Most of our readers probably know Tony Robinson best as the much put-upon Baldrick at the bottom of the Blackadder pecking order. He has cunning plans, but they don’t work.
However, last night I watched a Tony Robinson effort that was slightly more substantial than one of Baldrick’s plans, and an interesting sign of the times in this United Kingdom of ours, namely a couple of Channel 4 TV shows about the history of the British monarchy.
I missed the early part of the first of the two hour-long shows that airedlast night, but my understanding is that in the first, Mr Robinson started out investigating Richard III and ended up by satisfying himself that the current official Royal Family is descended from a deception, in the form of Edward IV.
Edward IV was born in 1442, having been conceived the regulation number of months before that in Rouen, France. Both the circumstances surrounding that birth, and the gossip which it immediately gave rise to say that Edward IV’s biological father wasn’t the King of England that he should have been, but was instead a French soldier whom the Queen had a brief fling with. Edward IV looked nothing like his official dad. More fuss was made when his younger brother was born than when he was. There’s a line in Shakespeare’s Richard III alluding to the gossip to the effect that Richard III’s rival was a bastard. And so on. Robinson even had himself a bona fide historian on hand to back this up with some new documentary evidence which further proved that the king was nowhere near Rouen when he should have been to be Edward’s biological dad.
It is possible – not likely but possible – that there will be an explosion of comments on this posting from people we don’t usually hear from, because believe it or not, the rights and wrongs of whether or not Richard III was or was not the Bad Thing that Shakespeare, Laurence Olivier, and now Ian McKellen, have portrayed him as remains a live issue among a certain sort of rather eccentric English person. The argument goes that Richard had the Princes in the Tower killed, not because he was a swine and wanted the Real Monarchy out of the way, but because he considered it his painful but patriotic duty to put and end to a couple of nationally disruptive fakes.
So, having satisfied himself that our actual monarchy isn’t our real monarchy, in the second of his two programmes, Robinson proceeded to chase down who our Real Monarch now is. To cut a long story short, this real King of England is a bloke called Mike Hastings, who left England to live in Australia in his teens, has had a great life there, and who actually voted for a Republic in the latest Aussie referendum on that subject. (I’m only making this up if Tony Robinson was too.) Mike and his disbelieving and frankly rather suspicious not to say rather contemptuous daughters were shown chuckling over it all, when Robinson arrived to visit him with a film crew. Although, it’s fair to add that Mike did take his ancestry seriously enough to possess his own chart, which luckily confirmed all of Robinson’s conclusions about his ancestry.
It was a thoroughly enjoyable programme, and on the whole Robinson didn’t try to make too much of things. By their own rules, the monarchs of England aren’t as kosher as they would like. If those rules had worked out differently, things would have been different. That was what he was really saying. His main conclusion wasn’t that Queen Elizabeth II should now be knocked off her throne. It was that we live in a rum old world. After these shows ended, I went a-googling, and discovered the usual killjoy response to all such startling revelations, to the effect that This Is Nothing New:
I don’t see anything there that hasn’t already been thoroughly discussed here. Am I missing something?
Short answer: the Queen is Queen because of the Act of Settlement, not because of her descent from any Plantagenets, Tudors, or Stuarts.
If it could be proved that she wasn’t legitimately descended from the Electress Sophia, then there would be something to talk about. But the chances of that are approximately nil. (DNA evidence wouldn’t do it: legitimacy is a matter of law, not of biology. Not that I have any reason whatever to think the Queen is not descended from Sophia.)
And the Act of Settlement happened way after 1442 (in 1701), and on its own would appear to end this as a serious live issue, so to speak.
However, with my googling I also discovered something else, which is that Tony Robinson is a bigger cheese on the left hand side of current British politics than I had previously realised.
This makes sense. The real political punch that this programme packs is that it is yet another little tiny chip off the edifice that is the British monarchy in particular, another squirt of urine into the swimming pool of the Old Story of British history. It was a very small but definite dig in the ribs for all the sort of people who, until very recently, used to rule this country, by one of their successors – by one of the New Establishment, you might say. The Old Establishment got to be that by inheritance. The New Establishment who rule us now is a meritocracy, in its own eyes anyway, rather than a strictly hereditary class in the old sense. Others who don’t love our New Establishment might prefer to call it something more like a Mediacracy or a Mediocracy or some such insult, but the point is, there has been a social discontinuity in recent British history, which is reflected in what often looks like a conscious effort by the New Establishment to piss all over the past. Robinson is no part of that, but he is clearly not averse to revising it.
