The New Murrey and Blue blog

This is Anthony William Hall, a former Shropshire police inspector. In 1931, he claimed to be the rightful King of England, descended from an illegitimate son of Henry VIII whilst James VI/I had been an impostor, thereby disqualifying all of his descendents down to George V, whom Hall sought to supplant.

The chief obstacles to this claim were:
1) A lack of evidence – in particular, Thomas Hall may not have existed and is not numbered among Henry’s offspring.
2) Henry VIII’s own will, specifying the descendants of his sister Mary after those of his “marriages”, but not his bastards, as his successors. Even though this was superseded in 1603, when the “Tudor” line expired, Lady Jane Grey’s mother Frances had not been attainted and her descendants are Dukes of Somerset today.
3) The 1701 Act of Settlement excluded all claimants not descended from Anne, whose last child had just died, or the Electress Sophia from the British throne and Hall is not thought to have had additional Hanoverian descent. If he did, he would have been junior to George V in that respect.