Citizen Writes
The coronation of King Charles III
Raise a glass to your cousin, King Charles III
2023-05-03
By Turi King, Professor of Public Engagement and Genetics at the University of Leicester
Spare a thought for your cousin this upcoming May 6th. He’s got a very big day ahead of him that Saturday when the millions of people around the world will be watching as Charles is crowned as King of the United Kingdom and 14 other Commonwealth realms.
Charles is descended down a particular lineage: a long line of, usually, first born sons, with a few detours on the way, of previous monarchs going back to William the Conqueror. But monarchs did not usually have just one child: they often had several children who, while being the younger siblings of the heir would not necessarily inherit the crown, would often go on to have several children themselves, followed by grandchildren, great-grandchildren and so on.
Fast forward to today and it’s not an uncommon feature of Who Do You Think You Are? on the BBC that a celebrity guest finds out that they’re descended from royalty. Both the comedian, Josh Widdicombe, and the rower, Sir Mathew Pinsent, separately found out they were descended from King Edward I, who died in 1307AD. British soap opera actor, Danny Dyer, famously found out he was descended from, from Edward III, who was Edward I’s grandson. Actor Alexander Armstrong found he was descended from William the Conqueror, who was the ancestor of both Edward I and Edward III. Benedict Cumberbatch, who is also descended from Edward III famously read a poem at the reinterment of King Richard III in Leicester Cathedral in 2015.
Indeed it happens enough on these programs that it led the BBC News Royal Correspondent to write a piece about it asking just how common it is? Are we all related to royalty?
Basically, the answer is yes. We’re all related to royalty, it’s simply a matter of degree. We will all have royalty somewhere in our family tree. The stumbling block to proving it is usually finding the documentary evidence.
So how do we know that royalty will be in every family tree? Well, we can show this using maths.
And we can do it both working forwards in time and backwards in time.
So, let’s start by working forwards.
Science presenters Adam Rutherford (geneticist) and Hannah Fry (mathematician) did a little calculation on this using Edward III as an example, after the Danny Dyer programme.
Edward III ruled in the 14th Century and he and his, presumably very tired wife, Philippa, had 13 children. Six of them had children themselves who included among them King Richard II and Henry IV. Adam counted a total of 321 great, great grandchildren. So, quite a few!
Now not all of these will have had the same number of children themselves because some will have had several children whereas others may have had none. So, to get an idea of the number of descendants, we need to come up with an average number of children per generation and work from that. And we can get an idea as to what this average number must have been by looking at how much the population has grown over the centuries.
Let’s be conservative and say each of them had, on average, 2 children per generation. We know from population growth it’s likely to have been a bit higher than that, but we’re being conservative here. There is also evidence that wealthier families had more children who survived to adulthood to go on to have children themselves, but on the other hand people do marry distant cousins and so on. But we’re going for a ballpark number here. We’re also just talking about legitimate children, NOT any illegitimate children who may well have gone on to have children themselves which would increase the number that bit further.
We also need an average generation time, so at what age are people having children. Some people will have children earlier and some later and obviously we can play around with that figure but for ease (and because it’s a figure that is often used) let’s go for 25 years.
So, if you do that then by about 1600CE, just about 400 years ago, then Edward III would have 20,544 descendants. This in a population of Britain of about 4.2 million at the time. That means that around 1 in 210 people wandering around at that time was a direct descendant of Edward III – that’s about ½ a percent of the population.
And most of them would likely have had no idea they were descended from Edward. Because the crown passes usually to the eldest son of a King, other royal children would become part of the nobility. Their children in turn might well not inherit any family titles and be a part of the wider gentry and land-owning families, with each generation heading in a direction of downward social mobility. After several generations, the descendants may not have owned any land and have been merchants or farmers, tradespeople and may have little or no knowledge of their families more regal origins.
Now let’s, as Adam and Hannah did, work the maths backwards in time.
We know that we all have two parents, who themselves had two parents, they’re your four grandparents. Your four grandparents all had two parents, these your eight great grandparents, their parents are your 16 great, great grandparents. You have 32 great, great, great grandparents and so on. It grows exponentially, doubling every generation.
If you go back about 15 generations to 1600CE, you have 32,768 13x great grandparents.
Just let that sit for a minute. 32,768. And we’re only talking a few hundred years ago. Now we know it won’t be quite that many because sometimes families intermarry, but you are still going to have literally thousands and thousands of people who were all equally your 13x great grand mums and grandads, going about their business at that time.
