of Charles II of Spain were detailed in despatches. The way the ailing king walked, rode (or more often not) and talked were all the subject of close analysis. Wishful thinking could set in, with observers keen to depict the king as close to death or close to fathering a son, the latter in a surprising letter by the Bohemian aristocrat Ferdinand Bonaventura von Harrach in 1699.Footnote 8

A few reigning houses such as Denmark or Hesse had one or more cadet lines ready to pick up the baton if the main line died out, but they were exceptions that proved the rule. Dynastic politics was both intensely personal and often deeply complicated. I would suggest that even at the time different perspectives were deployed. Often, a long-term perspective is presumed to have been almost automatic—that dynastic survival trumped all other considerations. This long-term approach, its goal the good of the dynasty as a collective, was often more absent than one would expect. When Augustus, elector of Saxony, left his wife behind when he quit Dresden to become the king of Poland, they had one son and heir.Footnote 9 That was a limited dynastic legacy, but appears not to have bothered Augustus, who preferred energetic exploits with an array of mistresses. In other cases, dynastic fragility could create political havoc, such as the death in 1639 of the five-year-old Tsarevich Ivan and two months later his newborn brother Vasili. Suddenly, the tsar had only one son, his relationship with Tsarina Eudoxia suffered and they had no more children. The Romanov dynasty was reduced to a precarious state and fear gripped the court that witchcraft had been used against the tsar’s children.Footnote 10

Instead, monarchs often resorted to a less collective, more short-term approach. The threat of cadet branches, not to mention the expense, could cool princely enthusiasm for encouraging younger brothers, nephews and cousins to marry. The cadet branches of the dynasty or younger brothers of the monarch could even prove destabilising.Footnote 11 Moreover, personal, individual considerations could trump any collective dynastic considerations. Many rulers preferred not to have sex with their spouses because they found them unattractive or downright repulsive. (Naturally, the feeling could be mutual.) Some might take lovers with whom they preferred to spend their intimate moments. A complicating factor was those rulers who felt little or no attraction to the opposite sex. Here too, the long-term advantages of having sex and, ultimately, children might appear too distant to outweigh the immediate discomfort or abhorrence associated with the conjugal bed.

Approaches to dynastic extinction thus varied considerably, despite how often it was visible on the horizon many years before the fact. With that in mind, how did people try to avert the end of a dynasty—and did they try that hard? This will take us to the question of what a dynasty was. A far more flexible animal to contemporaries than to later historians, it transpires.Footnote 12

A Poor Outlook for Sweden

In 1775, King Gustav III of Sweden had been married to Queen Sophia Magdalena for nine years and they had no children. His dynasty was relatively new to the Swedish throne as his father had been elected crown prince in 1743, at the behest of Empress Elizabeth of Russia. That meant there were no cadet lines in Sweden, though he had more distant relatives abroad such as the Tsarevich Paul. The king had two younger brothers and one younger sister, but only one was married and none had legitimate heirs. The royal couple had little sympathy for each other, and the king was likely to have been more interested in young courtiers than his queen. The future of the House of Holstein-Gottorp was looking bleak and the king decided to act.Footnote 13

In a unique document, the king’s confidant, Adolf Fredrik Munck, Master of the Stable, described what happened.Footnote 14 Written several years later, it was still a credible description of the extraordinary machinations of trying to produce an heir.Footnote 15 In July 1775, the king had travelled to the spa at Loka to take the waters for a few days. During a walk, the king mentioned his sister-in-law, Duchess Hedwig Elisabeth Charlotte, who had been thought to be pregnant, but after a while things simply petered out. The signs appeared to have been misread by the physicians. The king said ‘that He Himself wished to have an heir’, to which his attendants responded that ‘nothing would be simpler and also combined with the greatest bliss for the realm and a joy for the king himself’.Footnote 16 The phrasing makes it quite clear that the king by having an heir ‘himself’ meant a son, rather than an heir born to one of his siblings.

