You remember these famous words from Shakespeare:
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
They are of course the opening lines of “Richard III,” and are spoken by the nefarious and hunchbacked king. Although he’s called “Gloucester” in the play’s text, he was a real person—King Richard III—and he was deformed, having scoiliosis (Richard’s deformity is confirmed by historical records, including descriptions by Thomas More).
I could simply rehash the history of this short-lived king (1452-1485), but I’ll let the authors of a new paper in Nature Communications (reference and link at bottom; free download) give you the backstory. For these are the scientists who identified his body, found underneath a carpark in Leicester two years ago; and they published what seems to be a definitive ID based on skeletal, dating, and DNA-based evidence. The genetic evidence is way cool, for besides identifying him, they could also get a good idea of what his hair and eye colors were, and check those against the historical record. King et al. say this about Richard:
Richard III is one of the most famous and controversial English kings. His ascension to the throne in 1483, following the death of his brother, Edward IV, has been seen as contentious, involving, as it did, discrediting the legitimacy of Edward’s marriage and therefore the claim of both of Edward’s sons to the throne. Later, as yet unproven accusations arose that Richard had his two nephews murdered to solidify his own claim. Richard’s death two years later on August 22nd 1485 at the Battle of Bosworth marked the end of the Plantagenet dynasty, which had ruled for over 300 years, and the beginning of the Tudor period. Richard III was the last English king to be killed in battle, he became one of Shakespeare’s most notorious villains, and is one of the few English monarchs whose precise resting place was lost: the mystery surrounding the fate of his remains persisting to the present day.
Historical records report that after Richard III was killed on the battlefield, age 32, his remains were brought back to Leicester and buried in the medieval church of the Grey Friars. The friary was dissolved in 1538 under the orders of King Henry VIII, with most of the buildings being torn down in the following years. Approximately 125 years later, a rumour arose that Richard III’s remains had been disinterred during the dissolution of the monasteries and thrown into the river Soar in Leicester. However, it had long been thought that this rumour was unsubstantiated and it was therefore expected that the grave of Richard III should still lie within any remains of the Grey Friars church. While historical records and the subsequent analysis thereof have long indicated the approximate location of the Grey Friars friary, and its likely situation in relation to the modern urban landscape of Leicester, the exact site of Richard III’s grave had been lost in the 527 years since his death.
Although Richard III reigned for only a little over two years, substantial historical information about various features of his life and death exists. These include aspects of his physical appearance such as having a slim build, one shoulder higher than the other and that he suffered battle injuries, which resulted in his death. In September 2012, a skeleton (Skeleton 1) was excavated at the presumed site of the Grey Friars friary in Leicester, the last-known resting place of Richard III.
How can you ID bones from remains that are over four centuries old? Well, first you see if the skeleton looks like someone who could be Richard III. And indeed it did:
Male skeleton, aged 30-34. Check.
Slim build, scoliosis (one shoulder higher than the other). Check.
Carbon dating consistent with historical data. Check: dated from 1456-1530 with 95.4% probability.
Skeletal injuries consistent with death in battle. Check.
That’s pretty good, for there can’t be many swaybacked people who died in battle at the right time, and of the right age, buried where Richard is rumored to have been buried. But to clinch the case, the authors did DNA analysis, extracting the genetic material from the skeleton’s teeth and bones. They used three types of DNA, sequencing them and then seeing if they matched with the known descendants of Richard (yes, there are some, for British royal genealogies were kept scrupulously).
Here, if you’re interested, are the genealogies of the several relatives of Richard whose DNA was matched to that of his putative remains (click to enlarge):
They used three types of DNA, and I’ll give the results separately.
1. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). This is the DNA in the mitochondrion, a cellular organelle that produces energy and has its own DNA molecule distinct from the “regular” DNA in the nucleus. Since it’s in the cell’s “cytoplasm” (the contents of the cell), mtDNA is passed on solely from mother to offspring, as all the cytoplasm in a fertilized egg comes from the mother. The father’s mitochondrial DNA is not inserted into the egg that is fertilized by his sperm, so that part of his DNA isn’t present in his kids.
