Heir apparent

An heir apparent (FEM: heiress apparent) or simply heir is a person who is first in an order of succession and cannot be displaced from inheriting by the birth of another person.^{[note 1]} A person who is first in the current order of succession but could be displaced by the birth of a more eligible heir is known as heir presumptive.

For other uses, see Heir apparent (disambiguation).

Today these terms most commonly describe heirs to hereditary titles (e.g. titles of nobility) or offices, especially when only inheritable by a single person. Most monarchies refer to the heir apparent of their thrones with the descriptive term of crown prince or crown princess, but they may also be accorded with a more specific substantive title:^{[note 2]} such as Prince of Orange in the Netherlands, Duke of Brabant in Belgium, Prince of Asturias in Spain (also granted to heirs presumptive), or the Prince of Wales in England and Wales; former titles include Dauphin in the Kingdom of France, and Tsesarevich in Imperial Russia.

The term is also applied metaphorically to an expected successor to any position of power, e.g. a political or corporate leader.

This article primarily describes the term heir apparent in a hereditary system regulated by laws of primogeniture—it may be less applicable to cases where a monarch has a say in naming the heir (performed either while alive, e.g. crowning the heir as a rex iunior, or through the monarch's will).

on 30 April 892, al-Muwaffad was removed from the succession (heir apparent) completely,^[3] and when al-Mu'tamid died in October 892, he was succeeded by Al-Mu'tadid.^[4]

Al-Mufawwid

Parliament deposed , the infant son of King James VII & II (of Scotland and of England and Ireland respectively) whom James II was rearing as a Catholic, as the King's legal heir apparent—declaring that James had, de facto, abdicated—and offered the throne to James II's elder daughter, the young prince's much older Protestant half-sister, Mary (along with her husband, Prince William of Orange). When the exiled King James died in 1701, his Jacobite supporters proclaimed the exiled Prince James Francis Edward as King James VIII of Scotland and James III of England and Ireland; but neither he nor his descendants (the last of whom died in 1807) were ever successful in their bids for the throne.

James Francis Edward Stuart

Crown Prince (later known as Gustav, Prince of Vasa), son of Gustav IV Adolf of Sweden, lost his place when his father was deposed and replaced by Gustav IV Adolf's aged uncle, the Duke Carl, who became Charles XIII of Sweden in 1809. The aged King Charles XIII did not have surviving sons, and Prince Gustav was the only living male of the whole dynasty (besides his deposed father), but the prince was never regarded as heir of Charles XIII, although there were factions in the Riksdag and elsewhere in Sweden who desired to preserve him, and, in the subsequent constitutional elections, supported his election as his grand-uncle's successor. Instead, the government proceeded to have a new crown prince elected (which was the proper constitutional action, if no male heir was left in the dynasty), and the Riksdag elected first August, Prince of Augustenborg, and then, after August's death, the Prince of Ponte Corvo (Marshal Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, who acceded as Charles XIV John in 1818). The two lines united later, when Charles XIV John's great-grandson Crown Prince Gustaf (who acceded as Gustaf V in 1907) married Gustav IV Adolf's great-granddaughter Victoria of Baden, who became Crown Princess of Sweden. Thus, from Gustav VI Adolf onward, the kings of Sweden are direct descendants of both Gustav IV Adolf and his son's replacement as crown prince, Charles XIV John.

Gustav

Prince , at his birth in 1979, was heir apparent to the throne of Sweden. Less than eight months later, a change in that country's succession laws instituted absolute primogeniture, and Carl Philip was supplanted as heir apparent by his elder sister Victoria.

Carl Philip of Sweden

became Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia in January 2015 upon the death of his half-brother King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and the accession of another half-brother, Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, to the Saudi throne. In April of that year, Salman removed Muqrin as Crown Prince, replacing him with their nephew Muhammad bin Nayef. Muhammad bin Nayef himself was later replaced as Crown Prince by the king's son Mohammad bin Salman.

Muqrin bin Abdulaziz

List of heirs apparent

President-elect

Prime minister-designate

Heads of former ruling families

Fields, Philip M., ed. (1987). . SUNY Series in Near Eastern Studies. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. ISBN 978-0-88706-054-0.

The History of al-Ṭabarī, Volume XXXVII: The ʿAbbāsid Recovery: The War Against the Zanj Ends, A.D. 879–893/A.H. 266–279

(1993). "al-Muʿtamid ʿAlā 'llāh". In Bosworth, C. E.; van Donzel, E.; Heinrichs, W. P. & Pellat, Ch. (eds.). The Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition. Volume VII: Mif–Naz. Leiden: E. J. Brill. pp. 765–766. ISBN 978-90-04-09419-2.