So, what’s the chance that one of those 32 thousand or so 13x great grandparents was a direct descendant of Edward III: one of those 1 in 210 people who was wandering around in 1600CE. Well, as you can imagine, given the sheer number of them, it’s pretty high. Putting it the other way around, the chances that none of your 13x great grandparents was one of those directly descended from Edward III, is a ridiculously small.
Now of course, this is an estimate, but in short, it’s pretty darn likely that if you have broadly British ancestry then you are descended from royalty. Probably through more than one route in your family tree, as family trees are inter-connected. Your family tree going back in time, goes outwards, but pretty soon, it starts to collapse in on itself as relatives marry distant (and sometime not so distant) relatives. Anyone who has done research into their family tree will tell you that they’re less like a tree and more like a thicket the further you go back.
So how do you prove your link to royalty? Okay, here is where it gets trickier because as you go further back, the records start to become patchier, it was often only the wealthier who were often documented and who kept family trees.
What you ideally want to do is find what’s known as a Gateway Ancestor. This is someone who once you find them in your family tree, have a documented family tree which then links back to royalty. Usually, it’s someone who was wealthy or famous enough to be documented.
And this is exactly what they did with Josh Widdicombe. Josh’s great grandad married a gal whose father was vicar, Arthur Baring-Gould, who turned out to be a descendant of the family that set up Baring’s bank, one of England oldest merchant banks but also through this then found that he was more distantly descended from someone married into the family tree of Henry Rich, he was the first Earl of Holland and a mate of Charles 1st. From here you can trace back through the generations to the Boleyns and the Howards and from there to the Plantagenets and to Edward I. But the person who got them there was his great, great grandfather, who was a vicar, whose own great granddad was part of a wealthy family.
For Danny Dyer, it was his 5x great grandfather, James Bullivant who married a gal called Ann Gosnold, and she was the 3x great granddaughter of Robert Gosnold, born in 1611 and who was part of the landed gentry. His mother was part of the Tollemache family, who then link into the family of Thomas Cromwell who served as chief minster to King Henry VIII. Danny’s ancestor, Thomas Cromwell’s son, married the sister of Jane Seymour who was Henry VIII’s third wife. The Seymours descended from the Plantagenets, who were descended from Edward III.
So, remember how I mentioned about how the younger children of royalty and grand families, tended to start to marry out into the professional classes and clergy. Or possibly might become farmers owning large farms. What you want to do is extend your tree as far back and as far out as possible looking at all the extended family members. Follow up on those marriages in your family tree and see who are the families that your ancestors are marrying into. Look for gentry or clergy in there or farmers. There’s also a number of websites out there which can help you with this, for example by looking at online collections for Herald’s Visitations from the 16th and 17th centuries, which were essentially records of the nobility and resulted in family trees being a part of them. Or Burke’s Peerage which also has massive genealogies of well-known historical families. Once you’ve hooked into one of those families, then finding the link back to royalty is usually much, much easier.
Of course, the thing about programmes like Who Do You Think You Are? is tht they concentrate on well-known ancestors. And I have to stop myself from shouting at the telly because when they say that someone famous is a celebrity’s direct ancestor, in a duh, duh, duh kind of way, obviously while this is interesting, the famous person they’re talking about is just one of literally thousands and thousands and thousands of other people who were alive at that time, who would EQUALLY be the celebrity’s direct ancestor.
Indeed, in a way, what does it really mean, to say that someone is a direct descendant of royalty when everyone is related to royalty somehow and we’re all related to one another. My experience is that it means something different to each person. Personally, as a geneticist with a huge interest in history, I know I would find it fascinating to know how I’m related to royalty, but I’d be equally interested to know about the lives of my other many ancestors. To me the most wonderful thing is not that I must be descended from royalty but that we’re all related to one another and I have my place in the giant human family tree. And so do you.
Putting all that deep philosophical stuff to one side, let’s recap.
We’re all related to royalty in one way or another. It’s simply a matter of degree. It’s the proving it which tends to be the difficult bit. But please do feel free to go and buy yourself a crown or other regal accessory if you like, safe in the knowledge you are related to monarchy somewhere in your family tree.
And on May 6th, if you should feel so inclined, you can watch Charles III being crowned, knowing that he’s your distant cousin somehow as we’re all part of one giant royal family.