THE ROYAL HOUSES OF EUROPE

 

Jacques Arnold, international businessman, former Member of Parliament, and multi-linguist, author of this series of royal genealogical books, explains how they came to be written and the problems encountered along the way.

 

Fifty years ago, in far away Brazil, as a British schoolboy, I came across an old “Whitaker’s Almanack”, and in it, I came across a chapter recounting the “Family of Queen Victoria”.  This petered out in the fourth generation, and, fascinated, I decided to complete it down to the then present day.  Very soon, I ran into the sand.  This was before the days of the internet, and I had no access to British libraries.  I therefore, with all the confidence of a teenager, decided to write to the big figure well entrenched in the middle of this fascinating web: Admiral of the Fleet, The Earl Mountbatten of Burma.  He was then still a busy man, but also fascinated by his family’s genealogy, he took the time to complete my questionnaire.  I was thrilled.  At the third questionnaire, he called it a day, pleading other commitments!,  and referred me to Arnold McNaughton, a Canadian who had compiled the “Book of Kings”.  Over the years I drew up great charts.

 

In 1997, I left the House of Commons, and found myself with more time on my hands. I decided to publish my work, and out came “The Family of H.M. Queen Victoria”, now in its third edition.  This involved checking data, initially in Burke’s Peerage, but this proved occasionally to be incomplete, and did not include places of birth, marriage and death.  I therefore resolved to write to members of the families concerned.  They were, with very few exceptions, extremely helpful.

 

The book was well received.  In his review, the late John Brooke-Little, former Clarenceaux King of Arms, and for fifty years, Chairman of the Heraldry Society, he described the layout I have adopted as “… it argues many pedigrees whose inter-relationship is clearly indicated by simple and ingenious system of cross-referencing, on which Arnold is to be congratulated”.    Encouraging, indeed!

 

I then decided to tackle a new, second volume, “The Families of the British Consorts”.  This would encompass the indirect royal cousins, the wider families of Diana, Princess of Wales, The Duke of Edinburgh, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, Queen Mary and Queen Alexandra.   Interestingly, this alternated between British and Continental ancestry. 

 

The family of Princess Diana stretches through the higher reaches of the British Aristocracy.  Kicking off with Burke’s, I again ran into the sands, and corresponded with members of her family, most of whom proved very helpful.  Some fascinating connections came into view. Whilst descended from the old Northamptonshire House of the Earls Spencer, she is also descended from the Irish Dukes of Abercorn and Barons Fermoy.  Through the former there is a connection to continental royalty – the current Duke of Abercorn is married to a descendant of a morganatic Romanov marriage, through Lady Zia Wernher of Luton Hoo; and through the latter to many remote American cousins, resulting from the marriage of her great-grandfather to the American Frances Work.  An aunt was married to Sir Anthony Berry, the M.P. who was killed in the Brighton bombing at the Conservative Party Conference.  Other relatives appeared in the form of Richard Ingrams, Editor of Private Eye; the diplomat Viscount Asquith, descendant of the first world war Prime Minister; second world war Field Marshal Earl Alexander of Tunis; and Sir Patrick Mayhew, the former Cabinet Minister.

 

The Duke of Edinburgh, on the other hand, comes from the highest ranks of continental royalty.  He is a descendant of Queen Victoria, and was a nephew of Lord Mountbatten.  An extraordinary array of continental royalty figure amongst his cousins.  As the only son of Prince Andrew of Greece, he is descended from both the Greek and Danish royal houses. His sisters were all married to senior German Royals, some with unfortunate connections, which resulted in them having to absent themselves from the royal wedding in 1947.  On his mother’s side, he has the exotic ancestry arising from the marriage of his great-grandfather, Prince Alexander of Hesse to the Polish Countess Julie von Haucke. The marriage was morganatic, and founded the illustrious House of Battenberg, whose British members took the anglicised surname Mountbatten in 1917. 

