Confound their Knavish Tricks

One of the things I've spent the past couple of weeks doing has been "researching" (in that very specialist 2000s sense of "reading stuff on Wikipedia about"[1]) the British royal family, in service of an as-yet-unrevealed project.

Vaguely interesting things I've stumbled across (none of which are in any sense revelatory, and many of which you may know already, but which were either news to me or things I'd never fully realised before) include the following...

• While the present royal family may possibly be distant descendants of the Anglo-Saxon kings (in the sense that by now, pretty much anyone living in the British Isles could be descended from them), their best claim to the throne of England relies on the fact that the illegitimate grandson of Ethelred the Unready's brother-in-law happened to have a bigger army than Edward the Confessor's brother-in-law. Hmm.
  
  
• When a monarch who's previously been deposed but not killed comes back for a rematch and wins, the subsequent retaking of power is called a "readeption". Or at least it was once.
  
  
• While Henry VII may have been a Good Thing in that he ended all that tedious bitching between the Yorks and the Lancasters, his best claim to the throne was his descent by a dubiously legitimate route from Edward III's younger son John of Gaunt. Gaunt's children by his mistress, Katherine Swynford, were retroactively legitimised by the Pope (though specifically barred from the succession) when the two married late in life, in a move which was widely regarded as dodgy. (Henry then sensibly married Elizabeth of York, the older sister of the Princes in the Tower, ensuring that his own heirs were direct descendants of both York and Lancaster lines.)
  
  
• The Stuart kings after Charles I, and later the Jacobite "pretenders" to the throne (the disinheriting of several perfectly rightful monarchs on the grounds of their religion being yet another area where the current incumbents' claims to the monarchy can be seen as a little ropy) were directly descended from the Medicis of Florence, Charles' queen Henrietta Maria being the daughter of Maria de Medici and Henry IV of France.
  
  
• And speaking of France...
  • Louis XV, who came to the throne at the age of four, was succeeded 72 years later by his own five-year-old great-grandson. How often does that sort of thing happen, eh?
  • For the last six generations of the Bourbon monarchy in France, the male heirs were all called "Louis" and their wives some variant of "Marie". Someone really didn't have much imagination.
  • The two current claimants to the French throne (both perfectly legitimate, except for that small matter of France being a republic these days) are Louis XX and Henry VII.
  
  
• Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanov (of "nearly as many impersonators as Elvis" fame) was Elizabeth II's second cousin once removed. Somehow I'd never realised that before. It means the Queen's first cousin twice removed is a Russian Orthodox saint, and also probably shagged Rasputin. Funny how these things work out.

If you think any of that sounds complicated, you should see the family tree. The current heir to the throne is:

• the great-nephew of Edward "Nazi sympathiser" VIII;
• the great-to-the-fifth-grandson of Mad King George;
• the great-to-the-11th-nephew of Charles "Off with his head!" I;
• the first cousin 15 times removed of Bloody Mary;
• the great-to-the-15th-nephew of Henry "I'm 'Enery the Eighth I am" VIII;
• the great-to-the-17th-nephew of Richard "A horse! Aaaaaaayyy horse!" III;
• the great-to-the-21st-grandson (by two different routes) of Edward "Poker time!" II;
• the great-to-the-24th-grandson of Bad King John;
• the great-to-the-26th-grandson of the Empress Matilda;
• and the great-to-the-28th-grandson of the aforementioned William the Bastard.

I want the House of Wessex back.


[1] And while I'm rambling on pretty much at random -- we all know that "1960s", "1970s" etc denote particular decades, but is there any simple term that refers specifically to the first decade of the 21st century, rather than potentially to the entire century or indeed millennium? The nearest I can get is "twenty-noughties", but that manages to be simultaneously ugly and twee. ("1900s" has a similar problem, but at least you can only go 90 years wrong with that one.)