It is only recently that the Royal Family have been declared fit subjects for serious regardless-of-where-it-leads investigation. I can remember when saying they were ridiculous was like saying that homosexuality is an abomination now. Forty years ago, I don’t believe that TV shows like these would have been allowed to make it to our screens. Which is precisely one of the reasons why these programmes was made and shown now. (Another reason is that they were very entertaining.)
Personally I don’t base my sense of Britishness, or Englishness, in any way whatsoever on whether Queen Elizabeth II is the rightful air to her throne. And if it weren’t for the argument now raging about the sovereignty of my country as whole, in the form of the argument about whether Britain should be reduced to a clutch of little Euro-provinces, I would be an unambiguous anti-monarchist and pro-republican myself. However, given that debate, I have become more of a royalist than I’ve ever been before.
Because those who do take our Sovereign seriously tend also to take the sovereignty of our country seriously, these programmes will ever so slightly demoralise some of the people who now care about British sovereignty. And for that reason, ever so slightly, they demoralised me, despite being very entertaining, and indeed because they were so entertaining. In other words, although the idea of toppling the current Queen is not serious, these were still serious programmes, in the sense of still having a sort of current political agenda. (Metacontext?)
At the end of the second show, for example, Robinson tossed in the notion that had there been no bastard Edward, Britain might have remained catholic country, by which I assume he meant Roman Catholic. And Roman Catholicism is deeply embedded in the EUropean project, to the point where it almost makes sense to put that the other way around.
Robinson. Is that a Roman Catholic name I wonder?
The fact that Tony Robinson has a poor grasp of British history does not stop him wanting to give us (in his familiar ‘Play School’ manner) his historical views, which of course just happen to coincide with his political views. As is usually the case in such programmes the evidence is assembled to support whatever the programme makers want to claim, and they are not going to let inconvenient facts get in the way of their sermon. If you go to the official British Royal website you will find the family tree of Queen Elizabeth II. If you look at Henry VII you will discover his royal lineage is derived from Edward III and not from his wife. In short the programme is bunk. There is an instructive story about how the wealth of families can increase or decrease, and how political power works (i.e. there were occasions when for political reasons one branch rather than another branch inherited the crown – the most obvious example being the inheritance of the crown down the Protestant rather than Catholic branches) and speculating about the paternity of Edward IV is interesting, but as a rule if you want to make historical judgements it is best to rely upon respected historians.
It really doesn’t matter whether Edward iV was a bastard or not. 1701 was clearly important but even more important is that Henry VII was a Lancastrian so once he’d beaten Richard III the illegitimacy or otherwise of certain Yorkist kings was irrelevant. Although he did marry Edward IVs daughter which he might not have done if he’d know her father was not of the true York blood and hence perhaps Henry VIII etc would not have existed. If the scandal had been on the Lancastrian side then the legitimacy or otherwise of the Queen might be an issue but 1485 was when the House of Lancaster triumphed good and proper over the House of York, not through blood but through the crude simple “I’ve got the army that just beat your army” legitimacy which has historically always been the most important reason.
Its the same reason why the various Stuart pretenders were pretenders and not kings – the act of Settlement was a post facto legalization of the fact that James II had been turfed out of the country and that neither he nor his heirs were welcome back.
Yes; Robinson is a lefty (though of the engaging and humane variety). That doesn’t make this piece of programming a conspiracy to undermine the monarchy. The point about Richard III being deliberately blackened by the propagandists of later dynasties (all pretty strongly monarchist) is fairly well established.
Mr Robinson has fronted numerous historical and archaeological programs over the years, and if he doesn’t have a personal interest in history he’d surely be putting his Baldrick fame to some other use. He’s a successful author of children’s works too–notably including a sitcom called Maid Marian and her Merry Men, which assumes a familiarity with the Robin Hood legend in order to have fun with it.
I’ve long had him down as a worthwhile historical populariser, not a propagandist. Cf. the even more serious (and even more silly) Terry Jones.
If Channel 4 really wanted to destroy the monarchy they’d be running Diana documentaries and Charles interviews, not bothering with the Wars of the Roses. The idea that some Australian bloke is actually the rightful heir to the throne, by ignoring the broader issues of constitutional legitimacy, does precisely the opposite of undermining hereditary monarchy: it makes the hereditary principle and its incidents stronger than they have ever been in the real world.
I wonder how many Herberts I have to get through to claim the Earldom of Pembroke…
Britain’s Real Monarch is an Australian bloke called Mike!
