9 Comments »

Bill said:
God Save King George! Huzzah!
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SaltyDroid Reply:
July 7th, 2009 at 10:30 pm
It's too late for Gods & Kings!
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# 5 July 2009 at 7:42 pm

Bill said:
Er… oh yeah.
Anyway, fuck him – he was German anyway. Him and his headless Hessian troopers.
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# 9 July 2009 at 8:45 pm

froylein said:
Britain hasn't had an English king since the early Middle Ages. :) But whatever the country of origin, inbreeding insured that, hmmmm, pecularities stayed in the family.
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Bill Reply:
July 10th, 2009 at 8:04 am
Ooooh – contentious. Depends how you define "English", which is difficult, as it traditionally refers to a screwed up mess of Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, Norsemen, Normans, Celts, Ancient Britons, Romans and quite a few other bits and pieces we picked up on the way.
If you're looking for monarchs with English parents (i.e., both born in England rather than Scotland, Wales, Ireland or Somewhere Foreign) you do have to go back quite a long way. We can do you Queens: Anne and Mary II (of William and Mary) both had English parents. As did Elizabeth I, come to think of it.
For a king, you probably have to go back to Henry VII, who, although he was born in Wales and had a Welsh great-grandfather, had English parents – and, in any case, the Welsh and English nobility were so intertwined that it doesn't really make sense to see them as different nations at that level of society. He kicked off reigning in 1485, which is very, very late Middle Ages – in fact, you could probably call him the last medieval English king. His son, Henry VIII, also had all-English parentage. However, Elizabeth and the Henrys were only monarchs of *England*, not "Britain"
It's also a bit iffy to talk about "Britain" having "a" king in the Middle Ages (let's confine ourselves to the period after 1066 to make things simple), because there was a separate king of Scotland until 1603 (by which time the Middle Ages were well and truly over), when James VI of Scotland inherited the English Crown from Elizabeth I and became James I of England, too (so he had two numbers, which is kind of cool). "Britain" was only a single political entity between 1707 (the formal Act of Union, when we took over, er, I mean "united with" Scotland) and 1921, when most of the Irish buggered off.
Anyway, with the odd exception, "Britain" (taking that to mean the UK) has never really had an English monarch at all, ever. The current one is actually 100% "British" (as opposed to English: her mother was a Scot).
To be fair to them, they've never actually been that inbred – much less so than the royal families of (say) France, Spain and Russia, who had all sorts of incest-related medical problems. Compared to most European royals, our lot have been relatively unfussy about marrying "beneath" them – Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, for example, or James II and Anne Hyde. The old gene pool ain't in bad shape.
***LECTURE ENDS****
You can ascribe the ridiculous length and comprehensiveness of that reply (when a simple "bugger ye off, colonial rapscallion" would have done) to the fact I'm putting off calling my accountant.
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froylein Reply:
July 10th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
The English monarchy is closely related to that of Russia and the house of Hanover; the later Tsars more precisely. A friend of mine used to live in the neighbourhood of one of the Hanover princes during her studies, and he'd ring at her door regularly to offer her mole traps and apple cores.
You might enjoy "Royal Blunders" by the British historian Geoffrey Regan. It's a highly amusing and detailled account of the inbreeding and resulting pecularities of European monarchs and nobility. The very King George mentioned above believed, among other things, he had given birth to a pillowcase and eventually even knighted it.
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SaltyDroid Reply:
July 11th, 2009 at 12:13 am
Good thing we were pre-nuclear … or all the humor of inbreeding and knighted pillowcases would be lost forever.
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SaltyDroid Reply:
July 10th, 2009 at 11:34 pm
I hope your accountant is English …
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Bill Reply:
July 10th, 2009 at 11:45 pm
Welsh, actually, as I'm part of the occupying power in North Wales.
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# 10 July 2009 at 5:09 am

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