 

A generation further back, we have Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother.  Born Lady Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, she came from the historic Scottish family of the Earls of Strathmore & Kinghorne.  Her ancestry included The Dukes of Portland, but also some less exalted folk, mostly Scottish.  She was one of ten children of the 14^th Earl, all but two of whom have descendants.  Amongst her relations are numerous Peers, and a branch of the Bowes Lyon family, which emigrated to Canada.  Some key names stand out: the late Patrick Earl of Lichfield, society photographer; Timothy Colman, the mustard heir and Lord Lieutenant of Norfolk; Rachel Grant, the Bond-girl film actress; Lady Elizabeth Anson, the society party planner; and the current Earl himself, based at Glamis Castle, near Forfar in Scotland.

 

Queen Mary, for her time, was an unusual consort, coming from a morganatic line of European royalty, resulting from the marriage of Prince Alexander of Württemberg to the Hungarian Countess Claudine Rhedey, a beautiful young lady who died when her horse bolted at an Austrian military review, when she was trampled to death by a squadron of cavalry near Vienna, six years after the marriage.  Princess Mary of Teck was first engaged to the elder brother of her eventual husband.  Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, died during their engagement; and she turned her affections to his younger brother, George, Duke of York, who later succeeded as King George V, whom she married. Her father was Franz, created Duke of Teck, who married Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge, granddaughter of King George III, and daughter of the Duke of Cambridge.  Her brothers, all British, renounced their German titles in 1917, and became Marquess of Cambridge and Earl of Athlone respectively.  Through the earlier Cambridge family, there is an extended English family descended from the FitzGeorge brothers; and many German cousins from Queen Mary’s aunt, who married the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.

 

Queen Alexandra was a daughter of Christian IX of Denmark, one of Prince Philip’s ancestors, and therefore the family is totally over-lapped.

 

Being a book of Consorts, the recent second marriage of the Prince of Wales presented a conundrum.  By definition, the Duchess of Cornwall is not an ancestor of Prince William of Wales (the common denominator of all the other Consorts), but is, of course, a Consort in her own right, destined to be Queen Consort (or maybe a tactful alternative title), when Prince Charles ascends the throne.  In the latest, fourth edition, I decided to include a section on her family.  This proved to be fascinating.  Her mother, Rosalind Cubitt was a daughter of the 3^rd Lord Ashcombe.  That family had its origins in her great-great-great-grandfather, Thomas Cubitt, the “eminent builder”, who established the family seat at Denbies, near Dorking in Surrey, and whose son was elevated to the peerage.   Her maternal grandfather, the 3^rd Lord Ashcombe, had married Sonia Keppel.  She was one of the two daughters of the Hon. George Keppel, and his wife, Alice Edmonstone, a daughter of a Scottish baronet.  It was that Mrs. Keppel who was the close companion of King Edward VII, who is alleged to be the father of her second daughter.  The elder daughter, Violet Trefusis was the subject of a major lesbian scandal in 1920 when she absconded to France with her lover, the author Vita Sackville-West, only to be brought back by the two horrified husbands, Denys Trefusis and Harold Nicolson.  On her father’s side were the Shand family, a respectable upper middle-class family.  Her father was an army Major, her grandfather, four-times married Philip Shand, was a writer on French food and wine and an architect, and her great-grandfather, Alexander Shand, was a barrister.  The first marriage of her grandfather, to Londoner Edith Harrington, proved to be the most difficult to research, the family being a modest one, whose only known descendants were evacuated to Cardiff during the second world war, where they remained.  Other descendants proved untraceable, even through exhaustive research at the Family Records Centre.  From his fourth wife, he had a daughter, Elspeth.  This turned out to be the redoubtable wife of the former Chancellor of the Exchequer and Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe. 

 

I then decided to create a series of books under the simple title, THE ROYAL HOUSES OF EUROPE.  In turn, a sub-series of books was created for GREAT BRITAIN.  The two volumes above became Volumes 1 and 2.

