I’ve heard it as “common” or “folk” knowledge that the House Plantagenet has, somewhere in the branches of its family tree, the legendary Fairy Melusine. Has anyone ever figured out how, exactly, this genealogy works out?
Melusine was, supposedly, married to one of the Counts of Anjou (14th century?), and bore him four children, two of whom she left behind when she made her infamous exit. What’s the link between Anjou and the Plantagenets? I’m assuming there’s something prior to Margaret of Anjou marrying Henry VI, because (as I recall) the only child of that union, Edward of Westminster, was killed during the Wars of the Roses with no heirs.
Can anyone provide more specific information about the connection between the Counts of Anjou and the House Plantagenet?
Geoffrey V, Count of Anjou, married Matilda, widow of a Holy Roman Emperor and daughter of William the Conqueror, and their son became Henry II of England, progenitor of the Angevin line (which was called Plantagenet by Richard, Duke of York, 200 years later, in tribute to Geoffrey’s symbol, the broom plant, planta genista in the Vulgar Latin of the time).
Nobody is really clear on where Melusine fits into the lineage, but the name has been applied to the wife of each of two of Geoffrey’s ancestors, Geoffrey I Grisgonelle (count 962-987) and his son Fulk III Nerra (count 987-1040). Complicating the issue is a historical Melusine, not the legendary mermaid/devil’s daughter, who was one of the wives of Geoffrey V’s father, but not the one who was Geoffrey’s mother, and another legend which makes Melusine the wife of one Raymond, Count of Poitiers (there were eight of them) – who would be an ancestor of Henry II’s wife Eleanor of Aquitaine.
Or it could simply be saying that there’s something fishy about the Angevin ancestry!
The most common ancestory I have found as the Melusine’s baby-daddy was Fulk the Black (Count of Angou from 987-1040). However, some of the same legends claim that he met her in the Holy Land during Crusade (which would make sense for the daughter of Satan), but the First Crusade would not occur for almost two generations after his death.
(I’ve posted several times about Melusine on SDMB.)
That’s where the confusion comes in – Geoffrey V’s father, several generations later, actually married a Melusine who was the daughter of one of the Baldwins that were titular Kings of Jerusalem – and who thanks to the name got grafted into the Melusine legend. That Melusine, however, was not Geoffrey’s mother and has nothing to do with the Angevin/Plantagenet lineage.
(This is nearly as confusing as the Matildas – William the Conqueror’s wife, Henry I’s daughter (not William I’s daughter, as I mistakenly said in my earlier post), and King Stephen’s wife were all Matildas. But neither the waltz nor Australia had been discovered yet.)
That would be the Empress Matilda, who, just to correct a wee error on Polycarp’s part, was the daughter of King Henry I, not William the Conqueror ( who was her grandfather ). Good old Henry I had a few bastards, but only two legitimate heirs. When his teenage son William Audelin drowned with the sinking of the White Ship, that left only Matilda. Her convenient widowship allowed him to resurrect the all-important political settlement with the powerful Angevins ( a long-standing and geographically well-positioned enemy ) that had been temporarily dashed by William Audelin’s death ( he had been engaged to the Count of Anjou’s daughter and was to have received the northern part of the Angevin inheritance as the dowry ), but his attempt to secure her as his direct heir foundered on noble opposition to female rule. Though in truth she came close to winning the civil war that followed Henry’s death and at the very least was able to stalemate King Stephen ( her cousin, also a grandson of William the Conqueror ) and secure the throne for her son.
Of course there is a rumor that dates back to the Middle Ages (though perhaps not as far back as the 12th century) that Stephen was Henry II’s father due to some cousin loving and that this is he agreed to make Henry his heir. If this were true then it would mean Henry II wasn’t a descendant of Melusine. However, the members of the house of Angou and their descendants did intermarry with the royal family of England in later generations as well which would have re-introduced the Melusine bloodline. (Among others, Queen Margaret, most famous as the queen in Shakespeare’s Henry VI and the bitter dowager hag in Richard III, was an Angevin [though her only child died without legitimate issue].)