Thus, if you’re matching mtDNA of the putative Richard III with his descendants, you need to find an unbroken lineage of female descendants that come from either Richard’s mother or his sister. And, fortunately, that existed. If you look at the right-hand side of the figure above, you can see that Richard’s oldest sister, Anne of York, has an unbroken lineage of female descendants giving rise to two living people, Michael Ibsen (a male) and Wendy Duldig (a female), who are now 14th cousins of each other. Since Anne of York and Richard III had the same mother, they would also have had the same mitochondrial DNA, and that would have been passed down to both Ibsen and Duldig.
And indeed, the mtDNA of these two living people matched nearly perfectly with that of the mtDNA from the skeleton. They sequenced the entire mtDNA (once a very hard task), and one of the relatives matched absolutely perfectly, base for base among about 16,500 bases. The other modern relative differed in only a single base—very likely a mutation that occurred in the intervening four centuries. The probability of finding such a perfect match between the skeletal sequence and a random modern British person (calculated from a British mtDNA database) was conservatively calculated at 2 in 1832. Of course this probability decreases if you allow for that one mutational difference in the other descendant. For all practical purposes, this is very strong evidence that Richard III was an ancestor of the two living descendants shown on the right above.
2. Y chromosome DNA. Y chromosomes are passed only from father to son, so to match the putative Richard III’s Y DNA with that from living people, you need an unbroken string of male descendants of Richard. We have that, too, and it’s shown on the left side of the figure above. In fact, they found five descendants (not named). What they found here, though was that they did not match Richard’s skeletal DNA!! Now you could say that this means that Richard was not their ancestor at all, but another hypothesis (more likely given the forensic skeletal and mtDNA matches) is that there was what evolutionist John Maynard Smith called some “sneaky fucking” in the British royal family that mixed some non-royal DNA with the royal DNA.
That is, somewhere fairly far back in the lineage (for four of the living male relatives had the same DNA), some male who was supposedly a descendant of Richard III was actually fathered by someone outside the lineage. In other words, a British royal female had a bit of a fling. Those liaisons are harder to detect when you use mtDNA (which makes the mtDNA more reliable for forensics like those in this survey), for while you always know who the mother of a child is (after all, she gave birth to it), you aren’t always sure about the father. (This is called, of course, “paternity uncertainty”.) But Y chromosomal DNA is good for determining in modern cases whether a male really did father a child.
The authors note that paternity uncertainty for a given child is about 1-2%, and calculate that in the many generations between Richard III and modern descendants, the probability that some sneaky fucking occurred in that lineage would be around 16%. It could of course be higher or lower depending on the frequency of royal flings.
The implications of this, given the genealogy of Brits, are potentially large, for they could mean that a big swath of historical British royalty was genealogically bogus! As the authors note (read this carefully, my emphasis):
One can speculate that a false-paternity event (or events) at some point(s) in this genealogy could be of key historical significance, particularly if it occurred in the five generations between John of Gaunt (1340–1399) and Richard III (see Supplementary Fig. 2). A false-paternity between Edward III (1312–1377) and John would mean that John’s son, Henry IV (1367–1413), and Henry’s direct descendants (Henry V and Henry VI) would have had no legitimate claim to the crown. This would also hold true, indirectly, for the entire Tudor dynasty (Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I) since their claim to the crown also rested, in part, on their descent from John of Gaunt. The claim of the Tudor dynasty would also be brought into question if the false paternity occurred between John of Gaunt and his son, John Beaufort, Earl of Somerset. If the false paternity occurred in either of the three generations between Edward III and Richard, Duke of York, the father of Edward IV and Richard III, then neither of their claims to the crown would have been legitimate.
But since we don’t know when or where the surreptitious insemination occurred, we can’t say for sure that the House of Tudor was indeed genealogically bogus.
And, of course, this doesn’t affect the genealogy of the present British family tree, which are Windsors, for the Tudor family tree died out and was replaced by the Stuarts, Hanovers, and then the present Windsors (formerly the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha; the name was changed in 1917 to prevent the Brits from sounding German). So, to my chagrin (I don’t like British royalty), Elizabeth and her offspring and her offspring’s offspring can still claim royalty.