 

I then delved further back in a Great Britain – Volume 3, to cover the collateral descendants of King George III.  Despite having nine sons, many of whom cohabited with their mistresses, a succession crisis arose with the death of the only daughter of the Prince of Wales, Princess Caroline, in 1817.  Only three were legitimately married, and none had surviving children.  Orders went out: the remainder were to dump their mistresses and marry and breed.  Three did so.  Of these, the Duke of Kent produced Princess Victoria, who later succeeded to the throne.  Of the other brothers, only two produced heirs: Cumberland and Cambridge.  The former inherited the throne of Hanover in 1837, and the latter produced a second Duke of Cambridge, who uniquely married an actress in defiance of the Royal Marriages Act, 1772.  His three sons forfeited the right to both membership of the Royal House, and to the Dukedom of Cambridge, which became extinct on their father’s death, but have left two families of FitzGeorges, one of whom became a general and Britain’s military representative at NATO.

 

One of the Dukes, who had already dumped his mistress, was William, Duke of Clarence.  His marriage produced two daughters who did not survive infancy.  However, he had previously had a long ménage with Dorothy Bland, an actress renowned on the stage as Mrs. Jordan.  This relationship had been blessed with no less than ten children, but they were illegitimate.  A second section of this volume covers their descendants.  Researching these proved difficult, and no doubt gaps remain.  The family is vast.  The eldest son was created Earl of Munster, when his father came to the Throne as King William IV.  Siblings married peers, and they were the last of the prominent “royal bastards”.  Again, I had to resort to corresponding with identifiable descendants, and the jig-saw came into focus.  The Munster Earldom passed through seven holders, becoming extinct in 2000.  The penultimate Earl served as a minister in Neville Chamberlain’s government, and those of Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden.  Other descendants include the 22^nd Earl of Erroll, murdered in Nairobi in 1941 during the “White Highlands” scandal; Alfred Duff Cooper, another of Churchill’s ministers; the broadcaster, John Julius Norwich; Rupert Hart-Davis, actor and publisher, briefly married to the actress Peggy Ashcroft; and Viscount De L’Isle, the Governor-General of Australia. 

 

One descendant I initially missed was David Cameron.   Duff Cooper had three sisters, but descendants, including both the Norwich and Hart-Davis descendants, when quizzed as to the existence of descendants of the elder two sisters, Stefanie Levita and Hermione Arnott, claimed not to know of any.  In practice, Mrs. Levita had two daughters, the youngest of whom married an Ewen Cameron, grandfather of the current Leader of the Conservative Party.  I now include an addendum covering this family, which will be included in the forthcoming second edition.

 

Since then, Volumes 4 and 5 of the Great Britain sub-series have been published.  These cover the collateral descendants of Kings George II and George I.  The latter includes a set of Family Trees highlighting the connection from Stuart to Hanover.  These three generations, including the intervening Frederick, Prince of Wales, who died before succeeding to the Throne, contracted myriad marriages with continental royals of the first rank, largely German and Scandinavian, being the protestant houses.  Researching these, which frequently inter-married with the great Roman Catholic Houses of Austria and southern Europe, relied on the Almanach de Gotha, under its original publisher, and the post-war Handbuch des Adels, and also on the obscure but in-depth Genea Portugal website.  This had to be supplemented by a wide-range of genealogical publications in the various European countries, including the Russian émigré work from Paris.  Finally, contemporary updating relied to an extent again on correspondence with the descendants.

 

With five GREAT BRITAIN volumes, I have traced all the descendants of the Hanoverians.  No doubt there are descendants whom I have not discovered.  These come to light subsequently, occasionally by the people concerned themselves contacting me.  Very careful editing and verification is then necessary for very obvious reasons.

 

Further volumes are borne in mind: The legitimate descendants of the British Stuarts.  The descendants of the Stuart Bastards.  However, initial research on the former has rapidly becomes vast, plumbing the depths of the Italian, Austrian, French, Belgian and Bohemian landed aristocracies – the result of the Stuart princesses’ and exiles’ continental Roman Catholic marriages.  A scheme of volumes will be required.

 

I then assembled a Volume to cover the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha dynasty, so closely inter-related with our own – Indeed the succession of the German Duchy passed through our own royal family.  This proved to be a large tour d’horizon around European Royal Houses.