King Gustav said that things were not as simple as some would have him believe, ‘as he had no one who could propose the matter to the queen, which he found impossible to resolve to do himself. Especially as he had never once during their whole marriage been together like man and wife should do, when conjugal duties are to be fulfilled’.Footnote 17 He emphasised the need for a ‘negotiator’, as otherwise there would likely be an unfortunate scene with the queen. Various names were put forward, but the king rejected them all, and instead mentioned a captain in the Guards, one Lilliehorn, ‘in whom the king had the most trust as he had been brought up with the king from childhood and always proved trustworthy’.Footnote 18 Another courtier argued against using Lilliehorn, as what was needed was someone who had contacts with the women serving the queen.Footnote 19 To bring the enterprise to a happy conclusion, they needed a woman close to the queen who was ‘captivated’ by the king’s plan. Then Munck was suggested, because he ‘was well known to the queen’s chamberers’.Footnote 20 Indeed, one of them was his mistress.

The king was set on his plan succeeding, even though he had previously decided to continue living apart from the queen and had gone on to persuade his brother Duke Charles to marry. Munck was approached by a courtier and informed of the king’s plan. Then the king himself told him to join him for ride, when he outlined the situation. He emphasised that the only people allowed to be in the know were the queen’s chamberer Ramström and two courtiers who had been privy to the previous discussion. Everything was to be kept secret ‘until he had lain with the queen and become convinced, as he was not yet, that he was able to consummate the marriage’. ‘As he had not in his whole life been intimate with more women’ than three on as many occasions. The first was the wife of an English sea captain, who had been procured by his valet, Axel Griberg, for the crown prince ‘to learn’—and ‘Griberg had to instruct him in both attitude and act, during which latter his seed had flown’.Footnote 21 The second was the wife of General Du Rietz ‘whom he had touched several times but without discharge’.Footnote 22 The third was a courtesan, Miss Norman, who had been brought to the wardrobe rooms after a court reception in 1771. Leaving the rooms, she had said, ‘His Majesty is mightily shy and quite unused to this’.Footnote 23 Munck thought that the king would be capable as long as he could overcome his shyness, which King Gustav promised.

Munck decided, secretly, to encourage Miss Ramström, the queen’s chamberer, to employ ‘a married woman’ to ‘educate the queen’.Footnote 24 Two days later, the king and Munck discussed the matter again, and the king again told him about his doubts whether he could perform. He said soon after the wedding ‘he had several times lain with the queen and during that time tried to complete his male duty, but shyness and ignorance on both sides had resulted in nothing happening’. He had not known whom to ask for advice and had begun to loathe all women ‘to which both his education and the lectures by the queen dowager added much’. He said, ‘I cannot get out of this, as I am now so used to it, if you cannot teach me and tell me, my dear Munck’. The vastly more experienced Munck replied that ‘Nature is the best teacher’ and if the king abstained from other habits that can diminish the lusts of the flesh, presumably masturbation, and lay with the queen every night things would sort themselves out.Footnote 25 This did not persuade the king, who reiterated that ‘unused and ignorant’ as he was, it would be almost impossible for him to fulfil his conjugal duty. Also, after nine years of coldness it was difficult to live more intimately with the queen, which he thought would ‘so confuse him that nothing would happen and thus result in a worse relationship than before’. The king insisted, ‘You will inform the queen of my intention and then be with me in her room as I tell her of my plan to live as friends and spouses from here on’.Footnote 26

The queen soon arrived at the residence, and the king received her ‘kindly, against all habit’.Footnote 27 Munck then set out to realise the plan. He defied the king in bringing in Miss Uggla, a Lady of Honour, to whom the queen was close. She was intelligent, resourceful and, most of all, discreet. After consulting with the queen, Miss Uggla brought back the reply that the queen was much surprised and found it hard to believe that the king intended to change their life together. Munck then talked with his mistress, the queen’s chamberer Ramström, and the queen’s old chamberer, Wenner. Wenner had served the queen since she was a princess in Denmark and was both trustworthy and married. Munck calculated that it was necessary to bring Wenner into the plan, as she and Ramström were not friends, so if she were excluded and the queen asked for her advice it would not end well.

The following day, Miss Uggla again tried to persuade the queen, to no avail. Then Munck himself met the queen. He assured her that the king intended to change and admitted the fault was all his. The queen was not ready to meet the king and hesitated. Munck tried to press her into agreeing to a meeting but also carefully arranging how it was to be done. Munck promised that the king was serious and did indeed want to meet the queen, as long as the king was assured that there would be no nasty scenes dredging up disagreements in the past. After this followed two days during which the king tried to steel himself to approach the queen in person. At last the queen took the king’s hand as they were parting for the night and held on to it, asking for a meeting. The king promised to meet the queen the next day but was now scared and said to Munck that his behaviour came from deciding nothing was likely to change. Munck was emphatic that he need not be in the room when the couple met, but King Gustav was adamant.

