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In June 1488, just three years after Henry VII’s unlikely victory in the English Midlands, James IV became king on the battlefield of Sauchieburn south of Stirling, close to the spot where Robert Bruce had won his great victory over the English at Bannockburn in 1314.

James IV was brought up at Stirling Castle by his mother, Margaret of Denmark, alongside his two younger brothers. The queen had produced three healthy sons but she and James III led separate lives after an earlier rebellion in 1482. The king, who had managed to alienate all of his siblings, believed that his wife had sided with his brother, the Duke of Albany, when the duke returned from exile in France and invaded Scotland with the future Richard III of England. James III seems also to have felt that his eldest son was tainted by contact with Albany and perhaps considered barring the boy from the succession

James IV was ruler of a land famously described in a letter written by its own nobility in 1320 to Pope John XXII as ‘the tiny country of Scotia lying on the very edge of the inhabited world’. Scotland was poor, cold and wet. Edinburgh, its capital, held only 12,000 citizens, in contrast to London’s 50,000. Yet, like its new monarch, the country was not inward-looking.  Difficulty of travel by road over rugged terrain meant that it had long relied on sea routes for transport and communication with the wider world. The kings of Scotland were determined not to be overlooked in Europe. They forged trade and political alliances with Scandinavia and were long-standing allies of the French, who viewed Scotland as a brake on the ambitions of England. The two countries that occupied the island of Britain were natural enemies, nowhere more so than in the Borders, where centuries-old feuds and the violence that fuelled them were adjudicated by special courts composed of English and Scots. But James III had attempted a policy of conciliation with England that was unpopular with his aristocracy and Henry VII, a cautious man, did not relish constant war with his northern neighbour. It remained to be seen how James IV would approach Anglo-Scottish relations and how he would develop his ambition to make Scotland a European power.

he became heir to the French throne through his marriage to Margaret of Valois

Despite converting to Catholicism after becoming king of France in 1589, Henry IV issued the Edict of Nantes to foster religious tolerance. He was killed on May 14, 1610, in Paris, France

the spread of civil war made him reflect on its disastrous effect on France

In 1620, following the defeat of Frederick V (the elector palatine, or prince, from the Rhineland who had accepted the crown of Bohemia when it was offered to him in 1618) and the Bohemians, Spanish troops from the Netherlands entered the “Winter King’s” hereditary dominions of the Rhenish Palatinate. Militarily, Spain was now in a favourable position to restart the war with the United Provinces at the expiration of the truce in 1621

Little was said about religion or even the king’s authority, while the protection of the overseas empire had become the central consideration in Spanish relations with the Dutch rebels.

Having decided on war, Olivares pursued a perfectly consistent strategy: communications between Spain and the Spanish Netherlands were to be kept open at all costs

Peter III’s conquest of Sicily, where he reigned as Peter I, was the second major step in the Mediterranean expansion of Catalonia, marking the beginning of a long international struggle with serious domestic complications.

Alfonso III (1285–91), who inherited the mainland dominions, and his younger brother James, who received Sicily, valiantly tried to overcome the formidable opposition of the pope, the king of France, and the house of Plantagenet (Anjou). Alfonso seized Majorca because his uncle James had aided the French during their Crusade against Aragon. Once again the Aragonese nobles challenged the king, forcing him in 1287 to confirm his father’s General Privilege and to permit the nobles to control the appointment of certain royal councillors. After succeeding his brother as king of Aragon, James II (1291–1327) tried to secure an unchallenged title to that kingdom by yielding his rights to Sicily in 1295 and returning Majorca to his uncle James.

After securing a favourable alteration of his frontier with Murcia, James II occupied Sardinia in 1325. As Genoa disputed Aragonese rights there, his successors, Alfonso IV (1327–36) and Peter IV (the Ceremonious; 1336–87), were forced to wage a series of wars. Accusing his cousin, the king of Majorca, of disloyalty, Peter IV annexed Majorca permanently to the Crown of Aragon in 1343. In 1347 Peter provoked a constitutional crisis by naming his daughter as heir to the throne rather than his brother, the count of Urgel, who argued that women were excluded from the succession.

