The Unofficial British Royal Family Pages

Monday 21 June 2004

The Thin Blue Bloodline

For centuries, European royalty validated their regal identity by noting their descent from Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor. Like their Greek and Roman predecessors, royalty and nobles with Carolingian blood coursing through their veins tended to marry their close or distant relatives in an effort to keep the bloodline relatively pure.  

The fact that many of these consanguineous marriages were within the prohibited degrees of common ancestry, according to the Roman Catholic Church, did little to prevent them, especially as even the Church was confused over what was considered unacceptable. In part because the method of calculating consanguinity could not be agreed upon, acceptable degrees fluctuated between one and seven during the Middle Ages before finally resting at four degrees in 1215. Without getting too much into the details of this extremely confusing area of Canon Law, let’s just say that, without a special dispensation from the church, you weren’t supposed to marry your cousins. 

Of course, royalty is royalty, and most of the time, they did exactly what they wanted to do, dispensation or no. By the time of William the Conqueror – who was married to his fourth cousin – it is safe to say that the ruling classes in Europe were all pretty much related in some degree. Life carried on in much the same way for William’s descendants in England, with the exception that they began using the Canon Laws on consanguinity to their own advantage.  

King John is a fine example. As the fifth son of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, he was better known in his early years as “Lackland”. To amend this lack of property, he married Isabella of Gloucester, the daughter and heiress of the Earl of Gloucester, knowing full well that the marriage was contracted within the forbidden degrees of consanguinity (they shared Henry I as a great grandfather). Conveniently, when Isabella produced no children, John had the marriage annulled on – you guessed it – the grounds of consanguinity.  

While what John did was characteristically slimy, it was not unusual. He was, in fact, taking a page from the book of his own mother, who had her marriage to Louis VII of France annulled when she “discovered” that she and her husband were fourth cousins. Once free, Eleanor promptly married the future Henry II of England. 

The prevalence of consanguinity among royalty did not necessarily mean that it was thoroughly approved of, especially when politics made outright disgust of it entirely advantageous. This was the case with Richard III, who, it was rumored, wished to dispose of his wife, Anne Neville, in favor of his young niece, Elizabeth of York. Already losing trust and confidence in their king, this was just the excuse Richard’s courtiers and enemies needed to incite his final demise. Fortunately for her, Elizabeth escaped marriage to Richard and instead married Henry VII. It was their son who would usher in the next stage of royal marriages. 

When the majority of Europe was a part of the Roman Catholic Church, the playing field for royal marriages was fairly wide. A French king could marry an English princess just as easily as an English king could marry a Spanish princess. As long as they were noble and Catholic and, preferably, brought either land or peace with their dowry, one princess was just as good as another. Things got a bit more complicated, however, when Henry VIII decided it was in his best interest to break with Rome. As the little matter of religion had become more important – and more controversial – than all other considerations, the pool of prospective royal partners suddenly dwindled. Things might have turned out differently if Queen Mary I of England had produced a child with Philip II of Spain (her second cousin once removed), but fate left England leaning towards Protestantism until the Act of Settlement in 1701 officially barred Catholics from the British throne. 

Specifically, the Act of Settlement states that only the Protestant descendants of Sophia, Electress of Hanover, who have not married a Catholic, can succeed to the crown. When George I acceded the throne in 1714 under the terms of the Act, he kicked off more than 125 years of intermarriage between his descendants and the many small German principalities. As such, marriage between first cousins was not uncommon – the two most notable instances being the marriage of the future George IV to Caroline of Brunswick, and – of course – Queen Victoria to Prince Albert. 

These days, instead of claiming descent from Charlemagne – especially as almost anyone of European descent can make such a claim, myself included – the royalty of Europe now attribute their level of blue-bloodedness to their descent from Queen Victoria. After all, she wasn’t known as the “Grandmother of Europe” for nothing. But despite her prolific marriage to Albert, Queen Victoria was a staunch advocate of marriage outside the family, saying, “If there were no fresh blood, the royal race would degenerate morally and physically.” Nevertheless, individual members of the family continued to marry their cousins without hesitation. When the future George V’s ambitions to marry his first cousin, Princess Marie of Edinburgh, were thwarted, he instead married Princess May of Teck, his second cousin once removed.  

With three consanguineous marriages of monarchs in only five generations, it could be said that the royal blood was running a bit thin in Britain. But Queen Victoria would have been proud when her great grandson, Prince Albert, the Duke of York, married Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon in 1923, effectively giving the royal family an infusion of new and hearty Scottish blood. When their daughter fell in love, however, she followed the family pattern, marrying her cousin Prince Philip of Greece. Depending on how you look at it, the Queen and Prince Philip are as distantly related as fourth cousins through their descent from George III, or as closely related as second cousins once removed through King Christian IX of Denmark. 

All of this has led us to one place – the line of succession to the British throne. Although the first 58 individuals on the list are British, the majority of the rest of the list is a litany of the foreign descendants of Queen Victoria. Among the first 150 individuals in the line of succession to the British throne today are King Harald V of Norway (59^th) and his descendents, as well as many of the remaining members of the royal families of Romania, Yugoslavia, Russia, Prussia, and the various German principalities. 

The Norwegians can credit their place in line to Queen Maud of Norway, who was the daughter of Britain’s King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. The Yugoslavian royals owe their position to George V’s lost love, Princess Marie of Edinburgh, who became Queen of Romania through her marriage to King Ferdinand of Romania. Marie’s sister, Princess Victoria Melita – who became a grand duchess of Russia on her marriage to her first cousin Grand Duke Kyril of Russia – was the progenitor of both the Russian and Prussian royals who now claim a place in the British succession. Even Queen Elizabeth’s own husband is on the list – Prince Philip is approximately 563^rd in line to the throne. Not that this is a strange phenomenon, given that so many monarchs have married near cousins. Queen Mary, for instance, was also in line to the throne independently of her husband, George V.  

In short, the heritage and history of the modern British royal family is a tangled and confusing web of marriages and inter-marriages made only slightly less so by the fact that so many royal couples have shared large portions of their respective family trees. It just goes to show that while the royal family has proven that blood is thicker than water in the proverbial sense, the same has not always been true in literal terms.

Until next week,

- Tori Van Orden