3. Autosomal DNA. Most of our DNA is carried on the autosomes, or the set of 44 chromosomes (22 pairs) that doesn’t determine sex (that’s the other pair, either XX or XY). And we know from sequencing the human genome and from “association mapping” which regions of the autosomal genome play major roles in determining hair and eye color. If you sequence those parts of the autosomal DNA, then, you can get a good idea about a person’s hair and eye color even without seeing it.
And they did this for those parts of the autosomal DNA of the putative Richard III skeleton. Although there are no contemporary portraits of Richard III, one painting in the 1510s (the “SAL painting”) was made about 25 years after his death, and it’s shown below. It shows the king with blue eyes and brownish hair.
DNA typing from the autosomes shows that Richard had blue eyes with a probability of 96% and blond hair with a probability of 77%. However, those same genotypes can produce a variety of hair colors, including blond darkening to brown with age, as shown in the top part of the figure below. (All of these living individuals have the same forms of genes for hair and eye color found in the Richard III skeleton). Of all the existing paintings of Richard III, the one that most closely matches these traits is also the earliest one and the one deemed most authentic, the SAL painting.
The upshot: The authors combined all the probabilities: genetic (including the mismatch of the Y chromosomes but also the possibility of false paternity), skeletal, and dating, to calculate a likelihood that the skeleton really was that of Richard III. To do this they had to incorporate a priori estimates that the skeleton was his, and used two: a “skeptical” probability (2.5%) and a more liberal one (50%). Combining all these, they get a probability between 99.9994% and 99.99999% that the skeleton found was in fact that of Richard III. These are conservative probabilities, so for our purposes we can in fact be dead certain that the skeleton found was that of Richard III.
Envoi
Finally, according to a BBC story from yesterday, Richard’s remains will be reburied in the Leicester Cathedral on March 26 of next year, in this tomb:
They also provide a photo of Richard’s skull next to another painting of him, a reminder of our mortality (as if we needed it!):
UPDATE: A reader below points to a University of Leicester post showing a model of what Richard III would have looked like, based on the skull. They get the hair and eye colors wrong, for that information wasn’t known when the model was made. And it doesn’t look a lot like the painting. But what I really like on the site is a reconstruction of what Richard’s speech might have sounded like, based on his writing and on reconstruction of pronounced English of that time. It is very different from modern English!
___________
King, T. E. et al. 2014. Identification of the remains of King Richard III. Nature Communications, published online Dec. 2; DOI: 10.1038/ncomms6631
…he had lovely teeth…..
Not a lot of sugar in his diet I suppose…!
Excellent. Now it seems pretty well sorted we are definitely going to have to use this in our forensic reasoning module next year.
Its a good job there is no doubt about the paternity of any of the current royal family. None at all. That would be terrible.
I lived in Leicester in 1986 and probably walked near or over the bones several times. It’s a neat coincidence that DNA genealogy was developed in Alec Jeffreys’ lab at the University of Leicester back then.
And we can always use a reminder that the great weren’t always good.
But for British royalty and royalty in general he probably wasn’t that outstanding bad either.
I loves me some DNA.
The 1995 film version of Richard III with Ian McKellen, Maggie Smith and Robert Downey Jr. (among other notables), set in a alternative fascist England is an absolute must see.
Totally agree: Great film. Ian McKellen knocks Richard out or the park.
Absolutely, cracking stuff.
I’m not normally keen on that sort of thing, but given the historical inaccuracy of the play it actually worked much better like that (though “my kingdom for a horse” was a bit unconvincing).
I’m glad they preserved the original text of the play, but as you say “my kingdom for a horse” bellowed from a jeep is at the very least anachronistic.
It is my favorite version. The opening
scene in the urinal was greast.
I recorded that film off the air last week but hadn’t got round to watching it yet. Now I will!
It does a pretty good job of setting the play in the fascist 1930s, but I’d rank Olivier’s film of Richard III as an even greater must-see. Beyond the lush and exquisitely stylized middle-ages setting, the film boasts of the greatest villainous performances in screen history: Olivier’s sly, charismatic, and diabolically witty Richard.
I’ll have to see it.
Very cool, thanks for laying this out for us.
Love the intersection of science and history. What would be neat now is to have a forensic artist examine the skull and draw a face, based on the bone structure. Don’t tell the artist whose skull it probably is. I’ve seen examples of forensic portraiture and the results are stunning.