 

Having initially exhausted British-related Royal Genealogy, I then turned my attention to the Continent.  My records are loaded on to a versatile genealogy computer programme: Kith & Kin, produced by the Scottish SpanSoft company, which can cope with the vast amount of inter-marriage by cousins, and which allows me to “cut” the data in a wide variety of ways.  I therefore determined to produce volumes on the reigning Houses of Europe, each of which was to stand alone, not cross-referenced to the British volumes.

 

First off the block was The Benelux Monarchies, covering The Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg.  I had presumed that a succession of single daughters on to the Dutch Throne, Wilhelmina and Juliana, would result in a slim and manageable volume.  Not a bit of it – a thick but manageable volume resulted.  A second edition has ensued.

 

Next, The Scandinavian Monarchies, covering Denmark, Sweden and Norway.  This proved more manageable, but also had ramifications from members of all houses marrying “out”, and therefore carrying subsidiary titles, or none at all. 

 

A Balkans volume was to follow.  These Houses, Greece, Roumania and Bulgaria, originate from junior princes of major continental dynasties being drafted following independence from the Turks.  The only two countries to take forward a local dynasty were Serbia, later Yugoslavia, with the Obrenovic and then Karageorgevic dynasties, and Montenegro, which nevertheless inter-married with European Royalty.  The resultant volume was too thin, and was therefore supplemented by a work on the United Italian Monarchy, and the fore-runners in Savoy Sardinia, Bourbon Two-Sicilies and Parma, and Habsburg Tuscany and Modena; resulting in the Balkan & Italian Monarchies volume.

 

The set was rounded off by a volume on the Iberian Monarchies, covering Spain, Portugal and Brazil.  The latter is descended from the Portuguese Bragança family, against which it paradoxically rebelled in 1823.

 

The volumes therefore cover all the reigning Houses of Europe (except Liechtenstein and Monaco).

 

I have since turned my attention to the great continental dynasties, which lost their Thrones in the crashes of 1917-18.   Earlier this year, volumes were published on The Romanov Dynasty of Russia, and The Hohenzollern Dynasty of Prussia, the latter in two volumes due to its vast size.  Sometime in the future, I hope to publish The Habsburg Dynasty of Austria-Hungary and The Bourbon Dynasty of France.  These may well be in multiple volumes.  After that, the House of Bonaparte, and the various German Kingdoms may follow.  All the volumes now follow a pattern with a Preface providing a general explanation of the dynasty concerned, its historical context, and dynastic highlights; are exhaustively cross-referenced, and have a comprehensive Index.  They present family trees over periods from up to four centuries ago, to the present day.

 

As your readers know, genealogy is fascinating.  A chance encounter as a teenager resulted in my life-time’s fascination with royal genealogy.  I now have a vast data-base comprising at the time of writing, 32,395 people in 12,433 families.  They are today spread across the world, with many in North and South America, Australia and New Zealand, and in South Africa, as a result of the great European upheavals of the twentieth century’s world wars. There are now thirteen volumes, some in their third and fourth editions, with more on the way. The potential to produce new volumes is endless! 

 

Volumes in THE ROYAL HOUSES OF EUROPE series:

 

GREAT BRITAIN Volume 1: The Family of H.M. Queen Victoria.

 

GREAT BRITAIN Volume 2: The Families of the British Consorts. 

 

GREAT BRITAIN Volume 3:  The Descendants of King George III  including the FitzClarence family.

 

GREAT BRITAIN Volume 4:  The Descendants of King George II, the Collateral lines.

 

GREAT BRITAIN Volume 5:  The Descendants of King George I, and the Stuart - Hanover connection.

 

SAXE-COBURG-GOTHA

 

The BENELUX MONARCHIES:  The Netherlands     Belgium    Luxembourg

 

The SCANDINAVIAN MONARCHIES:  Denmark   Sweden   Norway

 

The BALKAN and ITALIAN MONARCHIES: Greece, Roumania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, -  Italy, Sardinia, Two Sicilies, Tuscany, Parma and Modena.

 

The IBERIAN MONARCHIES:  Spain, Portugal and Brazil.

 

The HOHENZOLLERN Dynasty of PRUSSIA  -  2 volumes