ANCESTORS OF THE KING.

Golden Bay Argus, Volume VII, Issue 68, 19 September 1901, Page 2

ANCESTORS OF THE KING.

Despite the critical school, we are now learning not to despise tradition. Mingled with a due proportion of fact, it supplies us with some remarkable results when applied to the Royal pedigree. For instance, few are perhaps aware that His Majesty can trace descent from Gyges the Lydian and Cyrus the Great. Now this is the way it is done. Fourth from Gyges in descent came Crasus, King of Lydia, who had a sister named Arienes. She married Astyages, King of Media, whose granddaughter Bardane married Cyrus the Great, b.v. 559. Of these two was descended Artaxerxes Mnemon, King of Persia, of whom came Arsaces Magnus Tiridates, King of Parthia; from whom Tiridates, King of Armenia; and of this house Basil, the Macedonian Emperor of Constantinople, claimed descent. A descendant of his was Luitgarda, daughter of Basil 11., Emperor of the East, who married Arnolph, Count of Holland. From him the line is through the Royal House of France to Isabel of Angoulesme, who married King John of England, from whom the King is descended in the female line. Further ba*ck than this the unblushing genealogist will probably hesitate to proceed, though there have been those who did not flinch from tracing the Royal House back to Noah through the ancient House of Norway, to say nothing of Elidure, King of Britain, B.C. 250, and the wonderful French pedigree leading to Antenor, King of the Cimmerians, B.C. 443 ; while at the elaborate ingenuity of the Irish pedigree to Noah through Magog and Japhet even the most robust imagination stands aghast. Of more genuine interest, however, is the traditional strain leading from the House of the Emperor Trajan. Theodosius, Emperor of the East, claimed descent from the family of Ulpius Trajanus, though not, of course, from the Great Emperor himself. Of him was descended Eudoxia, married first to Valentinian 111., and afterwards to Oenseric the Vandal (a mistake probably for Eudoxia, the daughter, who actually did marry Hunneric, the son of Genseric), whence came Dobrogera, who married Dieteric, of the line of Harderic the Saxon, direct male ancestor of his present Majesty.