How Many Of Us

Are Of

Royal Descent ?

Have you ever wondered whether you are actually descended from Royalty?

Well you are!

Many years ago, when I was at grammar school, I began "bumping into things", psychologically speaking; you know, noticing things in the real world which were intrinsically there, but which weren't supposed to be, in a kind of way which was more to do with the narrowness of the teachers than anything else.

Like the world map on the wall in the Geography Room, where, plain as day, there in the west coast of Africa you could clearly see the outline of South America, accurate to a tee, long before you ever learned, or (as in the case of we oldies!) before it was even known, that these two continents had once been joined together.

Or looking up at the starry night sky, and asking the question: bearing in mind that the cosmos is supposedly infinite in extent, and contains an infinite number of stars, and that no matter how incredibly faint each distant point of light is, an infinite number of these incredibly faint points, infinite--without end, should still make the sky infinitely bright. So why's it dark, then?

We've all "seen" these things...but, using the brains which thankfully God gave us, I guess at the time we were always at least smart enough not to ask.

But then, one fine morn, I bumped into this one........

Now we all have 2 parents, right? We may not like them, or we may have our ups and downs with them, or we might love them to bits. But no matter what, we definitely have 2 of them. Yes? Well it sounds logical, doesn't it?

And on the same logic we have 4 grandparents, and 8 great-grandparents, and 16 great-great-grandparents....and so on, so that each time we go back a generation, we double the total number of ancestors which we have living in that particular generation.

Well that's straightforward enough, you might think. So what? But the problem is, that this simple logic just can't be right. Let's keep counting back....

Generations ago Number of ancestors of that generation

1   (parents)..............................................2

2  (grandparents)......................................4

3 (great-grandparents)..............................8

4 (great-great-grandparents).....................16

5..............................................................32

6..............................................................64

7.............................................................128

8..............................................................256

etc.......

So the number of ancestors you have in each past generation doubles, and doubles again with each generation you go back....until by 25 generations back in time, you've got more than 33 million ancestors living just in that one generation!

But......'owd on a minute (as we'd say in Yorkshire).... 25 generations is about 825 years, which takes us back to about 1170 AD. But.... there were only 2 million people living in England at that time!

And yet, according to the most basic common sense, we must have had over 33 million ancestors then living, in just that one generation, and further if any single one of them had not been born, then the chain would have been broken and we would not have been born. So how do we explain this problem?                                                                                                

Thankfully, the explanation is really quite simple. Suppose, just suppose, that your dad had been your mum's cousin. How many great-grandparents would you then have had? Well the answer is of course 6, where everybody else has 8.

And so, straight away, if your kin are all related to each other, then the actual number of real ancestors you have, starts to fall below the theoretical number.

And that's the key. Going back to 1170 AD, what you really have is 33 million different lines of descent (this must be so, because each individual on your family tree must have 1 mother and 1 father of their own---think about it!)---from only 2 million people.

In other words, you are directly descended from those 2 million people alive in 1170 AD, over 17 different ways, or 17 times over,( as 33 million divided by 2 million = about 17).

But the overall point is, that with an overkill factor as high as that, you are most assuredly descended from every single individual alive in 1170 AD who went on to have descendants--- including the King.

Especially the King, in fact, because with his resources, and therefore concubines, he had more opportunity to sow his wild oats than anyone else.

The reigning king at that time was Henry II. It is therefore as dead a certainty as you could ever conceive, that he was either your 21,22,23 or 24 times-great grandfather.

Of course, one potential objection to this analysis might be, "Oh yes, that's all very well...but... suppose the people in the past had just kept themselves to themselves, in their various localised regions, and never had any sexual contact with anybody beyond those regions. After all, people didn't move around much in those days, did they? And in this way, of course you would not be descended from Henry II if he lived (or procreated) far away from the regional locality of your ancestors."

But this objection is not valid. For if people had isolated themselves in this way, then by now, after over 800 years, there would have been such divergent speciation in groups of people from different parts of the country that the physical differences between them would be strikingly apparent.

Moreover, such differences would blatantly show up in genetic analyses, whereas in reality, accurate genetic tests hardly expose any regional differences between us at all.

We can be quite certain, therefore, that over the past 800+ years our blood has transgressed all regional boundaries and has thoroughly mixed---- and therefore that the conclusion, that you are overwhelmingly likely to be a direct descendant of Henry II, is correct.

Further conclusions of course follow from this: for instance, if you are descended from Henry II, then naturally you are also related to all the other monarchs, including the present one.

Note:  Of course this analysis assumes that you are not of African, Asian or other non-Anglo-Celtic descent.

If you wish to enter into this subject in more detail, then you can link below to my mathematical analysis, which also shows a table displaying your average chances (%) of being descended from any particular monarch.

---Michael Alan Marshall                    

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