They did…
http://www.le.ac.uk/richardiii/science/facevoice.html
Great! That’s fabulous! Thank you.
Oooh, he sounds just like Brian Cox!
😀
I love listening to Middle English. If you get a chance, listen to someone who is skilled in the language, read Chaucer. I took a one year Chaucer and Middle English course when I was in school and we read Chaucer as well as poetry. The poetry from the North was much more tricky for modern English speakers to understand than poems etc. written in the accent of someone from London.
My favourite Middle English poem, Pearl because it contains the typical Mediaeval way of dealing with death and loss – here, the loss of the narrator’s infant daughter. Death was ever present in the mediaeval person’s mind since they experienced so much of it.
A discussion of Pearl
A bit on the plot of Pearl.
My high school AP English teacher was born in England and still had that lovely accent. It was a great pleasure to hear her read Shakespeare, Chaucer, and many poets. She was also a pro at speaking Middle English. Truly made the classics come alive.
Two extraordinary things arise from this
1/ one of the modern subject of supposedly male line pantagenet blood, was not of male line plantagent blood, indicating a ‘false paternity’ in the last 4 generations! So they must have had to do some genetic counselling – tricky stuff…
2/ Edward IV, his brother, was widely stated to be illegitimate – his father was short & dark & he was tall & blonde. His purported father was a bodyguard archer – I think King Louis XII called him ‘son of the archer’ & I recall a historian a few years ago saying his ‘father’ was in France when Edward was conceived. Richard questioned his nephews’ legitimacy, but was he also a bastard?
Edward IV was indeed conceived when his father was in France and his mother was in England, making Cecily Neville a fairly good candidate for the illicit bonking. As they were legally married, under English law, the children are still legally the children of Richard of York. Proving that Richard of York wasn’t the natural father would have made no legal difference to Edward IV’s eligibility to be king. Same for Richard III.
A few years ago a documentary was made tracing the genealogy of who would be king/queen if the natural fatherhood made a difference. It’s a bloke living in the outback of Australia, who knew of the lineage before the show found him. If he’s since died, he had a daughter, and grandchildren.
That’s HILARIOUS!
When it comes to royal rumpy pumpy the greatest exponent was probably King Edward VII (1841-1910) known as ‘Dirty Berty’ who fathered several illegitimate children and whose favourite mistress was Alice Keppel who just happens to be the great, great grandmother of Camilla Parker Bowles who is now the Duchess of Cornwall and the wife of Prince Charles.
That’s how duchesses have always been made, either as by-blows or promoted mistresses, if not both.
Henry I was even better. He had dozens of acknowledged offspring, who he foisted on his various subjects, which got them all sorts of dukedoms, earldoms etc. One was even married off to a Scottish king, Alexander I, although it seems the couple was devoted.
Charles II also had multiple acknowledged illegitimate children, but no legitimate ones.
I wouldn’t mind betting half the English nobility are descended from the result of royal indiscretions.
The Hastings family in fact.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britain%27s_Real_Monarch
There was a really funny bit where Tony Robinson took a hair sample thinking he could get it tested for DNA – but he cut it, so no root!
The present Prince Harry has bodyguards to prevent people taking his hair for DNA testing as there are doubts as to his father’s identity.
Cecily was also in France at Rouen when Edward was conceived. She went with Richard Duke of York and they lived there for about four or five years. Richard was off fighting for the month of July 1441 to 20 August 1441 which is the latest date Edward could have been conceived. However Richard was less than a day’s ride away and could have had a liaison with his wife. There is also modern evidence that women can be considered full term at 36 or 37 weeks, allowing Cecily a window of three to five weeks early delivery without a danger to the child being considered premature. Child birth at full term was also dangerous, but nothing was noted so he was not premature. There was no doubt by Richard Duke of York that Edward was his, and given his own loud claim to be the rightful King, this is crucial. Any claims at the time were made maliciously, namely by an unstable Clarence. No contemporary documents support those claims and most historians dismiss Michael Jones proposal on this matter. We cannot prove that Richard had the meeting above, but we have nothing that proves adultery either. A paternity test between the Duke of York and Edward IV as well as Richard lll with DNA would give us the answer.
