ANCIENT ROYAL LINE

Taranaki Daily News, 3 January 1935, Page 10

ANCIENT ROYAL LINE

BACK TO KING ALFRED ANTIQUITY OF HOUSE OF WINDSOR. DIRECT DESCENT TRACED. The House of Windsor traces authentic descent from Alfred the Great, who was in the ninth century King of the West Saxons and overlord of all the English. One female descendant of King Alfred in the direct line married William the Conqueror, the first Norman wearer of the English Crown; another female descendant was wife of the Conqueror’s son and eventual successor, Henry I. Thus the blood of King Alfred flowed in no niggardly measure in the veins of the progeny of Henry I. whence sprang the occupants of the English Throne through the subsequent 28 generations.

In tracing the descent of the present reigning family from Alfred the Great, Sir Sidney Lee remarks in his biography of Queen Victoria that the Royal generations did not always succeed one another on the throne in regular hereditary sequence; some monarchs died without heirs, and the succession reverted to an elder generation. Many

times, too, during the seven centuries that followed Henry I’s death, there was matrimonial mingling of the English Royal blood with new foreign strains, French, Spanish, .Danish, and German. But save for the eleven years in the seventeenth century, when monarchy was temporarily exchanged for a republic, , the ancient line knew no interruption.

The enforced abdication of James 11., Henry I’s distant but direct heir, though it' seemed to transmit the English ..Crown to a foreigner, did not really divert the sovereignty from King Alfred’s race, for James H’s successor, William 111., while hereditary Prince of the Dutch territory of Orange, was also son of James’s sister, and Queen Mary, William’s childless wife, was James’s elder daughter.

On the death without living issue in 1714 of Queen Anne, the younger of James IPs daughters, the Crown passed to her second cousin, Prince George, of Hanover, the first Hanoverian King of England. Both Prince George’s parents were bom and bred in Germany. But his mother, the Electress Sophia, was daughter of James I’s child and Queen Mary Stuart’s grandchild, Elizabeth, the ill-fated English wife of Frederick V, Elector Palatine of the Rhine, and the “Winter King” of Bohemia. Ard Prince George’s father, who was Duke of Brunswick as well as Elector of Hanover and acknowledged the family surname of Welf or Guelph, boasted a direct ancestress in a daughter of the great English King Henry 11. Thus George I. of England, despite his German birth and breeding and surname, was lineally connected, through both father and mother, with King Alfred’s stock.