Royal House

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This article is about the use of royal family names. For the inventor named Royal House, see Royal Earl House.

A Royal House or Royal dynasty is a familial designation, or family name of sorts, used by royalty. It generally represents the members of a family in various senior and junior or cadet branches, who are loosely related but not necessarily of the same immediate kin.

Because of royal intermarriage and the creation of cadet branches, a royal house generally will not entirely correspond to one immediate family or place; members of the same house in different branches may rule entirely different countries and only be vaguely related. The family may have originated entirely elsewhere.

The House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, for example, originated in Germany as a ducal family. Today, it no longer holds any status in Germany, but different branches sit on various thrones, including those of the United Kingdom and Belgium. Former monarchs of Portugal and Bulgaria also belonged to this house, although they were not especially closely related, as they descended from different branches, some of them distinct for many generations.

Royal house names in Europe are taken from the father; in cases where a Queen regnant marries a prince of another house, their children (and therefore subsequent monarchs) belong to his house. Thus Britain's queen Victoria belonged to the House of Hanover, but her male-line descendants belong to the House of her husband Albert, that is Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. The name was changed to Windsor in 1917. This has been violated recently; the children of queens regnant in the Netherlands and Luxembourg have retained their maternal House association and in the United Kingdom, Queen Elizabeth II's descendants by her husband, Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, will officially remain Windsor, although they are technically of the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg which in turn is a line of the House of Oldenburg.

Another way in which the royal house of a given country may change is when a foreign prince is invited to fill a vacant throne or a next-of-kin from a foreign house succeeds. This occurred with the death of childless Queen Anne of the House of Stuart: she was succeeded by a prince of the House of Hanover who was her nearest Protestant relative.

The House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg rules in Norway and ruled in Greece, because the modern founding monarchs of those nations were initially princes invited from Denmark, which is a cadet branch of that house. Due to the development of countries once in the British Empire into sovereign kingdoms in a personal union, the House of Windsor has ruled over 32 countries; 16 remain with the shared monarchy (known as the Commonwealth Realms), while the others are now under a different royal house, or have become republics.

Unlike most Europeans, many of the world's Royal Families do not really have family names and those that have adopted them rarely use them. They are referred to instead by their titles, often related to an area ruled or once ruled by that family. The name of a Royal House is not a surname; it just a convenient way of dynastic identification of individuals.

[edit] Reigning sovereign Houses

Bahrain: House of Al Khalifa
Belgium: House of Wettin (Saxe-Coburg-Gotha line)
Bhutan: House of Wangchuck
Commonwealth Realms: House of Windsor (agnatically the House of Wettin, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha line)
Denmark: House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg (branch of the House of Oldenburg)
Japan: Imperial House of Japan
Jordan: Hashemite
Liechtenstein: House of Liechtenstein
Luxembourg: House of Nassau-Weilburg, (agnatically the House of Bourbon)
Monaco: House of Grimaldi
Morocco: Alaouite
Nepal: Shah dynasty
Netherlands: House of Orange-Nassau (agnatically the House of Lippe)
Norway: House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg (branch of the House of Oldenburg)
Qatar:House of Al-Thani
Oman: House of Al Bu Sa'id
Saudi Arabia: House of Saud
Spain: House of Bourbon
Swaziland: House of Dhlamini
Sweden: House of Bernadotte
Thailand: Chakri

[edit] Deposed or extinct sovereign Houses

The majority of these nations are now republics or part of republics. The Princely Houses of Germany often have given their own names to the states they ruled.