To the Misty Dawn of British History

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22725, 11 May 1937, Page 9 (Supplement)

To the Misty Dawn of British History

BLOOD OF ALL GREAT DYNASTIES

t HOUGH the succession to the Throne was changed at the Revolution of 1688, the asso.s ciation of the Stuart blood with it was preserved, and also, of course, the Tudor, Plantagenet, Norman and Saxon blood, writes Michael JJacDonagh. The story of the ancestry of the Royal Family provides wonderfully impressive evidence of the enduring fabric of this realm, of the continuity of its national life, under its / truly national Throne, from far-off ages to the present- day. The flight of James 11. from the kingdom > was meant by him to be temporary only. He never resigned the Crown, and never intended * to resign it. Even if he had abdicated he would not, thereby, have prejudiced his son's title to succeed. The Convention Parliament, composed of. Loi'ds and Commons sitting together, which met to consider the situation, declared that Jame§, "having withdrawn himself out of the Kingdom," had, in fact, abdicated. Glad of the chance to get. rid oi a Monarch who was a Roman Catholic, and aimed at being absolute, they declared the Throne to be vacant, setting aside James' son, as well as James himself. This was a decision of momentous constitutional importance. It ran counter to the old theory that the King never dies —that the very instant a King passes away another King succeeds him, that the Throne never is and never can be .vacant. -Here was the Throne declaxed vacant by Parliament,' and here was Parliament looking around for someone whom it could elect or select to fill it. Fortunately, the Lords and Commons were in the position of being able to ' keep the succession still in the Blood Royal by availing of a collateral, if foreign, stream. For this recognition of heredity made the changeover easy by affording a salve to the tender consciences of most of the Royalists who re mained stout adherents of legitimacy. The Protestant Dutchman, William Prince of-.Orange and Stadthoider of Holland, to whom the Crown was first donated by Parliament ■jointly with his wife Mary, daughter of James 11., was a grandson of Charles 1. —his mother being a daughter of that unfortunate monarch—and he was therefore a nephew of James 11. as well as his' spn-in-law. Another daughter of ' James, Princess Anne of Denmark (who had been brought up a Protestant), was declared to be Heir Presumptive—William and Mary having no children—in the line of direct hereditary descent frorh the deposed Monarch, and subsequently, by the Act of Settlement, 1701, the succession was limited to the Hanoverians, descended from that Elector Palatine of the Rhine who had married Elizabeth, daughter of ' James L, and aunt of James 11. /

Thus, while the title of the Hanoverians to the Throne was strictly parliamentary—and there could bo no better one in a democratic age—the first of the Georges had in his veins a mingling of the blood of all the preceding Royal Houses of England—Stuart, Tudor, Plantagenet, Norman, Saxon. The present Royal liouse is the most ancient of the Sovereign Houses now reigning in Europe, much diminished in number by the World War. There were breaks in the direct line of succession. Kings and Queens died leaving no offspring. The Crown, therefore, reverted to collateral branches. There were usurpations. Kings possessed themselves of the sceptre by strong and bloody hands. Then there was the Revolution. A King was brought from Holland. But the Royal Blood of England was in the veins of all that long line of Sovereigns extending through many centuries of chequered history. That being so, King George can trace his ancestry back in an unbroken line—though not in the direct male line—not only to William the Conqueror but to Saxon Kings who are dim and shadowy figures in the misty dawn of British history. There have been thirty-seven Kings and Queens since William the Conqueror. Before that there had been twenty Kings. Egbert, the Saxon King of Wessex, who by bringing the scattered and independent petty kingdoms of the Heptarchy under his central domination, making England one, was the founder of the English Monarchy which exists to-day. That was ~bout the year 828. King George's ancestry goes even further back into the legendary ages, relying, in the absence of written records, on the heroic lays and legends of chroniclers and romancers. But confining himself to the period of authentic British history His Majesty could follow the careers of his forefathers through fourteen times a hundred years. For Cerdic of Wessex, from whom the Saxon Kings were descended, comes well within historic times, and back to him King George could trace his pedigree, step by step, without gap or flaw. Egbert was succeeded by fourteen Saxon Kings. The greatest of them all was AlfredEgbert's grandson—soldier and law-giver. His blood runs in the veins of the King. Then came the intervention of three Danish Kings. The Saxon dynasty was restored by Edward the Confessor (1042-1066), the son of King Ethelred and Queen Emma, daughter of Richard, Duke of Normandy. Edward died unmarried. Then followed the Normans. The first of them, William, Duke of Normandy, seized the Throne by force. He was illegitimate, his mother being the daughter of a tanner, but he was able to advance a claim by descent, though it was a weak one, in that Queen Emma was the sister