As the dreaded meeting approached, the king told Munck to feel his pulse ‘at which I felt the king had an elevated heart rate’. He then told the hesitant monarch ‘If Your Majesty does not quickly end this game, the preliminaries will drag Your Majesty into the grave. Therefore I will now go to the queen and tell her Your Majesty is following immediately’. ‘He ordered me to wait but I left, and when he called me back I replied that I had so good a reason to go that his order could not persuade me to turn back’.Footnote 28

Almost immediately after Munck entered the queen’s room, the king followed, and the queen embraced him. ‘Over six minutes they stood without moving and silent, but not without tears on both sides’.Footnote 29 Despite what had earlier been promised, they then discussed the misery of the previous nine years. The king admitted that things had gone wrong and how badly the queen had been treated. Munck then stood up to leave and the king did the same. The queen held the king back, so he stayed; he returned to his room half an hour later. He had rejected a plea from the queen to spend the night with the excuse that he had too much business to attend to. The following days, the king stayed away and the queen tried to bring matters forward. Munck emphasised the king’s ‘timidite’ as the reason for things faltering, but he also told Ramström that the queen should push and excite the king and put a portrait of her in his bed. To this was added a billet-doux in French assuring the king of the queen’s undying love. Then after supper, the queen whispered in the king’s ear ‘as two evenings have already passed and Your Majesty has not come to me, I will come this evening to you’.Footnote 30 The terrified king then begged her not to come but promised to go to the queen as soon as he could prepare so no one would notice him leaving his room at such an unusual hour.

That night the king did go to the queen’s bedchamber accompanied by Munck. Miss Ramström, normally slept with the queen, was outside waiting in the wardrobe. Once the king had been undressed, he was left alone with the queen. After fifteen minutes, the king rang a bell to call for Munck. ‘As I remained by the door, the king ordered me to come to the bed, where he whispered to me and said that he couldn’t find a hole. I advised him in a whisper to ask the queen to show him, but he replied, “I am ashamed to do that”.’ Then Munck left. An hour later, he escorted the king back to his own bedchamber. There he explained that ‘he had made several attempts, but they all failed, as he could not find a real hole in the queen’, adding that ‘as he was lying with the queen the following night I had to be there to educate and teach him’.Footnote 31

The following day, Munck asked Wenner to teach the queen and exhort her not to be shy when the king was in her bed. The queen was first outraged at Munck being present, but then accepted it as a necessity. At this meeting, Munck had to adjust the king’s position while with the queen, but despite all their efforts, no further progress was made. There were complications, it transpired. The king suffered from phimosis, too tight a foreskin, and the queen’s vagina was unusually small, so it hurt them both.

On the third night, Mrs. Wenner and Munck decided to put some oil by the bed to ease intercourse. This alleviated some of the pain, and for the next seven days, the king and the queen tried to have intercourse and eventually succeeded. Even so, it took several years to produce an heir. It was in the nature of the court that, despite the king’s exhortations to keep everything secret, their problems were soon common knowledge among the elite (Fig. 10.1). The little prince’s birth in 1778 was greeted with much jubilation, and the future of the dynasty seemed secure (Fig. 10.2).

Fig. 10.1
The sketch of prince and Sophia attempt to have an heir. The third person behind the prince is Munck, he helped the king and queen in sexual intercourse.

Gustav III and Sophia Magdalena’s attempts to have an heir included the humiliation of Adolf Fredrik Munck’s presence. This was something contemporaries liked to mock. Carl August Ehrensvard, Erotisk scen. © Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

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Fig. 10.2
The photo frame of future little crown prince fourth Gustav. His photo was embedded below his father third Gustav before his accession other photos are of ancestors.