Just a quick clarification. When Jerry refers to “descendants” of Richard, and of Richard as an “ancestor”, it’s shorthand for “descendant of the closest of Richard’s relatives who have living descendants with that part of their genome”. Thus, for example, Richard is Wendy and Michael’s great…great uncle.
I was thinking the exact same thing.
That reminds me – I get frustrated by people talking about ‘direct descendants’ as – really – you are either a descendant or you ain’t! But we all know what people mean when they say that… 🙂
…though there may be descendants …
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_of_Gloucester
Good stuff!
Just inhabiting pedantry corner for a second- the initial quote should be “son of York” rather than “sun” although obviously the son/sun pun is intended by the bard.
I’m not sure you’re right. I don’t have a first folio at hand, but every site on the Internet that I’ve found, including some quite authoritative ones, gives it as “sun”. The pun was certainly intended by the bard, but given the websites I suspect he wrote “sun.”
Alas! My apologies, of course, if I’m incorrect. I’m a bit confused myself now as I seem to find multiple references to both spellings on the interwebs and a few specifically refer to the intended ‘summer…son’ pun.
In keeping with Middle English: alas and waylawey 😀
The ‘Sun in Splendour’ was a symbol of the House of York. You may recall the Battle of Barnet (now a suburb of North London), fighting in a mist there was a confusion between the ‘sun’ of York & the ‘star with rays’ of Oxford –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Barnet
Site of the battle of Barnet…
http://barnetsociety.org.uk/component/k2/archaeologists-to-find-real-site-of-battle-of-barnet
I don’t think the biological illegitimacy of some ancestors along the way casts doubt on the legal status of certain monarchs. I think the son of the king’s wife is the son of the king, no matter who got her pregnant. The king could of course have the queen tried for adultery (adultery by the queen was, and perhaps still is, treason under English law), and thus disinherit the son (and execute the queen), but if the child was his wife’s and acknowledged as such by the king, then the child is the legal and royal, if perhaps not genetic, son of the king. Someone with better knowledge of English law might be able to say for sure.
I think you are right. Henry VII was partly king through conquest, & he carefully eliminated remaining scions of the Plantagents. Then there was 1688 & the Act of Settlement…
Though the idea of a king comes from choosing a member of the kin group – kin selection!
The OED on ‘king’-
As to the exact relation, in form and sense, of king to kin , views differ. Some take it as a direct derivative, in the sense either of ‘scion of the kin, race, or tribe’, or ‘scion of a (or the) noble kin’ […] Others […] taking it as = ‘son or descendant of one of (noble) birth’.
I’ve always thought it more than probable that Henry VII was the killer of the princes in the tower, after all he was the one with the most to gain. If he removed Richard III and had the bill stating they were bastards changed, then they were in front of him in succession to the throne.
Sorry, I hadn’t read this before I replied above – your assumption is correct. It makes no difference legally.
Adultery was not treason in England until 1542. It was not even treason as part of the 1534 Treasons Act. It was a sin, not a crime. The adulterous wife however could be tried on the basis that her actions endangered the future of the succession as she was placing a bastard on the throne. To do this she would be changed with another crime, that of imagining the kings death. If it could be shown that she was plotting with her lover or planned to marry him and rule through her bastard child, this was treason or presumptive treason if sex had not taken place but was intended. Anne Boleyn was caught under this law that dated to the treason laws of Edward I.
As you say a child in marriage was presumed to be fathered by the husband unless it was claimed otherwise by either party and if the husband recognized the child as his, that was the end of the matter. Penances did exist for adultery and husbands could imprison or put away wives for adultery as petty treason. Some of the few leading noble women who were tried and imprisoned for witchcraft are believed to have been suspected of adultery, this being a good way to punish them, when they were probably innocent.
Although by the time of Richard lll Parliament had made laws on legitimacy of succession, illegitimacy in theory
May not be a barrier even to the throne. Bastard kids could be legitimized. Parliament could be persuaded to allow a son of royal blood, born to a concubine to be declared legitimate and the kings heir. Henry Viii had his one recognized son, Henry Fitzroy declared his heir over his daughters in 1536. He died soon afterwards. And the first Norman King, William the Conqueror was a bastard, called so as well. As he took the throne by conquest it did not matter but it was used to smear his right as well.
