Jen got me Season One of The Tudors for my birthday. While the show plays fast and loose with timelines, characters, and events, it’s very entertaining. And VERY rated “R”.
Anyway. Watching the show has renewed my interest in European history, particularly the succession of royalty and the line to the throne. I found this page on tudorhistory.org which delineates the family tree of Henry VIII and his six wives. And here is where I discovered something very interesting.
Henry (1491-1547) and ALL of his wives are, ultimately, direct descendants of King Edward the I (1239-1307), through his two marriages. The intermingling of the families involved is difficult to decipher (I’m unused to reading family trees) but it seems like this particular family tree has more trunk than branches. I mean, if you pick just one thread and follow it down you find a startling amount of marriages between differing degrees of cousins.
Here’s something fun, if you can follow me. At the very beginning of the tree, Edward I married Eleanor and had daughter Margaret. Years after Eleanor died, Edward I married again, this time to Marguerite of France, and had son Thomas. Margaret’s marriage produced a son (John III), and Thomas’ marriage produced a daughter (yet another Margaret). John III and Margaret married.
So. John’s mother and Margaret’s father were half-siblings.
Put another way, an intermarriage occurred between the grandchild of Edward I and his first wife, with the grandchild of Edward I and his second wife.
Eep. What does that make them? My brain hurts.
Back to my original ponderance, I wonder if Henry chose wives decended from Edward I on purpose? Or were there few enough people in the aristocracy at the time that common ancestors and intermarriage were unavoidable? Certainly if you try to trace today’s royal family back a few hundred years it’s pretty hard to find a common thread. I started with Prince William and went back to the 1700’s before I gave up, and didn’t see much – or really, any – commonality among the relations.
Still. How cool would it be to be able to trace your lineage back hundreds and hundreds of years? I only know back as far as my great-grandparents on my mother’s side, and I know nothing at all about my father’s side.
Okay. Probably this stuff is only interesting to me (I can see Calvin rolling his eyes even as I type this). He may think that books are stupid, but he agrees with me that history is awesome. He just prefers WWII history (of which he is the utmost expert) over pretty much anything else.
As for me, I’m having way too much fun digging up evidence of inbreeding. Yarg.
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