A lot of people believe that Prince Harry is not the biological son of Prince Charles. I’ve no interest in discussing that particular issue in this thread though. I’m curious, are there any other historical royals, who at one point were at least as likely as Euganie is now to become a monarch, who have some doubters as to their parentage?
Although both are extremely unlikely, there were rumors and jokes in the 16th century about:
a. James VI being fathered by David Riccio instead of Mary, Queen of Scots’s husband Henry, Lord Darnley.
b. Elizabeth I being fathered by Ann Boleyn’s favorite musician, Mark Smeaton, rather than by Henvy VIII.
There was a case in Eleanor Herman’s books (Sex with Kings and Sex with Queens) where one King was insane and impotent and it was believed he never consummated the marriage with his wife. Instead, he condoned her dalliances with a suitor and claimed the child that was born as his own, even though it was pretty widely accepted that it was not a child of the King. He felt as if his obligation to sleep with his wife was satisfied, as she produced an heir and he paraded the child around as if it were his. I don’t have my Kindle on me today or I would look it up.
Aren’t there doubts as to the paternity of the children of Catherine the Great of Russia?
Off the top of my head:
Charles Martel (688 – 741), aka Charles the Hammer or Karl Martell, was the illegitimate son of duke Pepin II and his concubine Alpaida.
Arnulf of Carinthia (850 – 899) was, according to more than one source, the illegitimate son of Carloman, King of Bavaria, and his concubine Liutswind.
Henry VII’s claim to the English throne was … questionable - though I should add him rather to the much longer list of usurpers that are known (like Stephen, for instance).
After the murder of Severus Alexander (235) the Roman Empire was ruled by too many illegitimate Emperors to list them all; the Empire was in a permanent state of civil war till Diokletian’s (284) accession to the throne. Some of those pretenders to the throne had some legitimacy on their side, others fabricated their claim more or less creatively.
Which is also true for the “Reges geminati” (the counter or rival kings) in the era of Heinrich IV; legitimacy was finally decided by the victor.
While Henry was indeed not the Lancaster heir at the time, his claim was unassailable – he claimed the throne by right of conquest (i.e., “I whipped Richard III”), not by right of birth.
Well, the obvious one is William the Bastard, so named because he was indisputably illegitimate. He became King of England in 1066, albeit more via conquest than by inheritance.
There’s a book, Queen Victoria’s Gene, that suggests it’s statistically probable that Queen Victoria was illegitimate, because her gene for hemophilia seemed to come from nowhere. “Medically, there are only two possibilities: either one of Victoria’s parents had a 1 in 50,000 random mutation, or Victoria was the illegitimate child of a hemophiliac man.”
King Charles IV of Spain was probably cuckolded by his Prime Minister, Manuel de Godoy, and his third son Francisco was probably illegitimate. Francisco had a son, also named Francisco, who married his cousin Queen Isabella II. This latter Francisco was quite possibly homosexual, and Isabella was a nymphomaniac, so most or all of her children were very possibly illegitimate, including the future king Alfonso XII.
Juana la Beltraneja was so called by the enemies of her father, Henry II “the Impotent” of Castille, who claimed that Juana was the daughter of his favorite Juan Beltrán. Henry’s nickname derives from his divorce from his first wife, Blanca: he’d requested it on grounds of her infertility; Blanca, who until then had been Ms. Silent Embroiderer as Castillian customs demanded, said it’s hard for the mare to foal when the stallion doesn’t get it up… a test by three midwives found Blanca “virgo intacta” (that is, her hymen was still there); another one by three young widows found that all their knowledge was unable to get Henry’s most private parts to perform as a husband should. One of the most unsavory things that Blanca said during the divorce was that Henry had asked her to lie with another man and in this fashion give him a child, but she’d rejected the notion: she would lie with her husband or with no man.
Henry was the bastard brother of the king he’d himself dethroned, Peter I of Castille. After Henry’s death, the troops of his niece Isabel and of her husband Ferdinand I of Aragon beat Juana, thus Isabel became Isabel I of Castille (she who paid for Columbus’ trips).
Ramiro I of Aragon was the firstborn (and born out of wedlock) son of Sancho III the Great of Navarre, but in this case as in Henry’s it wasn’t a matter of the king being cuckolded (Sancho wasn’t even married at the time of Ramiro’s birth, so there was no queen of his to cuckold either - if anything, Ramiro’s mother Sancha was the one who could complain when Sancho went and married someone else).
Not that it affects the facts of this or any of these scenarios, but I thought it would be interesting to note that (if memory serves me correctly) English law would presume that a child born to a married woman is legitimate. In other words, assuming that the law is the same elsewhere, many of the people discussed here might have been biologically illegitimate but legally legitimate, unless solid proof of cuckolding existed.
The incidence of hemophilia in males is about 1/5000. Around the time of Victoria’s birth, what percentage of hemophiliac men lived to adulthood (and remained healthy enough to procreate)? I have no clue. But, if it’s, say, one in four, that implies 1/20000 fertile adult men have hemophilia. If it’s one in ten, that would make it 1/50000 which, of course, is the same as the random mutation rate.
I’m not saying that one in four, or one in ten hemophiliac men of the era survived to be fertile adults. My point is that the likelihood of random mutation and the likelihood of Victoria being the illegitimate child of a hemophiliac man are probably not too different from each other.
People have theorized that Edward IV (of England) was illegitimate, the result of an affair between his mother and a common soldier. This has been disputed, but nevertheless it is a possibility.
Oh yes, he wasn’t an illegitimate heir in the requested sense but an “usurper” (for some reason I can’t write that word without envisioning Monty Python) – still, like many other contenders for a throne before and after him, he took pains to not just base his right to the throne on arms but on genealogy as well. And on that account, his claim to be the rightful king was dubious: Although his great-grandfather belonged to the correct family tree, he had been illegitimate.
Enrique de Trastámara (1334 – 1379), however, was firsthand and in any other way illegitimate in the “you bastard”-sense.
And to give yet another example of illegitimate sons who still succeeded in sitting on [del]the[/del] a throne, I am going to name Enzio of Sardinia (1218–1272), illegitimate but well-liked son of stupor mundi, the astonishment of the world.
I was thinking much the same thing.
Also, that Queen Vic closely resembled the portraits of I’ve seen of her dad.
I was coming in to mention that book! It’s a good point though, that hemophiliac men didn’t live long back then. But the gene must have propagated throughout history somehow–it couldn’t have just randomly mutated into existence that many times.
Indeed. It sounds like the author of the book is using the prosecutor’s fallacy.
On the contrary, a mutation which happens with 1/50,000 odds will indeed randomly occur many times - about 1/50,000 of the time, in fact.
But the gene didn’t have to come from her father; it could have come from her mother as well, and she would not have developed haemophilia herself.
Supposedly, about 1/3 cases of hemophilia are due to new mutations.