Excellent.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/monarchy/story/0,2763,406138,00.html
“However, there are two problems with written constitutions. Their value depends upon who writes them and upon what forces exist to defend them against later subversion. The United States has been, for the most part, lucky in both these areas. I doubt very much if we should be. In fact, one of the greatest dangers to British liberty comes from modern politicians of both parties who refuse to respect the gentlemanly traditions of restraint which once kept us from being an elective dictatorship.
Why should these same politicians – let alone our newly politicised judiciary – be trusted with a written document which is bound to be ambiguous? If you doubt this, take a look at the new European Union ‘Charter of Rights and Freedoms’, with its implicit threat to freedom of speech in Article 52.
And this is the real problem for anyone who is truly concerned with liberty. The greatest danger to that liberty does not come from the melancholy remnants of the House of Hanover. It comes from the increasing power of centralised political party machines, and from the growing importance of European Union laws and institutions in our society.”
I have to say, as little regard as I have for people who bend a knee to anyone, this stuff is fascinating. Amazing how royalty captivates the imagination, even libertarian imagination.
Erm…Edward IV’s dad wasn’t King of England, he was the Duke of York…
Guy Herbert – You’re not usually such a complacent thinker! Wossname is familiar enough with the Robin Hood legend to have some fun with it? Is there anyone in the Anglophone world who doesn’t know Robin Hood and his Merry Men? For this Robinson gets a tick against Achievement?
Also, he is not an engaging lefty. There is no such thing as an engaging lefty, and I challenge anyone to suggest one lefty charmer. Just one.
Brian Swisher
Yeah you’re right, of course, but that was the official descent that justified Edward IV being king. He was the one who wasn’t in Rouen when he had to be. Which makes his wife and Edward’s mother not the Queen either.
As to the point about this stuff “captivating the imagination”, that’s not it for me. It is simply that if you want to understand the European Middle Ages (and later) you just have to grasp the significance of heredity, and how seriously it used to be taken. Not studying this would be like being a pacifist who refuses even to study war. (Although I bet there are plenty of them.)
It was Australian Mike who I found captivating, not his ancestors.
Not having a TV, I didn’t see the program, but the whole point is moot as Parliament twice invited (after the Cromwellian interregnum and the Glorious Revolution) people to become Monarch. Oh and in Edward IV’s age it was might makes right.
So yes, I agree that this is another example of BBC anti-monarchism.
Anti-monarchy? I haven’t seen the programme, but what I’ve read about it doesn’t seem so. It appears to be a look at a “what if…” scenario and possible supporting evidence, more or less on a par with the evidence that the Royal Boys were disposed of by Henry rather than Richard. Or the new case that Jeanne d’Arc was actually a wrong-side-of-the-blanket member of the French royal family. Against a particular monarch, yes, but not the whole structure, any more than pointing out that Richard the Lion-Heart[ed] preferred bedding men.
I am by no means an expert in this kind of thing, being an American and all, but it seems to me that discussions of lineage in the English monarchy going back that far really have little to do with the current ruling family. That’s because there have been several times since then when a monarch died without leaving a dynastic successor, and the English had to shop around outside for a new one.
The most famous of those is certainly when Elizabeth I Tudor died. The Tudor dynasty started with Henry VII after he killed Richard III.
Henry VIII had three children (officially). All of them reigned after his death, and none of them left any heirs. So the English offered the crown to King James Stuart of Scotland, most famous for sponsoring the “King James Bible” but otherwise a rather mediocre monarch or so I’m led to believe.
With a great deal of work it’s possible to show at least some connection between all of the monarchs, but sometimes it’s more than a bit tenuous, and looks more like rationalization than anything. (Sort of like what programmers refer to as “traversing a tree structure”. Even in a really big tree, there’s a connection eventually.) Ultimately you ended up with a separate branch from Hannover, the Brunswicks, beginning with George I in 1714. In 1917 the Brunswicks changed their family name to “Windsor” (taking the name from the castle) to show that they were not secret German sympathizers in the Great War.
Of course, it’s European tradition that children take their surname from their father, but it’s been overridden to some extent in the case of the children of Elizabeth II Windsor and Philip Mountbatten, with Elizabeth’s children (and all later male descendants by direct male line) taking the name “Windsor” and all the others (such as Princess Anne’s children Peter and Zara) being known as Mountbatten-Windsor.
But it’s all academic anyway. They’re all usurpers and pretenders, it seems to me. William I took the throne through force of arms in 1066 based on a paper thin claim to succession. He became King not because he was most directly in line, but rather because he won the Battle of Hastings.