The succession was secured and celebrated: even before his accession to the throne, little Crown Prince Gustav (future Gustav IV) was squeezed into a painting of the kings of Sweden underneath his father Gustav III Ulrika Fredrica Pasch, Regentlängd Gustav I–Gustav IV Adolf. © Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

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The tribulations of Queen Sophia Magdalena and King Gustav III’s sex life offer several insights. One was the king’s mixed feelings about what was needed to get an heir. He persuaded his brother to marry but was still keen to have a son of his own. Tellingly, the king’s other brother remained unmarried, and no efforts were made to bolster the dynasty that way. Another observation is the staggering awkwardness and ignorance shown by both the king and the queen, reminiscent of a similar situation with Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. There was also evident physical pain and a strong psychological reluctance to consummate the marriage. What beckoned was painful and not especially appealing to either of them. If the queen and Munck had not pressed so hard, the efforts at a reconciliation and sexual intercourse would have collapsed at an early stage. Left to his own devices, the king could not face the terrors and pain of intercourse with the queen.

If intercourse was too terrifying—or simply did not yield the hoped-for result—there were other options open to a dynasty on its last legs. Dynastic inclusiveness saw cadet lines or even illegitimate children provide candidates to the throne, and the concept of royal blood could be extended to descendants through the female line, providing a wider understanding of what constituted a dynasty. This was the case in Sweden, where the continuation between Queen Christina and her successor (and cousin) Charles X Gustav emphasised their shared royal blood. Royal and princely successions could be cobbled together from a mix of solutions. David Parrott’s observation that ‘The complexity and ambiguity of succession arrangements and inheritance customs throughout early modern Europe, and especially in the Holy Roman Empire—both in its German territories and in Reichsitalien, that part of Italy whose rulers also owed allegiance to the emperor as their sovereign overlord—is frequently overlooked and its potential for political disruption underestimated’ still largely holds true.Footnote 32

The Reluctants

Despite the very real threat of political disruption, there were several ruling houses in Europe who signally failed to master dynastic policy and ensure the survival of their dynasty. They can be divided into the rulers with several heirs who wrecked the future of the dynasty by allowing their offspring to remain unmarried and the rulers who for various reasons did not do everything to provide an heir. If dynastic perpetuation was paramount, the actions of many early modern princes and princesses seem irrational.

Among these desultory dynasts, the Hanoverians in the late eighteenth century stand out. Having produced seven sons who lived to adulthood, King George III and Queen Charlotte for perhaps understandable reasons took their eye off the ball and allowed five sons to remain unmarried and the married two to separate from their wives. The result was a change in a matter of years from a surplus of admittedly untalented royal dukes in one generation to a looming dynastic crisis in the next.

Something similar happened in Sardinia when Victor Amadeus III was king. Five of his sons reached adulthood, so the dynasty appeared safe. Yet, none of his sons would produce a son who lived to continue the line. Victor Amadeus’s successor Charles Emmanuel IV of Sardinia and his French wife Clothilde struggled to conceive. Various treatments, including weight loss, were tried, but with no result. After eight years, they agreed to give up and live ‘like brother and sister’. The other brothers were equally unsuccessful. Under those circumstances, leaving one prince unmarried until his forties and two to die unmarried does appear somewhat irresponsible if dynastic survival was paramount. Indeed, the lack of effort could be surprising. Philip IV of Spain had no son for many years of his marriage, and his heir was then his younger brother, the Infante Charles. Yet, at his death at the age of twenty-four, the Infante Charles was still unmarried. Where there should have been a sense of dynastic urgency, there was nothing—though in this case, it might have been, as Liesbeth Geevers has described, because of Philip IV’s unshakeable belief that God would intercede with a miracle as He would never abandon the House of Habsburg.Footnote 33

Another dynastic own goal was the custom of making princes into cardinals. Cardinal Henry became king of Portugal in 1578 with no heir, and one of his brothers had also been a cardinal. A century later, two dynasties struggling with survival, the Habsburgs and the Medici, had only a generation earlier made several of their prince-cardinals. Two of the sons of Grand Duke Cosimo II of Tuscany were cardinals and two more remained unmarried, within two generations that led to their dynasty dying out. If dynastic survival had been paramount, allowing several sons to remain unmarried would have been inexplicable. In similar style, of Philip IV of Spain’s two brothers, one became a cardinal and the other never married; the succession troubles a generation later could have been avoided if the survival of the dynasty had been their main concern.