I have no specific comment, but I would like to reinforce what many other readers have said recently: I like these scientific posts. I rarely comment, mainly because they tend to be beyond my expertise. Also, I live way out in the country, in the UK, on an internet connection that slows dramatically after people get home from school and work around late morning Chicago time. That means that I read most posts the morning after they appear, and other readers have usually already made any points that occur to me.
Well, the phrase “surreptitious insemination” takes the romance right out of it.
Thanks for the explanation. It’s fascinating how many inputs and variables go into the forensics and how they come together in a result with such confidence and internal consistency.
My paternal grandmother was a Somerset whose ancestors came to the US via Ireland via England from Normandy. My grandfather, her husband, was descended of a man who came to Quebec in 1679 from the Loire, not so far from Normandy. My mother’s ancestors were Clan Colqhoun; I more resemble her line, with light eyes, dark wavy hair and not-so-light skin.
Someday I will have the time and resources to do a complete family tree and genome. I’m confident that I would be delighted, surprised and freaked out to know how many times my family tree reconnects and how many “royal” lines are in the mix. Michael Ibsen’s being a direct male-to-male descendant of a king is really cool and his genealogy has been done for him! What a time saver! But in general, those of us with British and Western European are more closely related – and directly related more recently – to one another and to “royalty” than we can comprehend.
Great, great post – thanks again!
Interesting article and forensic process they went through!
Definitely have a listen to the “Voice of a King” section linked in the update. It sounds very different yet I could get the gist of what was being said.
A bit of a dumb question related to sneaky fucking as a legal, not a scientific concept — in traditional common law, was a child born to a married woman where the biological father was not her husband, considered legitimate? When a husband sued for divorce on grounds of adultery, did the child become illegitimate? And if a husband acknowledged a child as his own but the false paternity came out in later years, could that derail the genealogy of his descendants, or just be a salacious footnote?
That’s pretty much how it worked in Westeros, and those traditions sparked the War of the Five Kings. Cannot speak to *actual* Anglo common law.
I dont think there was any common law as such around it.
Illegitimate, in England, only was before marriage of parents. The father could disinherit them but dont think any specific law around it.
Think the main problem would be around some other relative trying to take advantage of it and nick the position. So would depend on who could best persuade/bribe the judges or get the most people to join in a brawl on their side.
Not long ago I read a (possibly apocryphal) story that the UK National Health had been gathering blood test data on parents and infants and then decided not to publish it — because the “false paternity” rate was so high (something around 30%).
This bit
“And, of course, this doesn’t affect the genealogy of the present British family tree,”
isnt necessarily true.
The current family trace their claim back via the tudors so if the line is broken far enough back it does undermine their lineage.
Apparently it depends on if you think the tudor claim was based on blood or right of conquest.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/theroyalfamily/11268218/Richard-III-DNA-shows-British-Royal-family-may-not-have-royal-bloodline.html
Sadly though i doubt we will be able to give them the boot based on it. Will just need to wait for Charlie to upset everyone.
Surely you mean wait for Chuck to be crowned. He’s already upset everyone hasn’t he?
Great post. “Sneaky fucking”. All of science needs clever euphemisms like that. Like, Casimir force sneaks in a fuck beneath the auspices of van der Waals.
I start to loose track after Grandparents so the English have my sympathy. Since Richard bit the dust back in the 1480s it is certain we had nothing to do with it as they did not find this place until the early 1600s. Even Columbus had not sailed close by as yet.
I am not sure but I think they used Mitochondrial DNA to show Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings had done their thing back in the late 1700s. It is not absolute because Jefferson did have a brother but that is not very likely.
I don’t think mitochondrial would have solved the Jefferson/Hemings situation since it is passed down maternally and he wouldn’t have been “pointed to”. Y chromosome analysis, however, would do the trick if a known male-line descendant of Sally Hemings shared with a known male-line descendant of Thomas J.
Thomas’ acknowledged children were both daughters. The Hemings’ ancestry through the Jefferson paternal line was established using Y-chromosomal markers from Thomas’ uncle and his descendents.
In addition, the Hemings family has maintained from the earliest days that Thomas fathered Sally’s children (although not all).
Thanks for following up on that.