of his father's father. However, his youngest son, Henry 1., united the Saxon and Norman claims to the Throne by marrying Matilda, daughter of King Malcolm of Scotland, and of Margaret, granddaughter of Ethelred, and sister of Edgar Athelin, the last of the Saxon Princes. In the person of Henry 11. the Crown was restored to a descendant of Cerdic in the female line. Then came the Plantagenets and the Tudors. The mingled blood of all these streams flows in the veins of the King. Yet this is by no means all. Not many of his people realise how extraordinarily varied are the lines of descent, foreign as well as British, combined in the person of the King. It is no heraldic fancy, but a genealogical fact, that His Majesty is descended from the High Kings who ruled over Ireland long before King Egbert

founded the English Monarchy. One of the most ambitious of the Anglo-Norman lords who obtained vast tracts of land after the Conquest of Ireland in 1171 was Hugo de Lacy. In 1178 he married the daughter of Roderick O'Connor, the last High King of Ireland. The main line of de Lacy ended in a sole daughter who married another notable Anglo-Irish noble, Walter de Burgh, and, in time, the main line of de Burgh ended also in a sole daughter, Elizabeth de Burgh, Countess of Ulster in her own right. As she was the ward, as well as a great heiress, she was wooed and won by no less a personage than Lionel Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence, son of Edward 111. and brother of the famous Black Prince. It was from Lionel and his other brother, John of Gaunt, that the rival branches of the

Plantagenet family, York and Lancaster, were descended. The bloody struggles of the two factions for the Throne ended with the death on the field of Bosworth of Richard 111., whose despairing cry in Shakespeare's tragedy, "A horse, a horse, my Kingdom for a horse," haa rung through the centuries. The Crown of England, which was carried by Richard into battle, was found when the fight was over, and was placed on the head of the Earl of Richmond, who, on the field of his victory, was hailed as "King Henry V 11.," the first of the Tudors. Henry's mai-riage with Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV.—the first of the Yorkist Kings—united the claims of the Lancastrians and Yorkists, and the succession of the son of the marriage, Henry VIII., to the Throne was the first undisputed title for more than a hundred years. It was through Elizabeth de Burgh that the blood of the last High King of Ireland descended to the Stuarts. With the death of Queen Elizabeth the direct line of the House of Tudor came to an end and the dynasty of the Stuarts began. The title of the Stuarts to the English Crown was derived from Margaret Tudor, the eldest daughter of Henry VII. and Elizabeth of York, and a sister of Henry VIII. who married James IV. of Scotland. Their granddaughter was Mary Queen

cession to t'he Crown of England. Her son, George, Elector of Hanover, ascended the British Throne as. George 1., on August 1, 1714. It is curious to think that the hot, passionate, reckless blood of Mary Queen of Scots flowed in the veins of this uncouth "wee, wee German lairdie." Perhaps there was only a little of it. Through the Hanoverians the Royal House reaches back to Princes who reigned upon the Italian side of the Alps long before the time of the Crusades. For the Electors of Hanover were descended from the Este family, one of the ancient Princely houses of Italy, which survived until the consummation of Italian Unity in 1860, when the territory of Este in Northern Italy was absorbed into the new Kingdom of Italy. Thus, in one way or another, the King is descended from almost all the greater dynasties and races that have held sway in Europe since the fall of Imperial Rome. Queen Victoria carried her line still farther back. She favoured the theory that the English were descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel, and was convinced of her own descent from the Royal House of David. In 1869 when an Anglican clergyman, the Rev. F. R. Glover, addressed to Her Majesty the results of his researches into her pedigree.

of Scots, whose story is immortal, for in it are those two inextinguishable elements of human interest, romance and tragedy. Mary's son, James VI. of Scotland, succeeded Queen Elizabeth as James I. of Great Britain by reason of his descent from Margaret Tudor. Thus it was through James, the first of the Stuarts, that the blood of the ancient Kings of England, Scotland and Ireland were inherited by the present Royal House. The union of the Stuarts with the House of Hanover came about through the marriage of Elizabeth, daughter of James 1., with Frederick V., Elector Palatine' of the Rhine and King ol Bohemia, and the marriage of their daughter, Sophia, with Ernest Augustus, Elector of Hanover. The Electress Sophia died on June 8, 1714, losing by not quite two months the suo-

which convinced him of her descent from the Psalmist, she was exceedingly pleased and commanded his attendance at Windsor, when, he said, she informed him that the descent was part of the secret history of her house, and showed him a Royal pedigree with David as its root. But confining oneself to authentic and undisputed records, think of all that long history in England, Italy, Germany, with its great personages, its mighty episodes, being to-day concentrated in one man. The Imperial Crown of England is hallowed by the thought. The British King wears the oldest Crowns m the world. Japan claims that her Crown stands first in antiquity. But as "Burke's Peerage" well says the antiquity of the Crown of Japan "cannot be tested by the rigid tests of accuracy that we apply in this country."