Inactivity could lead to the end of dynasties when a prince failed to perform. The reason for such failure varied, of course. The last Medici Grand Duke of Florence, Gian Gastone, preferred the company of young men and appeared relatively unworried about the continuance of his dynasty.Footnote 34 Others were simply impotent or insane, though the onset of mental illness did not stop Duke Albrecht Friedrich of Prussia from having at least seven children.

In Sweden, the painful scenes in the queen’s bedchamber between Sophia Magdalena and Gustav III were not the country’s first dynastic crisis. Forty years earlier in the 1730s, there had been an episode which captured the complexities of impending dynastic extinction—and the elusive nature of what comprised a dynasty. For about two decades, it had been obvious that King Frederick and Queen Ulrika Eleonora would have no children. The question of the succession hovered with increasing urgency over the political landscape.Footnote 35 Four varieties of dynastic continuity were discussed. One was the House of Hesse. King Frederick had been the hereditary prince of Hesse when he married the queen, then a Swedish princess, and later he succeeded as Landgrave of Hesse.Footnote 36 King Frederick had a nephew whom he could have positioned as successor not just to Hesse but to the Swedish crown. The queen did talk fondly of ‘our House of Hesse’, but the idea had little traction among Swedish politicians.

Another option, though a long shot, was the royal bastards. With his mistress, King Frederick had two sons, the young Counts Hessenstein.Footnote 37 Robert Oresko has pointed out how the bastards of the House of Savoy were ‘an additional pool of talent’ to draw from. If the dynasty was threatened by extinction, bastards could be a last resort.Footnote 38 In 1520s’ England, Henry VIII appears to have countenanced making his illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy his successor. In a dynastic emergency as extinction beckoned or territory was at risk, a favoured illegitimate son could still have a chance. Pope Alexander VI, after all, spent a huge amount of effort to secure a principality for his son Cesare. Another example was Alfonso V of Aragon’s illegitimate son, Ferdinand, who became king of Naples in 1458. When the House of Aviz ended in 1580, the illegitimate son of an Aviz prince, the Prior of Crato, tried to claim the Portuguese crown. As late as the 1590s, Henry IV of France appeared to have considered marrying his mistress Gabrielle d’Estrées.Footnote 39 This did create a fierce backlash, though, which might indicate that the time for kings to marry mistresses had passed. As in France, so in Sweden: the Hessenstein option may have been favoured by the king’s mistress, but it had little real support.

Another option was to turn to a cadet branch of the royal dynasty. For King Frederick and Queen Ulrika Eleonora, that meant the Zweibrückens. All the members of the Swedish branch were dead apart from the queen herself; the rest were distant relatives in Germany. The chosen candidate was Christian IV of Palatinate-Zweibrücken-Birkenfeld. His great-great-great grandfather, Wolfgang of Palatinate-Zweibrücken, was also in a different line of the great-great-great grandfather of the Swedish queen. Not a close relation. The fact that Christian IV was a young boy, born in 1722, was an advantage, as he could be moulded to suit the Swedish succession. Tellingly, his mother struck up a correspondence with the Swedish queen, and the boy was given a Swedish governor to direct his education. In the 1730s, Prince Christian emerged as a serious contender for the Swedish throne, backed by France. There was another contender though: the Duke of Holstein. His was not a Swedish royal dynasty on paper, not being Zweibrücken or Hesse, but what he did have was a much closer connection than them because his mother had been a Swedish princess and he had spent his childhood and youth in Sweden. Unfortunately for him, his aunt Queen Ulrika Eleonora loathed him and was determined to keep him out. On his death, his son Charles Peter Ulrik became duke of Holstein and the possible Swedish successor. When an heir presumptive was finally chosen by the Diet in October 1742, their choice fell on Duke Charles Peter Ulrik because he was ‘of the Royal Swedish blood’ as the Estate of the Peasants put it. However, he had just been chosen as heir presumptive to the Russian imperial crown, and when the news arrived in Stockholm, the Diet had to think again. In the end, on the express wishes of the Russian Empress Elizabeth—who was in the process of occupying most of Swedish Finland—another Holstein prince with fewer links to Sweden was chosen to facilitate a favourable Russian–Swedish peace treaty.

