This thread in IMHO made me wonder… how inbred, on average, are the various royal families of Europe. Are the Windsors all second cousins? I mean, it would explain a lot. And yes, I know about the Habsburg Chin.
When rich people inbreed they call it “pedigree collapse” (just thought I’d share…).
If you go to http://www.royal.gov.uk/family click the link that goes to Queen Victoria’s family tree (Saxe-Coburg, Windsor) and you’ll get just a tiny glimpse of how inbred the British monarchy really are…but then what do you expect - they’re English;)!
On the bright side, Princess Di gave the monarchy some much-needed new blood. When I see Prince William, I wonder if he’s even Charles’s…now THERE’S some inbreeding for you.
Inbreeding has taken its genetic toll on Queen Elizabeth’s family. There was a big scandal a few years ago when it got out that the Queen had two female cousins who were severe imbeciles with IQs in the single digits. Their existence had been hidden away in an asylum all their lives. Pictures of them were published in the papers showing them staring and mouth-breathing with blank faces. The really disturbing thing is how closely they resembled Her Majesty.
Perhaps they keep these hidden relatives in order to use them for a spot of organ harvesting, should the need arise. And the queen mother is fairly sprightly for 100, isn’t she? 
Seriously, though, the corgis probably get better treatment than those cousins.
I have not been able to find these pictures online. Are they available, or has the British Secret Service deleted them all (only half joking here - there are strict laws regarding what one can say about the Royal Family in the UK)?
The Dutch Royal Family has a more diverse history than the English counterpart, resulting in less (or none, depending on your definition) inbreeding. There certainly haven’t been any cases of clear insanity recently - although I do believe there has been such a case (alledgedly because of inbreeding) in the early 19th century.
These might be the people previously referred to (from the Observer newspaper 23 July 2000)
http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4043437,00.html
I don’t know whether there would be photographs online; it seems unlikely. I found this because I was sure that Earlswood was the hospital in question. Don’t know yet if these are the ladies that Jomo Mojo had in mind.
You watch it, Jojo. I’m a mouthbreather because I have a deviated septum and my nasal passages are very easily blocked. It has nothing to do with imbecilism.
Celyn – yeah, those are the ones.
javaman - well, excuuuuse me! I just described how it looked. I could have said “drooling” but then probably some congenital droolers would get pissed off at me.
It gets worse. Much worse. There was the son of a Scottish nobleman about a hundred years ago who was known as “the Monster” and was kept locked in the attic for his entire long existence. The unpleasant details are described in Alex Shoumatoff’s quite interesting book on lineage, The Mountain of Names (which also explains “pedigree collapse”).
Two inherited illnesses (may be manifestations of the same thing-I am not a medic) that have haunted mainly the British Royals and to a lesser extent some others such as the Russians and the Germans are haemophilia and porphyria.
Porphyria, it is believed, is the illness responsible for insanity in some of them,(was it GeorgeIII who was the really mad one?)
Yes, George III was the really loopy one. But the film had to be called “The Madness of King George” without any numerals, in case non-U.K. audiences assumed it was the third in a series of which they had already missed two and was not therefore worth going to see. Makes sense, I suppose.
BTW although Coldfire was joking about censorship, there seems to be remarkably little about those Bowes-Lyon women on the web, unless there is, and I just couldn’t find it.
There definitely was or is a tradition of it being OK for first cousins to marry. P.G. Wodehouse put several examples of this into his stories about the British upper classes.
In one of the stories, a middle-class girl and aristocratic guy are in love, and the latter tells her that his family
want him to marry his first cousin instead of her. The girl’s response is “How horrid!”, but I don’t know if that was just because the family was trying to break them up, or if it was more like, “Ewww, first cousins marrying!”.
Haemophilia and porphyria are indeed the most obvious side effects resulting from the habit of the royal houses of Europe intermarrying.
The odd thing about this thread is that most of the other evidence which has been mentioned relates to the Bowes-Lyons family. The story about ‘the Monster’ sounds like a confused retelling of the old ‘Beast of Glamis’ myth.