The queen of France, Marie de’ Medici, had been crowned the previous day at the basilica of Saint Denis and was due to make her formal entry into the capital.

French queens were not crowned as a matter of course and Henry IV, king of France since 1589, saw no reason to go to the expense of a coronation for his second queen whom he had married in 1610

The alarm was shared by France, which had been at war with the Habsburg empire for much of the 16th century. Religion was also involved, as the Catholic Habsburgs were opposed by many German Protestant princes. Henry IV was urged to intervene militarily, but he had hesitated initially.

The continuing military, as maritime, supremacy of Spain could hardly have been more sensationally demonstrated than by these twin events

dramatic evidence of Spain's right to universal empire, but had also caused, by their determination and devotion

the twenty-year-old Philip IV deserved to be called 'el Rey Planeta' – the Planet King

mother of the last Valois Kings

preserve the authority of the monarchy through the years of its degradation

Médicis Queen entered the capital as the prospective mother of the new Bourbon dynasty

The fortunes of the Tudor dynasty were laid by the most romantic mésalliance in English history, the secret betrothal of a Welsh attendant at the Court of Henry VI to the dowager queen

Henry V, the hammer of the Welsh, had continued his father's proscription of the whole nation in punishment for the rebellion

Owain's marriage to Katherine of Valois, although hubristic, was not annulled when discovered, and the fruit of its consummation, the two sons, Edmund and Jasper, were not declared illegitimate.

History may not repeat itself, but there is no gainsaying its fondness for close affinities

When in 1807 Ferdinand, heir to the throne, stood accused by his father, Charles IV of Spain, of sedition and seeking to usurp the royal title, the young prince fearfully recalled the analogous events two hundred and forty years previously

In 1568 Philip II had similarly confronted his recalcitrant son Carlos, resulting in the latter’s imprisonment and mysterious death seven months later

Henry IV of France was an engagingly flamboyant monarch, famous for his vitality and wit, his forcefulness and determination

Accepting the heavy responsibilities of his crown, he used or planned to use his offspring to strengthen the Bourbon monarchy

As Henry’s marriage with Marguerite de Valois (the occasion of the massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day) proved childless and was annulled, his legitimate line derived from his second wife, Marie de Médicis.

king of Aragon from January 1336, son of Alfonso IV.

Peter had to contend with revolt in Sardinia throughout his reign; but he succeeded, by political and military means, in preparing the future reunion of Sicily to the Aragonese crown and was recognized by the Catalan Almogávares as duke of Athens and Neopatras in 1380.

Although the mercenaries succeeded in briefly installing Henry of Trastámara on the Castilian throne, Henry failed to honour any of his promises to Peter, and after 1369 Charles V of France took no trouble to conceal that he preferred his alliance with Castile to that with Aragon. As a result, Peter now pursued a complicatedly neutral approach to the Hundred Years’ War, with some bias in favour of the English.

Two features distinguished the reforms of Charles III (the “Caroline” reforms) from those of the early Bourbons. First, Charles was a “reformer’s king” in that he consistently supported reforming ministers.

After 1714 Spain experienced a gradual economic recovery, which became quite marked in the second half of the 18th century.

Charles III maintained that the key to Spain’s prosperity lay in the development of an American market in the Indies. He saw clearly that Spain alone could not preserve an overseas market closed to the outside world against Britain.

the diplomatic nightmare of the trial and execution of Mary, Queen of Scots

the French crown maintained the only permanent embassy of Elizabeth’s reign

The Spanish embassy was a stormy one, suspended between 1572 and 1578 and permanently terminated in 1584

the very survival of the first Bourbon king amid the dangers and conspiracies of his time suggests a certain element of rational calculation, if not outright hypocrisy.

