The illegitimate royals
When the 9th Duke of Buccleuch, Europe’s largest private landowner, died two years ago he was officially worth £320million.
The owner of three stately homes, he had reluctantly hit the headlines when a £30million masterpiece by Leonardo Da Vinci was stolen from one of his castles. He was described in one tribute as “the real King of Scotland”.
He traced his ancestry all the way back to King Charles II but what nobody mentioned at the funeral was that the bloodline went via royal mistress Lucy Walter, who was expelled from England and died of syphilis in Paris at the age of 28.
The late aristocrat’s forebear the 1st Duke is better remembered by history as the Duke of Monmouth, Charles II’s handsome but dissolute bastard son, who tried to grab the throne after Charles’ death and had his head cut off for treason.
The lively lineage of one of Britain’s premier toffs gives the lie to this week’s announcement that Burke’s Peerage and Gentry, which lists the genealogy of every royal and aristocratic family in Europe and the United States, is to include illegitimate children for the first time.
“No, it’s certainly not the first time Burke’s Peerage has included bastards,” agrees the guide’s executive editor William Bortrick.
“Charles II is famous for his string of children who keep British society well populated today.
What we are actually doing is starting to list the families of couples who have children but choose not to get married, which is becoming much more common.”
He adds: “Illegitimate ancestors are a different thing altogether. We have always listed those because they account for half the dukedoms in existence.”
That’s a mischievous exaggeration on Bortrick’s part but it’s certainly true that the British aristocracy can ill-afford to sneer at births on the wrong side of the blanket.
Charles II’s wife Catherine of Braganza could not have children so his mistresses set about making up for that omission – and the king was happy to recognise the resulting progeny by giving them titles.
Catherine Pegge delivered the Earl of Plymouth; the celebrated Barbara Villiers gave him the Dukes of Cleveland, Grafton and Northumberland as well as the Countess of Lichfield; the orange-seller turned actress Nell Gwyn provided the Duke of St Albans; and Louise de Kérouaille supplied the Duke of Richmond.
Some of those titles are now in abeyance – there is no longer a Duke of Cleveland for example and the current Earls of Lichfield and Plymouth and the Duke of Northumberland come from a different bloodline (the titles having fallen dormant and then been recreated).
But some of Charles’s bastard offspring founded productive lines. The Duke of Grafton’s great-grandson the 3rd Duke became prime minister under King George III, while another of his descendants was Princess Diana.
In fact she could trace her royal lineage twice over because she was also descended from the Duke of Richmond.
That remarkable fact means that Prince William should in due course be the first blood descendant of Charles II to accede to the British throne.
The Duchy of St Albans is also still going strong. The present duke is a blameless chartered accountant but his heir, one Charles Francis Topham de Vere Beauclerk, had 15 minutes of infamy in 1999 when he leaped on to the Woolsack – the Lord’s Chancellor’s throne in the House of Lords – to denounce the abolition of voting rights for hereditary peers.
He was banned from the Palace of Westminster for life, which didn’t stop him trying to enter the Commons in a by-election. He won 182 votes.
Another semi-political figure who can trace their ancestry back to the 1st Duke of St Albans is Samantha Cameron, wife of the Conservative Party leader. By coincidence – or possibly not, given the tendency of the upper classes to stick to their own kind – her husband is also descended from a royal bastard.
David Cameron can trace his family not to Charles II but to that other great sire of royal bastards, King William IV.
As Duke of Clarence the royal nicknamed “Silly Billy” set up home with a celebrated comedy actress called Dora Jordan and had no fewer than 10 children with her. Under pressure to provide a legitimate heir – his elder brother the Prince Regent was childless – he eventually turned his back on Dora and all but her youngest children were taken away from her. She died alone in France.
All their children took the surname Fitzclarence – the prefix “Fitz” from the French “fils de”, meaning “son of”, is traditionally used for illegitimate royals. The eldest George was given the title Earl of Munster but was tormented by the thought that he ought to have been Prince of Wales. He shot himself in 1842.
All Dora’s five daughters by William married aristocrats. One, Elizabeth, married the 18th Earl of Erroll, an ancestor of the peer murdered in the Happy Valley sensation in Kenya in 1941.
Meanwhile her grandson, the Duke of Fife, married back into the Royal Family when he wed the Princess Royal, daughter of King Edward VII. This is also the line of the family from which the Tory leader springs.
Another descendant is TV historian Adam Hart-Davis. He discovered the connection when he was doing some filming at Bushy House, the royal residence Dora was allowed to use while still in favour.
“It’s rather fun to be partly royal,” he told me. “I occasionally cut myself to see if the blood is blue.”
A group of people who clearly share his view that it’s rather fun to be royal are the Descendants of the Illegitimate Sons and Daughters of the Kings of Britain, otherwise known as The Royal Bastards.
Membership of this 58-year-old society, based in Cupertino, California, is open to individuals of any nationality who can prove descent from an illegitimate son or daughter of a king of England, Scotland, Wales, Great Britain or the United Kingdom.
“Please note that most lineages acceptable for admission to other hereditary associations will not quality for admission to this society,” it rather snootily insists.
“This is not a matter of accuracy but of accuracy and substantiation: only lineages supported by evidence that meets the standards of this society can qualify an applicant for admission.”
One wonders if they would accept Robert Brown. He claims to be Princess Margaret’s love child – and therefore 12th in line to the throne – on the basis of a hazy photograph and a sense that the parents who brought him up preferred his younger brother to him. So far he has struggled to make anyone believe him.
A surer candidate might be Judith Keppel, who shot to fame as the first big winner on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?
She was chiefly famous as a relative by marriage of Alice Keppel, mistress of Edward VII. But she is also a direct descendant of the 2nd Earl of Albermarle whose wife Anne was the daughter of the 1st Duke of Richmond – and thus Charles II’s illegitimate granddaughter.
Exactly the same ancestry applies to another member of the Keppel family – Alice’s great-granddaughter Camilla. We know this personage better as the Duchess of Cornwall.
She of course is set to become the first ever wife of a reigning monarch to be known as Princess Consort rather than Queen – so royal legitimacy continues to elude her whichever way she approaches it.
Nobody ever said it was easy being a bastard.