It strikes me that based on my study of European history, it’s nearly always a case of possession being 90% of the law. Whoever sits on the throne is the proper ruler, until he dies or is replaced by someone else. All the rest is just hand-waving.
Verity: Wossname is familiar enough with the Robin Hood legend to have some fun with it? Is there anyone in the Anglophone world who doesn’t know Robin Hood and his Merry Men?
I wasn’t suggesting that Robinson gets marks for his own familiarity with Robin Hood. What’s positive is his willingness to assume that children are familiar with the traditional stories, and are smart enough to get the jokes based on anachronisms and inversions of those traditions.
As for engaging lefties, sad to say, they are more common than engaging rightists, at least in Britain. Perhaps that’s because they aren’t so readily worn down by the struggle against the tide. I know I’d find it easier to be sunny if my opinions were deemed respectable–or even merely comprehensible–when voiced in public.
Wot Steve said. I always thought the Windsors were krauts. Isn’t it true that George I didn’t speak English? (Apologies if I’m getting this wrong. I’m not well-versed in British history, except for the parts where you’re taxing our tea, burning our capitol, and running down the Loosiana to the Gulf of Mexico.)
OK, Guy Herbert, name one.
I must please guilty to having watched the program. I thought that the real giveaway as to Robinson’s agenda was that the possibility of someone more intelligent than George III permitting the preservation of anglospheric unity never got a look in in his counterfactual history based on the alternative line of descent.
Three and a half hours later and Guy Herbert has yet to dredge up the name of a single engaging lefty. Come on, Guy! You said they were more common than engaging righties. You must have had some in mind? One?
Was Richard the Third the one who dared to cut the peasant’s taxes?
Sorry Verity, I’m normally pretty idle, but a bit of work was necessary morning…
Thinking of any engaging people at all, regardless of political cast, starts to become difficult when one’s challenged. I’m sure it’s a matter of taste, and you’ll claim all these people are in fact tedious and not remotely likeable, but here are a handful to be getting along with:
Terry Jones (as aforementioned); Bill Clinton; Jeremy Hardy; Stephen Fry; Kenneth Clarke; Diane Abbott.
Since the new Who’s Who is out perhaps I ought to go through it and mark everyone for imputed leftiness, dullness and pomposity. But it strikes me as an even more dispiriting game than going through Whittakers and striking out government offices and quangos I’d like to see abolished. (Which latter I’ve had to give up as too depressing.)
OK, Guy, the only one I’ll give you is Bill Clinton and that’s because he doesn’t have any principles whatever. He’s not really committed to the left. He just wants life to be comfortable for Bill and being a leftie is much easier than fighting the left as a rightie. Bill’s lazy and charming. Hillary’s a leftie in her heart.
Diane Abbott has the potential to charm, but her loonie socialism wipes it all out. I cannot abide Stephen Fry.
Steve, the various imported kings were still supposed to be direct descendants of the royal line. James I and VI was a direct descendant of Henry VII via Henry VIII’s sister, who was James I and VI’s grandmother. Mary II, of “William and Mary” fame, was a daughter of James II and VII. Queen Anne was her sister. Sophie, the mother of George I and claimant via the Act of Settlement, was a granddaughter of James I and VI, via her mother Elizabeth, the “Winter Queen”. The English succession was never patrilineal – that was the whole point of the “Salic bar” excuse for the Hundred Years War.
The Edward IV legitimacy issue is important for two interrelated reasons.
Firstly, Henry VII’s personal claim to the throne was thoroughly disreputable. His claim descends through a very dubious Welsh line via a bastard daughter of John of Ghent. Henry VII married Edward IV’s daughter Elizabeth in order to bolster his claim, and to keep anyone else from marrying her and raising the Yorkist flag against him. The later Tudor, Stuart, Orange, Hanover, and Windsor claims descend through Elizabeth’s claim.
Secondly, Elizabeth herself was declared illegitimate by Act of Parliament, which Henry VII suppressed by burning all available copies. We know this because people hid copies, or lost them, or whatever. Richard III disinherited the children of Edward IV by this Act – it’s how he crowned himself. The argument was that Edward IV had secretly betrothed one of his mistresses prior to marrying his queen, and thus was technically a bigamist, which illegitimatized their children.
So, either Elizabeth was a bastard by Act of Parliament, or a descendant of a bastard by Act of God, and her children were descendants of royal or not-so-royal bastards on all lineages of any import. It’s a quite thorough example of the bankruptcy of the theories of power through linear descent.
