Although considerable scholarly attention has been paid to the ways in which English monarchs held the throne, relatively little has been focused on the means that enabled them to occupy it in the first place. In The Right to be King, Howard Nenner explores the rules and assumptions that governed the succession to the throne in late Tudor and Stuart England. It is a story of high political drama that illuminates the competing modes of succession: inheritance, election, nomination, conquest, and prescription. Nenner provides a careful analysis of exclusion and abdication and examines the mysterious course of the succession of William and Mary in 1689. By tracing the slow process by which Parliament wrested control of succession from the monarch, he sheds new light on the history of Parliamentary sovereignty. In addition, he argues that contemporaries constructed much of the evolving public law of succession from familiar legal forms in the private sphere, such as property, inheritance, and contract law.