There were several dynastic options in the 1730s: Zweibrücken alternative, a cadet branch of the existing dynasty; a foreign nephew of the king; a bastard; the Holstein option, a member of a different dynasty, but with closer links to the Swedish royal family than the rest; or a stranger, the Prince-Bishop of Lübeck. In the event, it was the prince-bishop who was chosen. A dynasty thus could continue in several ways, some of which were neither complete continuity nor a complete break. The option that on the face of it was a change to a new dynasty—Holstein-Gottorp—in fact offered the greatest continuity.

This was seen at other changes of dynasty too. On the abdication of Queen Christina in 1654, she was succeeded by her cousin—a Zweibrücken—despite there being still members of the older branch of the Swedish Vasa dynasty alive. They had simply been ruled out because they were Catholics and part of the Polish royal family. The same happened to the queen’s bastard brother Count Gustaf Gustafsson of Vasaborg. Instead, the queen turned to the cousins on her paternal aunt’s side, the Zweibrückens, who had lived at her court for years and positioned themselves as members of the royal family.Footnote 40 They gradually merged into the Swedish royal dynasty because they had Swedish royal blood. Similarly, when Philip II of Spain drew up an overview of possible successors to the Spanish crown, he excluded branches of what would today be seen as the Habsburg dynasty. To his mind, descendance from his father Charles V was what mattered, so his daughters and descendants of his sisters were all contenders, but at the same time, he excluded his Austrian Habsburg cousins, who all descended from Charles V’s brother Ferdinand.Footnote 41

Sweden was not the only country where the end of a ruling dynasty was not a clear-cut event, then. And in many instances, there were dynastic options which were disregarded. The Habsburgs died out in Spain in 1700—but lived on in Austria. The main Nassaus died out in 1702 with William III but lived on in distant cadet branches of the Nassau family. When the Valois died out in 1589, was the new Bourbon king the first of a new dynasty, or was he the representative of a cadet branch—which had splintered off three centuries earlier? When Grand Duke Gian Gastone of Tuscany died in 1737, a cadet branch of the Medici still existed, the Princes of Ottajano; however, it was in the interest of the great powers to take over the grand duchy, so it was given to Francis Stephen of Lorraine. In reality, clean breaks appeared to have been relatively rare and instead solutions were found by shifting sideways, trawling through matrilineal descendants or distant cadet branches. A ‘new’ dynasty could attempt instant permanence with a careful choice of sons-in-law as reserve heirs to bolster the family’s legitimacy while it found its feet.Footnote 42

A Problem for Whom?

To what degree was a dying dynasty a problem? Queen Elizabeth I of England seemed to have been unfazed by the approaching extinction of the Tudor dynasty, possibly because the word Tudor held little importance to her. Cliff Davies has shown how she saw herself as the daughter of Henry VIII and the successor of previous English monarchs, while her patrilineal ancestors bearing the name of Tudor were largely irrelevant.Footnote 43 Turning to Tuscany, ‘Needless to say, the question of the succession to the Grand Duchy obsessed old Cosimo III’, according to Elena Ciletti.Footnote 44 Yet reflect on his actions, and Cosimo III does not come across as a prince hell-bent on perpetuating his dynasty. Apart from plans to ease his middle-aged, childless daughter into the succession, Cosimo III did nothing. When his marriage fell apart, he let his wife, who at thirty was still of childbearing age, depart without much effort to reconciliation. His three children were all childless, and his younger brother only married late and when his health was already failing. The younger brother, Francesco Maria, did renounce his cardinalate, but his young bride at first refused to consummate the marriage, and then in two years, he was dead.Footnote 45 The Tuscan succession crisis brewed for many years with remarkable little done to avoid it, and when steps were taken it was too late.

Dynastic extinction could bring havoc, not just to royal families and courts but to nations. The end of Russia’s Rurikid dynasty in 1598 was also an end to stable, legitimate government—and the start of the descent into anarchy known as the Time of Troubles. A corollary of dynastic extinction, unless carefully managed, was instability; yet so too was opportunity. In Russia, it gave Boris Godunov his chance to seize the crown. When the last duke of Saxe-Lauenburg died in 1689, he had tried to make his daughter Anna Maria Franziska his heir, but the duchy was soon occupied by the ruthless duke of neighbouring Celle. Anna Maria Franziska was herself a living proof of the tribulations of dynastic extinction. Not only was her home duchy occupied but the grand duchy of Tuscany, whose heir Gian Gastone she married, was seized too after his death. No wonder she preferred to spend her time in her stables talking to her horses.