A bastard is a child born as a result of a coupling between two people who are not married, or whose marriage is later found to be void. The legal significance of this status is that such a person is not a lawful heir of their parents. Richard III in a proclamation dated the 23rd of June 1484 observed that the mother of the man [who became Henry VII] “was the daughter unto John Earl of Somerset, sone unto Dame Katherine Swynford, and of their in double avoutry gotten” by which he meant that the Earl of Somerset was conceived by John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford during the lifetime of his wife and of her husband. John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford [whose sister as a matter of interest married the poet Chaucer] however were subsequently married, and their children [who took the name Beaufort] were legitimated by the Richard II, and by Parliament, in February 1397 – and also by the Pope on September 1st- the male heirs of which were granted the title Earl of Somerset [and in 1443 were elevated to a dukedom]. The Patent of Legitimation as originally granted and entered in the Patent Rolls and which received the sanction of Parliament “rendered the issue of John of Gaunt by Katherine Swynford capable of taking every species of dignity, honour, or office, and removed all objections on the ground of impure birth” although around 1407 when Henry IV confirmed this grant to John Beaufort Earl of Somerset, the words “excepta dignitate regali” were added to the Patent Rolls. These words however were not inserted in the Rolls of Parliament and therefore this denial of royal status has no legal effect, because the grant is that which is sanctioned by Parliament i.e. the mother of Henry VII was by law the lineal heir of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. Aware that his was not the strongest claim to the crown, Henry VII resolved to obtain recognition of his right prior to his marriage to Elizabeth of York. A Parliament met at Westminster on the 7th of September 1485, and Henry gave a speech to the Commons in which he noted his accession “as well by just hereditary title as by the sure judgment of God, which was manifested by giving him the victory in the field over his enemy” Parliament accepted his right to kingship de facto, considering all that it was necessary to do was state this fact, and settle the royal dignity upon him and the heirs of his body. Notwithstanding his address to the speaker of the House of Commons that his claim to the crown by descent and conquest the Act of Settlement makes no allusion to either of these pretensions:
“To the pleasure of Almighty God, the wealth, prosperity, and surety of this realm of England, to the singular comfort of all the King’s subjects of the same, and in avoiding of all ambiguities and questions, Be it ordained, stablished, and enacted, by authority of this present Parliament, that the inheritance of the crowns of the realms of England and France, with all the pre-eminence and dignity royal to the same pertaining, and all other seignuries to the King belonging beyond the sea, with the appurtenances thereto in any wise due or pertaining, be, rest, remain, and abide in the most royal person of our new Sovereign Lord, King Harry the Seventh, and in the heirs of his body lawfully coming, perpetually, with the grace of God, so to endure, and in none other”.
P.S. John of Gaunt (i.e. Ghent) was the [fourth] son of Edward III who during the senility of his father, and the minority of Richard II, was the de facto ruler of England. He acquired his Lancastrian estate through his marriage to Blanche (whose father the Earl of Lancaster and was one of the first recipients of the Order of the Garter), and was created Duke of Lancaster in 1362. He was a supporter of John Wycliffe (one of the founder of Protestantism) and his great Savoy Palace (on the site of the modern Savoy Hotel in London) was famously destroyed by a mob opposed to the Poll Tax in 1381. I seem to remember that Henry the Navigator, the Portuguese king who encouragement of explorers led eventually to the European re-discovery of what became known as America, was his grandson. Shakespeare (who history plays give us one of the finest studies of the nature of political power) gives him one of the most famous speeches in Richard II – i.e. the play that Essex revived when he fomented a rebellion against Elizabeth 1st – but I am rambling.
Ineteresting article–like a lot of good American Republicans, I have to confess taking a certain guilty pleasure in the comings and goings of the British Monarchs. But, look, let’s not take this bit of fun too seriously! The Glorious Revolution established that the monarch is exactly who Parliament says the monarch will be, and bloody well better not get above his station–and isn’t that the only thing that makes living in a country with a monarch bearable?
It may interest readers of this thread to note that there is still a Stuart claimant to the throne out there, by the way–the Duke of Bavaria, who, no doubt somewhat whimsically, stiles himself Francis II of England and Scotland. You can read about the whole Jacobite line at http://members.rogers.com/jacobites/kings/index.htm
Craig Bryant: Has the current Jacobite line given up the claim to the throne of Ireland, then?
