The Royal Family: Icky

I’m no doubt preaching to the choir when I point out that there’s something kinda funny-looking about the royal family. ‘Buck-toothed, big-eared, horsey and inbred’ is probably nearer the mark. The shocking truth is that they are in fact all of the above.

The Queen and Prince Philip are both great-great-grandchildren of Queen Victoria – making them third cousins – as well as being second cousins once removed through King Christian IX of Denmark. Christian IX was himself Queen Victoria’s third cousin and had asked her to marry him before she chose Albert instead. Albert being her first cousin. Somehow, the fact that Victoria and Albert were both delivered by the same midwife makes it even ickier.

If you look at the (tiny) family tree below, you’ll see that the Queen and Prince Philip are also third cousins of King Juan Carlos of Spain – who is married to yet another third cousin’s daughter.

What is wrong with these people? Surely there are plenty of perfectly horsey fish in the sea?

Charles Darwin did a spot of research into inbreeding, spurred on by anxiety after marrying his cousin Emma Wedgwood, of the credit-crunched white-motif-on-blue-background pottery family. Back in the day – Victorian times, shockingly – this was quite the thing to do in order to prevent unsavoury sexual mingling with the inferior classes. Charles and Emma Darwin had a nice life and ten children, but somehow Charles couldn’t shake off the suspicion that there was something inherently… inbred and icky about his family. He spent years recording his children’s defects – ‘backward in walking & talking… attacks of shuddering & gasping & hysterical sobbing… makes many extraordinary grimaces’ etc etc – and eventually concluded: ‘We are a wretched family and ought to be exterminated.’

I’m saying nothing, but republicans may want to take note.