Royal Descent

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You have new messages (last change).

Royal Descent means descent (often through female lines) from one or more Kings or Queens.

Royal descent is sometimes claimed as a mark of distinction. Most monarchies in history have been and are hereditary, and most have placed the monarch at the apex of a society in which status has to some extent depended upon ancestry, royal ancestry having the highest status of all.

However, royal descent in English speaking countries with significant populations of English descent (including the United States of America as well as the United Kingdom) is much more common than generally supposed. The Plantagenet Kings, in particular (especially Edward I and Edward III) had a number of younger children whose lines have continued to flourish over the centuries, and over the generations they have gradually married into lower and lower social classes, starting with the English nobility, continuing with untitled English gentry, and from there into many undistinguished middle class families.

Since every human has two parents, and those parents each have two parents, and so on, it can be shown by a simple mathematical calculation that, assuming 25 years between each generation, every person alive today has more lines of descent back to about 1200 AD than the total population of the world at that date. From this, it might be inferred that everyone is descended from everyone living in 1200 AD, but that is, in fact, not correct. Many people living in 1200 AD have no living descendants (they may have had no children at all, or their descendants may have died out in a later generation). The figures are explained by the fact that, through cousin marriages amongst their descendants, many people living today will be descended from the same person living in 1200 many times over, i.e. through different lines. Nevertheless, given a relatively stable indigenous population, and the absence of a rigid caste system preventing marrying out of the caste, both of which conditions have been present in English society since the Middle Ages, there is a high probability that a person living many centuries ago (say, 1000 years ago), if he or she has any descendants living today at all, has so many descendants that a large proportion of the people living today in the same geographical area will share a descent from that person.

Royal descent is no exception to this, because the English royal family, in particular, did not insist only on royal marriages for all its children, and has thereby disseminated its genes into the population as a whole. Royal descent is, however, easier to prove than descent from less notable ancestors, because genealogies and public records are typically fuller and better known and preserved in the case of royal descents than in the case of descents from other people. It takes many centuries for a population to intermarry sufficiently for it to claim widespread descent from a single person, and, until the parish record system in the sixteenth century, and civil registration in the 19th century, family records are fuller for landowners than for ordinary people. It is also only since the twentieth century that family history has been an interest pursued by people outside the upper classes. Hence, the continuous lines of descent from royal ancestors are much better researched and established than those from other ancestors.

Between 1903 and 1911, the Marquis de Ruvigny published volumes entitled The Blood Royal of Britain which attempted to name all the then-living descendants of Edward III. He gave up the exercise after publishing the names of about 40,000 living people, but his own estimate was that the total of those of royal descent who could be proved and named if he completed his work at that time was 100,000 people. His work, however, was heavily dependent upon those whose names were readily ascertainable from works of genealogical reference, such as Peerages and Burke's Landed Gentry. More obscure lines of descent were, by definition, likely to have been lost and de Ruvigny's estimate seems very low. Others have suggested that as many as 80% of people of English descent are descended from the Plantagenets whilst the English geneticist Professor Stephen Jones estimates 25%. However, the number who could prove such a descent is likely to be very much smaller than the number who actually have it.

The phrase "English descent" does not, of course, mean "purely English descent". As soon as an immigrant family marries into an indigenous family, it acquires all the ancestors of its indigenous parent, and is therefore no less likely to be able to claim a royal descent than a non-immigrant family. Furthermore, many English emigrants have taken their ancestry into overseas populations. Roderick W. Stuart says in his book Royalty for Commoners (3rd edition 1998) that the American descendants of Edward III "number in the millions".

[edit] See also

Genealogy of the British Royal Family

[edit] Further reading

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../r/o/y/Royal_Descent_b0ff.html"