Keep the debate rolling! For those interested, the new findings on Edward IV’s illegitimacy are set out in my recent book, Bosworth 1485 – Psychology of a Battle (Tempus Publishing, paperback, 2003).
“In 1917 the Brunswicks changed their family name to “Windsor” (taking the name from the castle) to show that they were not secret German sympathizers in the Great War.” Stephen Den Beste
I’d always thought the name change to Windsor was from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Queen Victoria’s surname following her marriage to Prince Albert.
Just can’t stand it can you? I am so happy that someone finally found out the truth about the “royal” family. Good for Tony Robinson!
Royal my butt. Inbred scum more like.
henry the VII did take his thrown by force yes but when the tudor line ended with elizabeth the first the next person in line for the thrown had to be traced back up through henry the VII wifes family. everyone (her brothers and father) other than her uncles and cousins wenrn’t legitamet and the thrown shouldnt have gone to them as it did. the thrown should have gone to edward the IV’s brother/half-brother and then be pased down through their family line. if it had done as it should have (if edward the IV id proved to be illigitimate as it appears he is) in the first place then henry VII may have never won the war of the roses, there may have never been a civil war, never been the empire or 2 world wars that happened as a result of our empire. my view is that there should be more research done into these claims and a DNA test be done on the royal family or certain members at least if some refuse. then if they are not our true monarchy the royal family should be made head of state.
Act of Settlement, I think you forget one important fact.
If Edward IV was not the lawful King, and that George Duke of Clarence and his heirs were, then every bit of legistlation passed since then would be invalid. I’m no lawyer, but do not acts of Parliament require Royal Assent before they become law? If so then every monarch since then (Including our Lizzie) has not had the legal right to give Royal Assent
I agree and disagree with the postings above. The British monarchy is fragile and will soon fail in its modernising attempts to change a little and condition a lot. Britain doesn’t need its flattened pyramids anymore and populations are becoming increasingly aware of this. Is it possible to genuinely represent a modernising Britain to a justifiable extent within the constraints of a royal constitution, does the British population respect the efforts being made, and why do we need such reassurances that there is higher representation for us in addition to parliament? Putting aside the claims of a flawed linage and its subsequent breaks, there are problems afoot today causing irreparable damage. Are the current bunch legitimate enough to begin with and are they behaving themselves, keeping those historians at bay? Charles and William have a lot to do and that’s if they succeed Elizabeth II. It could all fall to Harry and then what?
“Its the same reason why the various Stuart pretenders were pretenders and not kings – the act of Settlement was a post facto legalization of the fact that James II had been turfed out of the country and that neither he nor his heirs were welcome back.”
Not welcome back from a lot of selfish, uptight protestant bastards who benefitted handsomely from denying their countrymen free religious expression, committing treason against their lawful king, and oh, engaging their countrymen in a series of unnecessary and costly (both in human, and to a much lesser extent, monetary) wars.
They were not “pretenders” they were legit.
Let’s see what the british “preferred”:
William III, a shruken, uptight, pretentious little prick who abused his wife and helped kill a lot of englishmen in the cause of protestantism. Oh, what a winner. And he liked banging his male friends. Again, how sweet.
The first Duke of Marlborough, whose entire fortune was earned literally screwing anybody he could get his hands on. Would sell anybody he knew for a buck. Let’s see, would he have commanded ANY armies had he not helped throw over the one man who dragged his ungrateful and low ass out of the gutter? Plus, his daughters were all trashy whores.
George I – didn’t even speak english. Was abusive and cruel to his wife. HATED being in England. Oh, yes, but he wasn’t catholic?
I agree and disagree with the postings above. The British monarchy is fragile and will soon fail in its modernising attempts to change a little and condition a lot. Britain doesn’t need its flattened pyramids anymore and populations are becoming increasingly aware of this. Is it possible to genuinely represent a modernising Britain to a justifiable extent within the constraints of a royal constitution, does the British population respect the efforts being made, and why do we need such reassurances that there is higher representation for us in addition to parliament? Putting aside the claims of a flawed linage and its subsequent breaks, there are problems afoot today causing irreparable damage. Are the current bunch legitimate enough to begin with and are they behaving themselves, keeping those historians at bay? Charles and William have a lot to do and that’s if they succeed Elizabeth II. It could all fall to Harry and then what?
Don’t think it will fall to William, he’s a closet gay guy and his “girlfriend” Kate Middleton’s womb has been scarred from one too many abortions (5 from a very reliable source) from the real guys she’s been banging. Harry? Well, Seig Heil………………isn’t nazism fun?
Long live the British Monarch!