Meet the neighbours

Later this month, the continent’s royalty will descend on London for the party of the year. But who are they, asks Euan Ferguson, and why are they thriving in our apparently egalitarian Europe? So much goes back to Victoria, for good and for ill. Her descendants have sat on the thrones of 10 European countries, and still do in five cases. There are trails of her genes throughout, it seems, about 90% of all European royal lines, including the royal families of Spain, Denmark, Norway, Greece, Italy, and of Austria (Tuscany line), Hesse and Rhine (all three lines, of course). Not to mention the likes of Schleswig-Holstein- Augestenburg, and who could forget, Schleswig-Holstein-Glücksburg. Many of the living descendants will, as we speak, be calling from royal palaces to secure their EasyJet flights, clutching the Ticket of the Year. You’ve always got to invite the rellies, sigh. But if Victoria’s genes kept many of these dynasties alive, they also very nearly wiped them out. It was Victoria’s haemophilia gene, passed through her granddaughter to the Russian court, which led to Grigory Rasputin being called in to treat Alexei, ailing son of the last empress – Rasputin’s subsequent influence over Alexandra led to the fall of the Romanovs, the end of the Russian imperial family, and then their wholesale slaughter in 1918. All over Europe, lesser royal families began to topple: the state of European monarchies one century ago was, as they say in the history books, parlous; as they say in Scotland, their coats were hanging on a very shaky peg. Today, as much of the world gears up to celebrate, or at least watch, the forthcoming Westminster nuptials, and William’s continental relatives clutch those invites with varying degrees of decorum, a surprising number of European royal families have survived, even blossomed. They’ve survived war, tragedy and nearby revolutions. They’ve survived scandal – and, believe me, having spent time looking at their rambunctious pasts, our own first family’s travails make the Windsors look like the prissy milk monitors of European royalty. They’ve survived the rise of the tabloid, and of tabloid thinking. They’ve even managed to mate, properly, for once. After a

Posted by on April 9, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.