Interesting that ‘wrong Ys’ in even minor nobility can pinpoint who was sleeping around, the identity of offspring and perhaps even the bed-partners in particular f-events. Very scandalous for revered historical figures, no? I can understand why the genealogies of the Y-chromosome donors are not identified in the Nature report. But with such juicy gossip, can the DNA paparazzi be far behind. Will the light of day reach the nights of history?
Bit of further pedantry: Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was Prince Albert’s family. The British ruling family up until Victoria’s marriage was Hanover.
And yes, I do have Prince Albert in a can.
So if we include matrilineal descent, the current royal family is still the Hanovers.
I always figured they did count the mother’s line and always imagined the Stuarts would have lived on if any of Anne’s children had survived. I had no idea they didn’t.
The Hanovers weren’t the closest relatives after Queen Anne died, they were the closest Protestant relatives. Catholics were legally barred from the English throne.
When George I came to England to take up the kingship, he left his wife behind but brought his two mistresses.
Heavens forbid a Catholic of the stuart line make an appearance!
Or for that matter, of the Plantagenet line!!
Amusingly, the Catholic heir to the Stuart line will be Sophie, Princess of Liechtenstein. As far as I know, she has no plans to invade Britain and claim the throne.
This is great. I followed this since they first announced finding the skeleton in the parking lot (in a weird coincidence under a parking space marked with a large “R” for reserved).
Is there any chance that they will figure out when the “paternity breaks” occured?
Yes! It is even possible to infer who was hanging out with the queen at the time. See my comment above. It is culturally sensitive but obviously there is no law or technical impediment protecting ancestors, real or imagined. If Adam has fallen, why not Henry VIII?
By the way, The Hanoverian (Windsor) claim to the throne arises by descent from the Stuarts (specifically James VI and I), which arises by descent from the Tudors (Henry VII), which arises by descent from John of Gaunt. So depending on just where that funny Y chromosome entered the picture, it may be that all the subsequent ruling houses lack a legitimate claim.
Doesn’t affect the Royal succession since that’s defined by Acts of Parliament. Those Acts are of course informed by the genealogy, but once they’re passed, that’s the law of the land regardless of whether the genealogy was correct. Parliament is sovereign. In this case the relevant legislation is the 1701 Act of Settlement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_of_Settlement_1701
However, the Royal succession isn’t the only thing potentially at stake here. There is also the Dukedom of Beaufort, and the two subsidiary titles of Earl of Worcester and Marquess of Worcester.
The bald facts of the matter are these:
********************
Firstly:
The body in the car park, based on a wealth of evidence, appears to genuinely be that of Richard III. They know what Y chromosome is carried by this body.
Secondly:
By tracing back from multiple independent descendents, we also know what Y chromosome was carried by Henry Somerset, 5th Duke of Beaufort (who was also the 3rd Marquess and 7th Earl of Worcester). Henry Somerset had inherited these titles by descent from Charles Somerset, 1st Earl of Worcester – it’s basically the same title, but got upgraded a couple of times en route.
Thirdly:
Richard III and Henry Somerset are both supposedly direct male descendants of Edward III, and should share a Y chromosome. They don’t.
********************
Given the above three facts, and assuming only one mispaternity event, then there are ONLY four possibilities.
1) The mispaternity was somewhere in the royal line of descent between Edward III and Richard III. (4 generations).
Implications: not huge, since as I said above, Royal succession isn’t simply genealogy, you have Acts of Parliament that define the succession legally independent of genealogy.
2) The mispaternity was somewhere between Edward III and Charles Somerset,1st Earl of Worcester. (5 generations)
Implications: The Worcester/Beaufort succession is unaffected, it’s just that they’re not really who they think they are, and the whole dynasty of them are really descended from the milkman (or whoever).
3) The mispaternity was somewhere between Charles Somerset, 1st Earl of Worcester and Henry Somerset, 1st Duke of Beaufort. (6 generations)
Implications: The Beaufort succession is unaffected, but the Worcester succession’s gone wrong. Current Duke of Beaufort might not be entitled to his subsidiary titles.
4) The mispaternity was somewhere between Henry Somerset, 1st Duke of Beaufort and Henry Somerset, 5th Duke of Beaufort. (4 generations)
Implications: Beaufort and Worcester successions are both screwed up, and the guy who thinks he’s the Duke of Beaufort… isn’t.
