COUSINLY.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XV, Issue XXIV, 14 December 1895, Page 750

COUSINLY.

Among the hardest things which the infant Prince Edward of the royal house of England, the little son of the Duke of York and heir expectant to the throne, will have so straighten out when he is older is his relationship to his own father and mother. It constitutes a problem such as is seldom found outside of princely houses. It is certain, however, that he is the third cousin of his father, and also the second cousin of his mother. This makes his reflation to himself somewhere between that of a third and fourth cousin. He is, as it were, his own double-third cousin—a relationship which it will doubtless take some time for him to comprehend. Both his father and his mother are descended from George 111. of England. George lll.’s son Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge, had a daughter Mary who married the Duke of Teck, and became the mother of the Princess May, who married the Duke of York ; and the Duke of York’s father, the Prince of Wales, is the great-grandson of the same King George 111. The young prince will have the right to address either his mother, his father or himself as * my royal cousin ;’ and he may, perhaps, excuse any paitiality for his mother over bis father by declaring that she is a nearer relation to him than his father.

The princely families of Europe supply many similar cases of tangled relationship, growing out of the successive intermarriages of cousins in nearer or remoter degrees.