The British Royal Family is headed by King Charles III, who acceded on the death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, in September 2022 after her record-breaking seventy-year reign. Charles is married to Queen Camilla, and his heir is his elder son, William, Prince of Wales. William married Catherine Middleton in 2011, and their three children — Prince George, Princess Charlotte, and Prince Louis — stand next in the line of succession in order of birth.
The living genogram fans out from Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, who died in 2021 after seventy-three years of marriage. Their four children — Charles, Anne, Andrew, and Edward — anchor the senior branches. The younger of Charles's two sons, Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, married Meghan Markle in 2018 and stepped back from official royal duties in 2020, relocating to California with their children, Archie and Lilibet, who remain in the succession though outside the working family.
Succession now follows absolute primogeniture rather than male preference, a change made by the Succession to the Crown Act 2013, which is why Princess Charlotte keeps her place ahead of her younger brother Louis. The reform, agreed across the Commonwealth realms that share the monarch, marked the first time a British princess could not be displaced in line by a later-born brother.
The family's continuity is unusually well documented because the House of Windsor is itself a deliberate act of rebranding: in 1917, amid the First World War, George V renamed the dynasty from the German Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor, after the castle — one of the rare occasions a royal house has, in effect, changed its own surname by proclamation.
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