There’s still a debate on that – if only because he took after (and somewhat resembled) Peter III. So there’s some who say he absolutely was a bastard, others who say he most likely wasn’t.
Speaking of though, it’s likely that Peter the Great was a bastard, as most of his brothers were quite small and feeble. (Even if they were half-brothers). His brother and co-Tsar, Ivan V, was mentally retarded.
I think tye person you heard/read this from had heard about thishttp://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/1999/feb/18/monarchy and ran to Mars with it.
No, the Porchester rumour is older than that and hardly obscure, having been publicised earlier in the 1990s by the unholy trio of Nigel Dempster, Christopher Hitchens and Kitty Kelley.
None of which means that it’s actually true. Indeed, for Dempster to cite only facial resemblance seems especially feeble.
I heard this rumour in the mid-1980s, IIRC, and my Sources At Court tell me it has been current pretty much since 1960.
<nitpick>Herman and the Hermits</nitpick>
Si
When you’re right, you’re right! 
So which one of the Beatles or the Hermits was QE2’s bastard? (And is it just coincidence that Plunket sounds so much like Blanket, the child of uncertain parentage so much in the news of late?)
Yeah well, given that he was a bastard himself and had won the throne from his elder and legitimate brother in yet-another-civil-war… there would have been no accusations of ilegitimacy without the divorce proceedings, but Juana would have had problems holding onto the throne anyway. There’s periods in Spanish politics that seemed to be “ok, which kingdom was having a civil war that year?”
Couldn’t the Regent have given consent? I’m assuming there must have been one. Was the consent never requested, did the Regent deny it, or was the law that stupidly written?
If they had asked the Regent, he undoubtedly could have given consent, but he undoubtedly wouldn’t have, and they never asked him, because Catherine was the daughter, the widow, and the mother of kings, and Owen Tudor was a poor Welsh knight.
Have a look for yourself:
The Babe
The Bomb
Whaddya think?
I, being socially awkward, am unaware of Plunket and Blanket.
IIRC, he was never asked. The queen dowager had an affair and got pregnant, and since there was no betrothal or engagement of any kind it would have been embarassing to seek permission to wed, so she basically kept quiet about the kids until later.
Peter the Great’s half brother Ivan V who was mentioned previously is somewhat enigmatic to historians. He was reported to be mentally retarded and severely physically disabled; at his “strongest” he required help walking, often had to be borne in a litter, and by his death at 29 he was blind, paralyzed, and completely incoherent/seemingly absent mentally. However, he had five healthy daughters.
While retarded people can have normal sex drives and most forms of mental retardation are not hereditary, it’s much rarer among the mentally retarded who also suffer severe physical infirmities as well. I’ve wondered if in fact he perhaps had CP or some type of severe birth trauma or degenerative neurological disorder that left him not so much mentally retarded as “seemingly” mentally retarded due to inability to communicate well or severe speech impairments.
Marie, queen of Ferdinand of Romania and a first cousin of King George V of Great Britain and Tsar Nicholas II, was known to have had several lovers during her wretchedly unhappy marriage. Three of her children (Carol, Nicholas, and Elisabeth) are generally considered to have been Ferdinand’s, but Ileana, Mignon, and Mircea’s paternity was questionable. Mircea was almost certainly the child of Barbu Ştirbey, and he may have fathered Ileana, too. Marie declared to her husband’s face that Mignon’s father was her cousin Boris, a Russian Grand Duke. Nicholas was rumored to be the child of Waldorf Astor, but he looked so much like Ferdinand that seems unlikely.
This thread has me thinking of a research interest of my own. In American history it’s well known that many white men from Thomas Jefferson down to total lowlifes fathered children with black female slaves, but while these did account for the majority of biracial children there was a surprising number of children born of free white mothers and black male slaves. With children of free white fathers/black [or biracial] slave mothers the unions that produced these children ran the gamut from outright rape to mutual consent to in a few cases longtime monogamous relationships, but what’s surprising in the case of white mothers/slave [or black] fathers is that the majority of the individual cases I’ve found record of were born of completely consenting relationships, and a surprising number were actually raised by their mother with children by her white husband. (TheDelany sisters, amazingly spry centenarian spinsters made famous by Oprah, were descendants of a plantation mistress who had two children by her overseer while separated from her husband (with whom she also had children) during the War of 1812, and what’s amazing is that when he came back they resumed their marriage, had more children, and the two biracial daughters were raised by their stepfather.)