Navarre were established during his own lifetime

In 1594 Jean Boucher, the most influential curé among the revolutionary leaders of the Leaguer Sixteen, launched an attack upon the hypocrisy of the king’s conversion fully as personal and venomous as his earlier indictment of the last Valois, Henri III

Courts are a key to understanding European history. Defined as ruling dynasties and their households, courts transformed countries, capitals, constitutions and cultures. Great Britain and Spain, for example, both now threatened with dissolution, were originally united by dynastic marriages; between, respectively, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile in 1469; and between Margaret Tudor and James IV King of Scots in 1503, leading to the accession a hundred years later of their great-grandson, James I, to the throne of England. 

The House of Orange was crucial to the formation of the Netherlands, the House of Savoy to the unification of Italy, the House of Hohenzollern to that of Germany. Dynasties provided the leadership and military forces that enabled these states to expand. As Bismarck declared, while asserting the need for royal control over the Prussian army, blood and iron were more decisive than speeches and majority decisions. 

Like previous European conflicts, including the Napoleonic Wars and repeated wars ‘of Succession’, the First World War was in part a dynastic war; between the Karageorgevic rulers of Serbia, whose supporters had murdered the previous monarch from the rival Obrenovic dynasty, and the Habsburgs, determined to oppose Serb expansion, symbolised by another Serbian victim, the assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand; and between the Hohenzollerns and Romanovs for domination in Eastern Europe. The fall of four empires in 1917-22 – Romanov, Hohenzollern, Habsburg and Ottoman  – was a European cataclysm comparable to the fall of the Roman Empire 1,500 years earlier. 

under whose reign the prolonged crisis of the Wars of Religion was made worse by dynastic rivalries arising because the male line of the Valois dynasty was going to die out with him

In 1572 she presented him as a candidate for the vacant throne of Poland, to which he was finally elected in May 1573. In May 1574, however, Charles died, and Henry abandoned Poland and was crowned at Reims on Feb. 13, 1575. He was married two days later to Louise de Vaudémont, a princess of the house of Lorraine. The marriage proved childless.

The French Wars of Religion (1562–98) continued during Henry III’s reign

Philip VI of Valois (reigned 1328–50), grandson of Philip III, was of mature age when he became regent of France in 1328. Upon the birth of a daughter to the widow of his cousin Charles IV, the familiar issue of the succession was posed anew. It was the regent’s experience, together with the circumstance that Edward III of England, grandson of Philip the Fair, was under the influence of his disreputable mother, Isabella of France, that probably disposed the council at Vincennes to recognize Philip as king (April 1328).

Philip’s reign began well.

This initial success was soon undone.

first French king of the Valois dynasty

continued the efforts of the 13th-century Capetians toward the centralization of the administration in Paris.

The elder son of Charles of Valois, Philip was first cousin to the brothers Louis X, Philip V, and Charles IV, the last Capetian kings of the direct line. On the death of Charles IV in 1328, Philip, in the face of opposition from the partisans of the claim of Edward III of England, assumed the regency until the end of the pregnancy of Charles IV’s widow. When the widow produced a daughter, who therefore could not succeed to the throne, Philip became king and was crowned at Reims in May 1328.

Henry succeeded his father, Henry V, on September 1, 1422, and on the death (October 21, 1422) of his maternal grandfather, the French king Charles VI, Henry was proclaimed king of France in accordance with the terms of the Treaty of Troyes (1420) made after Henry V’s French victories.

the English hold on France was steadily eroded; despite a truce—as part of which Henry married (April 1445) Margaret of Anjou, a niece of the French queen—Maine and Normandy were lost and by 1453 so were the remaining English-held lands in Guyenne.

York was lord protector, but his hopes of ultimately succeeding Henry were shattered by the birth of Edward, prince of Wales, on October 13, 1453

Between 1808 and 1813, during the Napoleonic Wars, Ferdinand was imprisoned in France by Napoleon.Ferdinand was the son of Charles IV

Charles IV was sufficiently alarmed to arrest Ferdinand but forgave him.

Charles was overthrown by the Revolt of Aranjuez (March 17, 1808), and he abdicated in favour of Ferdinand.