Efforts to Keep Dynasties Alive

The default was to make every effort to keep the ruling dynasty going. Love potions, prayers and pushing aged cardinals into marriage were all means to keep dynasties on track—though arguably in many instances it was to have a personal heir or to manage the succession rather than to perpetuate a dynasty per se. In what must have been the most humiliating episode of his life, King Gustav III of Sweden called on his friend and courtier Adolf Fredrik Munck for help. It was clear that it was painful for the king and the queen to go through with sex, and it was deeply embarrassing to have Munck there to help them. Yet, they persisted and in due course several pregnancies and two sons were the result. One might conclude that King Gustav III would have done anything to perpetuate his dynasty, yet the answer was no. He did not pressure his youngest brother or his sister to marry, which could have resulted in heirs. Instead, his concern seems to primarily have been to have an heir of his body, rather than the survival of his dynasty through one of his siblings.

Other early modern princes and princesses tried to create an heir when extinction threatened. After the death of his only grandson, Duke Eberhard Ludwig of Württemberg dismissed his long-time mistress and tried to get another legitimate heir with his long-suffering wife. As she was fifty-one by that stage, the plan failed. Another approach was to line up younger brothers for dynastic service. In 1734, the young son of the Margrave of Baden-Baden died, and it looked increasingly unlikely that the Margrave would have an heir, whereupon his brother chose to leave his career in the Church to get married; in the end, the dynasty died out anyway. Younger brothers sometimes proved recalcitrant. Prince Rupert of the Rhine refused to return to the Palatinate in the 1670s to marry and provide heirs, despite his brother’s wishes.

In Catholic countries, there were prince-cardinals who obtained papal permission to be laicised so they could marry. Thus in 1709 Francesco Maria de’ Medici was released from the cardinalate in order to produce the Medici heir, which seemed beyond his nephews. In 1578, the aged Cardinal Henry succeeded his great-nephew Sebastian as king of Portugal. He tried to get a dispensation to marry but failed because the pope was wary of angering the king of Spain, who hoped to seize Portugal when the House of Aviz died out.

The enthusiasm for producing an heir varied more between monarchs than is often assumed. While normally an important part of a monarch’s role, some had a more fatalistic view of dynastic survival. Tölle has analysed the depressing mortality rates of the Austrian Habsburg archdukes of the late seventeenth century. The Austrian princesses gave birth to far fewer boys than girls, and the boys on average only survived until the age of 15.Footnote 46 This was a dreadful prospect for a dynasty, where its Spanish branch too had a horrific mortality rate. Still, at least the Spanish Habsburgs appear to have nurtured a strong and misplaced belief in divine intervention to protect their dynasty.

For others, such as Gustav III of Sweden, their interest in dynastic survival was very much focussed on their own direct heirs, as in their children or grandchildren. When nephews, cousins or other more distant relatives became the link to a surviving dynasty, such interest often faltered. To keep a dynasty going appears to have been a common goal, but the fluidity of what constituted a dynasty makes it less clear how that was achieved. That a Holstein duke was ‘of the Royal Swedish blood’ was revealing.Footnote 47 Was dynasty both smaller and larger than what has traditionally been thought of a dynasty? Bastards, distant cadet lines and nephews and cousins on the female side might be part of a dynasty. At the same time, some rulers, though very intent on getting an heir, were less interested in relatives taking the role. Perhaps, the ways in which a succession crisis could be resolved and a dynasty could be said to transform and survive in a different guise, sidestepping the strictures of biology and Salic law, could be said to be true dynastic resilience.

The abiding image of the continuity and longevity of Europe’s ruling dynasties belied the reality of many early modern monarchs who did not make dynastic survival their greatest priority. Instead of encouraging siblings and cousins to marry, they were dissuaded or at least without encouragement, and sons were made cardinals or allowed to remain unmarried. Rulers themselves remained unmarried or lived away from spouses they disliked. That the long-term dynastic thinking scholars sometimes assume was in the collective best interests of a dynasty was all too often abandoned for short-term benefits for rulers who prized individual happiness and pleasure over the painful humiliations endured by Gustav III and Sophia Magdalena.

Archives Consulted

Riksarkivet (Swedish National Archives), Stockholm (RA).