I descend (assuming nobody jumped the fence in 300 years) from the union of a white indentured servant who gave birth to a mulatto daughter in 1706. (Difficult genealogy to trace incidentally as both mother and daughter were named Elizabeth Rawlinson with a first name being spelled Elizabeth, Elisabeth, Betsy, Betty, and Bess and last name being spelled Rawlinson, Rawlins, Rollins, Rollison, and other ways, but the same family.) She was jailed but refused to identify the father. Her master (the man who owned her indenture) appealed to the court for her release as every day she spent in jail was a day he was deprived of her labor, and she was released after what seems to have been a few weeks (her master was credited 91 days to the term of her indenture). Both mother and daughter became spinsters in the literal sense (one who makes their living by spinning) and are reasonably well documented for what were essentially peasant women in 18th century Virginia.
The daughter apparently never married but had at least 3 children. By law she was free because she was born of a free mother; I’m not sure how such women would have been affected much later when Virginia (as with other states) forbade free blacks to remain in the state with legislature approval. It’s not surprising if she didn’t marry as even in the 18th century miscegenation laws were in place that would have barred her from marrying a white man, while there weren’t that many free blacks and marriage to a slave, while perhaps legal, would not have been very desirable. I am guessing she had a long time relationship with a white man, or perhaps white men, as her sons all had her surname.
Her grandson William Rawlinson (again, several spellings) was listed as a “moelatto” in court records and his brothers s had to identify as such when they moved south into the Carolinas. (One of his nephews had to take an oath swearing he was not a mulatto, which he did, which may or may not have been perjury; in Virginia a person with 7/8 white ancestry could legally identify as white but I haven’t found whether or not South Carolina had the same law; such distinction did not liberate them from slavery, and in fact there were legally white slaves at Monticello as well as many lesser known places.)
William, a wagon maker, had a large family and eventually owned at least 6 slaves (that’s how many he bequeathed in his will). In his late 50s he moved with his adult sons and daughter to Alabama. I’ve wondered whether his children knew about his ancestry. The earliest photograph I have of a family member is of his grandson (my great-great-grandfather), who has African-American features if you really look for them but that’s true with most anybody).
Anyway, not related to royalty, but related to illegitimacy in special circumstances and how it was viewed. There’s not a lot written about the white mother/enslaved (or free black) fathered children of the south, but the circumstances of their lives seem to be “what it was when it was where it was”- no real continuity.
Interesting factoid - the Delany sisters are the aunts of Samuel R. Delany, author of Hogg. Interesting how all roads seem to lead to that book.
I read somewhere it was Downs Syndrome.
Someone thas suggested that Queen Victoria was possibly the result of an affair her mother had with a hemophilliac, as the disease would otherwise have been a mutation with her. However, most consider that bullshit.
Yes, Marie of Roumania was having quite a few affairs. Mircea was certainly Stirbey’s, and Illeana or Mignon probably wasn’t Ferdinand’s. (Nicholas, I’m not sure of.) I think only Carol and Elisabeth were her husband’s. (Quite frankly, I can’t really blame her)
I’ve read that also, but if so then it means his wife most certainly fooled around. While Downs Syndrome women are sometimes fertile (about 40% of them from what I’ve read), there are very few substantiated cases of a man with Down Syndrome fathering a child (literally something like three or four) and unlike most forms of retardation Down Syndrome is hereditary. (It doesn’t mean the offspring will have it but they have a 50-50 likelihood.)
Very likely to be bullshit, given the short life expectancy of hemophiliac males at the time of Victoria’s conception.
Victoria’s beloved Albert was widely rumored to be illegitimate and half Jewish in his own lifetime. This is from a movie reviewbut the illegitimacy rumor is mentioned in most biographies.
There were rumors that in her late 40s the widowed Victoria had an illegitimate child by her Scot companion John Brown. Per the legend the child was raised in France and died there as an old man. I don’t believe any of her more serious biographers give any credence to the rumor, though some do concede that she may have been romantically involved with Brown.
