British Monarchs Trivia
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99 free British Monarchs trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
England has had a king or queen more or less continuously since Alfred the Great, and the list reads like a thousand-year soap opera: a king who died of too many lampreys, a queen who reigned for nine days, a monarch found under a car park, a king who lost America and one who gave up the throne for love. This quiz runs the whole line. It opens with the Anglo-Saxons and the Conquest, moves through the Plantagenets and the Wars of the Roses, gives the Tudors and Stuarts their due, and finishes with the Hanoverians and Windsors up to the coronation of Charles III. Along the way you'll meet Magna Carta, the Princes in the Tower, the Gunpowder Plot, the Glorious Revolution, the 'Madness' of George III and the Abdication Crisis. Easy questions ask who won at Hastings and who had six wives. Hard ones ask which king was the last to lead troops in battle and who was styled Lady of the English. Fifty questions, every answer sourced. Long live the quiz.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which king is usually counted as the first to rule all of England, after taking Viking York in 927?
Æthelstan
Æthelstan: ten years later he crushed an invading alliance of Scots and Dublin Vikings at the Battle of Brunanburh.
Q 02Which king is the subject of the legend about burning a peasant woman's cakes?
Alfred the Great
Alfred the Great: hiding from the Danes in the Somerset marshes, he supposedly let the cakes burn, yet months later he routed them at Edington.
Q 03Which Danish king won the English throne in 1016 and later ruled Denmark and Norway too?
Cnut
Cnut: in the legend where he orders the tide to halt, the original point was to show his humility before God, not his arrogance.
Q 04Which king built Westminster Abbey and was buried there the day Harold was crowned?
Edward the Confessor
Edward the Confessor: his new church was consecrated in December 1065, but he was too ill to attend and died days later.
Q 05Weeks before Hastings, Harold Godwinson defeated a Norwegian invasion at which battle?
Stamford Bridge
Stamford Bridge: Harold killed both Harald Hardrada and his own brother Tostig there, then had to hurry south when William landed days later.
Q 06Which famous cloth tells the story of the Norman Conquest of England?
The Bayeux Tapestry
The Bayeux Tapestry: despite its name it is really an embroidery, since its scenes are stitched onto linen rather than woven.
Q 07What survey of English landholdings did William order in 1085-86?
The Domesday Book
The Domesday Book: its record was treated as so authoritative that courts cited it as evidence in land disputes for centuries.
Q 08Henry I's heir drowned in which 1120 disaster?
The White Ship
The White Ship: chroniclers said its crew were drunk when it struck a rock, and the heir's death later led to the civil war called the Anarchy.
Q 09According to a chronicler, Henry I died after eating a surfeit of what?
Lampreys
Lampreys: Henry of Huntingdon wrote that the king dined on them against his physician's advice, then fell ill and never recovered.
Q 10Empress Matilda was never crowned queen but held which title during the Anarchy?
Lady of the English
Lady of the English: she even held King Stephen captive in 1141, yet she was never crowned.
Q 11Which archbishop was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral after clashing with Henry II?
Thomas Becket
Thomas Becket: four knights took Henry's angry outburst as a royal command, and the murdered archbishop was made a saint little more than two years later.
Q 12Which English king spent only about six months of his ten-year reign in England?
Richard the Lionheart
Richard the Lionheart: captured on his way home from crusade, he was freed for a 150,000-mark ransom, then soon left England, never to return.
Q 13Which king agreed to Magna Carta with his barons in 1215?
John
John: he soon claimed he had agreed to Magna Carta under duress, the Pope took his side, and England slid into civil war.
Q 21Edward IV's 1464 marriage to which woman alienated Warwick the Kingmaker?
Elizabeth Woodville
Elizabeth Woodville: Warwick was busy negotiating a foreign bride for Edward, but the king had secretly married her instead.
Q 22Edward V and his younger brother are remembered by what name?
The Princes in the Tower
The Princes in the Tower: two children's skeletons dug up at the Tower in 1674 were buried in Westminster Abbey as theirs, though that has never been proven.
Q 23Richard III was killed at which 1485 battle?
Bosworth Field
Bosworth Field: Richard became the last English king to die in battle, and his body was put on display before a burial without ceremony in Leicester.
Q 14Edward I's epithet 'Longshanks' referred to what?
His long legs
His long legs: standing about 6 ft 2 in, he also seized Scotland's coronation Stone of Scone and carried it off to Westminster Abbey in 1296.
Q 15Where did Edward II die in 1327 after being forced to give up his crown?
Berkeley Castle
Berkeley Castle: his own wife Isabella and her lover Roger Mortimer had invaded to depose him, and he was probably murdered there on the new regime's orders.
Q 16Which order of chivalry did Edward III found around 1348?
The Garter
The Garter: in one later legend, Edward picked up a lady's fallen garter at a ball and silenced laughing courtiers with the order's motto.
Q 17What was the spark of the 1381 Peasants' Revolt that the young Richard II helped crush?
A poll tax
A poll tax: once in London, the rebels seized the Lord Chancellor, Simon Sudbury, and beheaded him.
Q 18Henry IV is also known by what name, after the castle where he was born?
Bolingbroke
Bolingbroke: Richard II had exiled him and blocked his inheritance, so he invaded while Richard was away in Ireland and took the crown.
Q 19Which weapon helped Henry V win the Battle of Agincourt?
The longbow
The longbow: archers made up most of Henry's army, and their arrows struck French knights floundering across a freshly ploughed, muddy field.
Q 20Who is the youngest person ever to succeed to the English throne?
Henry VI
Henry VI: less than two months later his grandfather Charles VI of France died too, so the baby also inherited England's claim to the French throne.
Q 24Richard III's remains were found in 2012 beneath what in Leicester?
A car park
A car park: it had been built over the lost Greyfriars friary, and DNA tests later confirmed the skeleton beneath it was his.
Q 25Who was the first monarch of the House of Tudor?
Henry VII
Henry VII: he pardoned the boy pretender Lambert Simnel and put him to work in the royal kitchens.
Q 26Which 1534 act made Henry VIII head of the Church of England in place of the Pope?
The Act of Supremacy
The Act of Supremacy: Henry broke with Rome after the Pope refused to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon.
Q 27Who was proclaimed queen on 10 July 1553 and deposed nine days later?
Lady Jane Grey
Lady Jane Grey: Mary at first spared her life, but her father's support for Wyatt's rebellion sealed her fate, and she was beheaded in 1554.
Q 28Mary I became queen consort of which country through her marriage to Philip?
Spain
Spain: fear of the Spanish match helped spark Wyatt's rebellion in January 1554, months before the wedding went ahead that July.
Q 29Which king of Scotland inherited the English crown in 1603?
James VI
James VI: after moving south in 1603, he returned to his Scottish homeland only once, in 1617.
Q 30Guy Fawkes guarded gunpowder beneath which building?
The House of Lords
The House of Lords: the plot unravelled after an anonymous letter warned a lord to stay away from the opening of Parliament.