Duke of Beaufort isn’t such a household name as the Queen, but it’s still a multi-hundred-million quid estate. If I were a descendent of any of the earlier Worcesters or Beauforts, I might be tempted to push for some further testing.
This could all yet end up in a hilarious and interesting court case.
If I had to put a finger in the air and guess the most likely explanation, I’d note that Charles Somerset – the first of the Worcester/Beaufort line – was actually a bastard son of one of the Somersets by his mistress Joan Hill. Charles was later legitimised many years after his father’s death and given his own new title, which is the start of the current dynasty of Worcesters/Beauforts. I suspect that’s probably the weakest link in the chain – after all, if you’re the mistress of a noble and fall pregnant, you’re going to want to claim it’s the nobleman’s son.
Looks a bit like Lord Farquaad.
A bit of Googling reveals I am not the only one to see the resemblance.
There is over at YouTube a glorious clip of Peter Sellers doing the Beatles “A hard days night ” in the style of Olivier performing Richard Oil..
And don’t you just love predictive text… Sorry!
Applied modern technology is increasingly commonplace nowadays but I still get the occasional frisson from reading PCC’s widely varied post such as this one, shakes my naturalism to its core 😉 Thank you for the delightful post.
Thank you sir for a way way enlightening post.
That’s a nice analysis by the authors, pretty robust and conclusive I would say. Very cool; thanks for bringing this work to my attention!
In the context of modern day, it seems amazing to me to think that a maternal line could be unbroken for 15+ generations. Of course, parents used to have a lot more children than they typically do now (in the UK).
There is some woo associated with this discovery. The Secretary of the Richard III Society, Phillippa Langley made a private visit to the site and received an intuition that Richard lay in a particular spot beneath the tarmac although ground penetrating radar had revealed nothing. The bones were discovered on this spot on the first day of the dig.
Yes, I remember her saying that. I couldn’t believe she would say for the world to hear when I heard it.
Best euphemism of the year (thanks, boggy): rumpy pumpy! Can’t you just see it?
Thanks for the summary. I was prompted to download the paper to read on my long flight this weekend.
Hang on a minute, I’m pretty sure the bloke on the right is Yorick!
Alas!
I told him gambolling would be the death of him.
Ha, ha, good one!
(I’ll admit you sent me to the monologue to “remember” that.)
I found this post fascinating in many different ways. DNA, mitochondria, facial reconstruction, language reconstruction.
I even liked the tomb, I think it’s a really cool design. It would make a good bench too. I’d like one just like it for myself, except I plan to be cremated. I even like the cross. Not for the religious purposes, but as a design element.
Lots to enjoy in this post.
Great post all the way around, with many different angles to it! Clear description of the science, learned a lot from this, thanks!
An interesting false paternity may exist in the Romanov line as well. There is grave doubt that Catherine the Great’s son was the biological child of her husband, the Romanov Tsar. So the Romanov dynasty would have ended in the 1700’s, and neither the last Tsar, Nicholas II, nor his son Alexei, were Romanovs.
I’d like to see what that study would show, if it’s ever done!
Yes, it would be hard to narrow down the father of any of Catherine the Great’s children to anything fewer than about half a dozen names.
Is Mister Ed one of them?
oddly enough Catherine the great’s son by putative father the tzar, looked more like putative father then actual dad.
and let’s not forget tzar had taken up w another woman at this point in history.
‘pini
“And, of course, this doesn’t affect the genealogy of the present British family tree, which are Windsors, for the Tudor family tree died out and was replaced by the Stuarts, Hanovers, and then the present Windsors …”
Well, not really. The Stuarts succeeded the Tudors on the English throne only because they were also descended from Henry VII (Tudor), through his daughter Margaret’s marriage to James IV of Scotland. And the Hanoverians succeeded the Stuarts because they were also descended from James VI (Stuart) through his daughter Elizabeth’s marriage to Frederick V of Bohemia. So purely in terms of descent, the whole chain right to the present day is still dependent on Edward III and John of Gaunt. In terms of legality, it’s simply that the 1701 Act of Settlement effectively re-set the baseline by declaring that the succession would pass next to the house of Hanover, thus rendering all questions of legitimacy further back down the line moot.