It is one thing to claim that there was a time when the Royal Family was rather inbred; it is another to claim that the Bowes-Lyons are as well. The reality is that the Bowes-Lyons are probably no more inbred than any other British aristocratic family. They are almost certainly no more so than the Spencers. While the gene pool of the British aristocracy may not be as large as some social groups, the potential pool of partners for a British aristocrat has over the centuries extended to tens of thousands of families. The geographical constraints on the choice of partner was far less than those which applied to the rest of the population. There is no evidence that British aristocratic families (unlike nineteenth and early-twentieth century royals) are more likely to suffer from genetic disorders than the population at large.
Two of the Queen’s grandparents were non-royal and a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation reveals that the same is true of ten of Prince William’s sixteen great-great-grandparents. The answer to the OP is now not very.
- I have heard that there have been many weak, insane Tsars, such as the husband of Catherine the Great, who played with toy soldiers in a peculiar way,among other things.
2. I’m reading a biography of Queen Hortense in which I see that it was taken for granted in France that people marry their cousins. Napoleon wanted to marry Queen Hortense’s son to a daughter he might have by his second wife. And just as an interesting side note: Hortense was the daughter of Josephine by a marriage previous to her marriage to Napoleon, and Hortense thought of Napoleon as her father and he called her daughter. She was married to a neurotic brother of Napoleon, I think his name was Louis, to whom N gave Holland for him to be king over, and thus Hortense became queen. She hardly ever went there, however, dreading being around her suspicious, spying, unpredictable, unstable husband.One of their sons turned out to become Napoleon III, who got himself elected emperor of the Second Empire. By that time the people were sick of the Bourbons again, who had been restored.
3) The ancient Egyptian pharaohs had to marry a woman in their family, especially their daughters during the time of Akhnaten. This couldn’t have caused the supposed deformity of Akhnaten, as his mother and father weren’t related at all (although I guess the bad genes could have come from only one of these parents who HAD inbred, ie., his father Amenhotep III.
Re Hemophilia and the British monarchy:
Hemophilia is caused by a dominant mutation on the X-chromosome. Inbreeding increases the incidence of recessive genetic disorders, but not the incidence of dominant genetic disorders. The fact that Victoria’s daughters married into closely related royal families explains why hemophilia was introduced into other European dynasties, but if her daughters had instead married commoners, Tibetans, Zulus or whatever, there would still be about the same proportion of hemophiliacs among her descendants. Victoria must have either received the gene from her mother or it was a spontaneous mutation of hers. In either case, how closely related her mother may have been to her father would have been entirely irrelevant.
Celyn, it is not true that the title of the movie was changed:
Just adding to NEBULI’S post . . . I have also heard that the fact that hemophilia appears nowhere in the British Royal Family (meaning, Victoria’s forebears) prior to Victoria, and nowhere in her mother’s family, might indicate that she was illegitimate, the gene being carried by her natural father. The problem with this scintillating hypothesis is that no reasonable candidate for natural father can be found who carried the gene. Of course, medical records were so incomplete back then, it’s possible he had it and it just wasn’t noted. Assuming he even existed, that is.
And if you’re looking for the mentally slow of true royal lineage, I would argue that the “best” candidate would have been Prince Albert, grandson of Queen Victoria, son of Edward VII, and heir to the throne. Prince “Eddy,” as he was known, was “of limited intellect, almost ineducable.” His status as Heir Presumptive apparently caused no small degree of concern until he had the grace to die at the age of 28, paving the way for his brother to become George V, much to the relief of the British Empire and of Princess Mary of Teck, who had been engaged to him, and who later married George V.
There’s been some misinfo posted on hemophilia.
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It’s a recessive gene, not dominant. It shows up in all men who inherit it since there’s no matching gene on the Y chromosome.
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The carriers (at least before modern medecine) were all female. Virtually all males who had it died quite young.
The royal families with the heaviest inbreeding were those on the Iberian peninsula, Portugal, Castile, and Aragon. They tended to intermarry extensively among themselves. I understand there was one king who had only 10 different people as great-great-grandparents, rather than the normal 16 that most people have.
dtilque- thanks for the correction. My terminology was inaccurate, but I believe my main point is still valid. While hemophilia is recessive in females, it is in effect equivalent to a dominant trait in males since they have only one X chromosome. Thus inbreeding would not effect the incidence of the disease in male descendants. It could effect the incidence of the extremely rare occurances of female hemophilia victims, but since I’m unaware of the existence of any cases of female hemophilia sufferers in European royal families it appears that it is not germane to this thread.