This must be truly devastating news to the strong supporters of the English monarchy!
I’m sure the Saxe-Coburg Gothas will be distraught.
Surely no British royal has ever claimed descent from Richard III. He was deposed in favor of a new dynasty.
From TFA:
“Arguably” even if John of Gaunt actually was the child of Edward III, Henry IV had no legitimate right to the throne He was a usurper!
To be clear, the article indicates that the break could have occurred any time along the Somerset line before the 5th Duke.
Or maybe the body isn’t that of Richard, which seems a reasonably high probability.
Too much money involved for it not to be him I suspect, or for anyone to dare ask the obvious question.
There seems to be agreement among competent scientists that it really is him; probability is quoted to be around 99.99%.
It has been a very common finding in DNA-based genealogical research that women do step out without it being recorded anywhere.
No. A lot of findings are that some child is not the offspring of the official parent. That can mean cuckolding. It can also mean that some other person’s child (say that of a sibling) was raised as their own or some other adoption took place. Adoptions were and in most places are quite informal and might not be recorded in anything like a formal record.
As it is, the finding is irrelevant to the line of succession. The British line of succession is determined by desent from Sophia of Hanover, not from the Tudors and even if it was, the Windsors can trace their lineage back to even stronger claimaints than Henry Tudor… his Mrs for instance.
I’d just like to note that if this results in the UK needing a new monarch, my services are available.
And it’s hardly as if the Somersets have had an unblemished marital record - Richard’s contemporary, the 1st Earl of Worcester, was illegitimate, which ironically means his paternity is the link in the descent that’s probably the most certain. Also the wife of the 3rd Duke of Beaufort was one of the most notorious aristocratic adulteresses of the eighteenth century, no mean feat in such a crowded field, so it is just as well that the descent doesn’t go through him.
It has been suggested that the problem most likely arises from the paternity of Richard’s grandfather. In which case, in a further irony, it would be Richard’s own claim to the throne that would be called into question.
An older article with an interesting graphic about the skeleton and indications of wounds: Richard III facial reconstruction reveals slain king more than 500 years after his death | Daily Mail Online
The latest DNA evidence - it’s definitely Richard III: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2014/12/02/dna-evidence-proves-that-king-richard-iiis-remains-really-did-end-up-in-a-parking-lot/
Ah. A good thing to remember, thanks.
That’s a pretty incredible piece of science, there. I was blown away a few years ago when Russian scientists published a paper in which they compared DNA samples offered by Prince Michael of Kent, among others, to remains found in Yekaterinburg to establish not only that all five Romanov children had been very dead since July 1918 (ending the Anastasia legends), but that Tsarevich Alexei had hemophilia B. They were able to isolate DNA from his X chromosome, sequence the relevant clotting factors, and detect the exact mutation that would have resulted in a truncated, non-functional factor IX. Amazing stuff. But those bones were not quite a century old. Half a millennium? Quite a feat.
But of course, the Hanovers can trace THEIR lineage back to Henry Tudor, through his eldest daughter, Margaret, remember?
Does Henry Tudors claim to the throne through Right of Conquest make this all null and void anyway?
Tudor — kinda representing the Lancastrian ‘claim’, but more representing Henry Tudor — certainly chose to emphasize Right of Conquest for himself, but any children reestablished the York-Plantagenet elder line though his wife Elizabeth, rightful heir of her father Edward IV.
Which was pretty much why he married her.
They also traced it back to Elizabeth of York, who was the senior heir of the Yorkist claim and that takes care of that.
Anyway the Act of Settlement is only concerned with Sophia’s descendants. Not her ancestors.
As others point out, any cuckolding is irrelevant to the genealogical claim of the present Queen. The Dukes of Lancaster and York, sons of King Edward III, could have both been bastards and it would have no effect on the line of succession. Certainly any cuckolding in the bastard Beaufort-Somerset line is completely irrelevant.
Elizabeth II is heir of Sophia Wittelsbach, granddaughter of King James VI and I. He, in turn inherited the throne of England as gt-gt grandson and senior heir of the marriage of King Henry VII to Elizabeth of York. Since neither Henry VII nor his Lancastrian predecessors every declared they were starting a new dynasty as Conquerors, the genealogic legitimacy of King Henry VIII and all subsequent Monarchs depends strictly on the rights of Elizabeth of York to the throne.
Anne happened to have been a Plantagenet agnate - her grandfather and gt-gt-grandfather were both Dukes of York, but that is irrelevant to her claim to England! She is the senior heir of King Edward III via a partly-female descent with Plantagenet infidelities irrelevant:
- King Edward III
- Lionel, Duke of Clarence
- Philippe of Clarence
- Roger de Mortimer, Earl of March
Roger’s son Edmund was recognized as Heir Presumptive to King Richard II but was arrested by the Lancastian usurpers and died childless, with rightful inheritance passing to his sister … - Anne de Mortimer
- Richard Plantagenet-York, Heir of England
- King Edward IV
- Elizabeth of York, Queen and wife of Henry VII
(Legitimacy of Edward IV and his marriage were questioned by Edward’s brother, but that is irrelevant to this discussion.)
No. Because the one thing Henry VII - or rather his 1485 Parliament - did declare was that no one could inherit the throne except the heirs of his body.
That had the effect of disinheriting all the other possible claimants, including Elizabeth of York. And that wasn’t an accident. Henry was very carefully excluding any argument that his claim to the throne depended on his marriage to Elizabeth, which at that point had yet to take place. Henry VIII, in turn, succeeded not on the basis that he was his mother’s son (however politically useful that connection might have been), but rather because as his father’s heir, he had a statutory right to do so.
A similar point can be made about Sophia of Hanover, which indeed was the point that AK84 was making - the Act of Settlement limits the succession to the heirs of her body and, as in English law, statute trumps everything else (or at least it does in this case), the question as to whether she was actually descended from James VI and I, Henry VII or Edward III is legally irrelevant.
English people have a fairly cynical attitude to what is declared by those organs; the scum of parliament will always register — which is their essential role — whatever is dictated by those in charge; as was shown by numerous volte-faces during the Wars of the Roses and earlier in, say de Montfort’s Rebellion.
Notably in the Parliament of Devils which proscribed Richard of York and his aides; the parliament of his son Richard which bastardized his elder son’s children; and his successor’s parliament which re-legitimized them. Those parliaments of Henry VIII which were only too willing to go along with whatever crazy the old nutter next thought up; and in the 17th century parliaments reversed their previous opinions fairly frequently depending who had the whip hand.
Neither statutory nor testamentary ( Henry VIII, Peter the Great etc. ) decrees as to succession have much force in the end; often the legitimate heirs succeed; often they are replaced. Either way, the thoughts of temporary parliamentarians are ultimately unimportant to the process and do not stand, any more than the contemporary dominance of parliament shall stand — whatever demented presentists imagine.
Henry also ensured through treaty that his daughter Margaret’s heirs would be removed from the line of succession after she married King James IV of Scotland, did’nt work out too well did that. Henry would have been politically aware enough to know that statute law was not worth the paper it was written on, by marrying the Yorkist heir, he was ensuring that his children would be the senior heir of the only realistic alternative line to him.