The Admin
We want to know your thoughts! The big wedding is coming up but... Should Prince William really marry Kate Middleton? Should royalty marry commoners or should they stick to other royalty? Let us know!
Until late last century, royalty did pretty much stick to other royalty, to use your words. It wasn't unusual even 150 years ago for first cousins to marry, because it's not like the pool of available royals has ever been a big one. The royal families of Europe are more inbred than lab mice and small town rednecks are extremely genetically diverse in comparison. It's only recently the family tree has started to fork. Queen Victoria of England had lots of kids and those kids married into all the royal families of Europe, making World War I one heck of an ugly family feud, and she's the reason all the European royal families were plagued with hemophilia about a century ago. King George V of England and Czar Nicholas II of Russia were spitting images of one another. Back in the early 1500s, Juana, a princess of Spain, married Phillip, the heir to the throne of the Hapsburg Empire. They shared *eleven* great-grandparents. At roughly the same time, Juana's brother and one of Phillip's sisters also married.
Focusing on the English royal family, there's precious little English blood flowing in the Windsors. Since the early 18th century, the English monarchs have been totally or primarily of German descent (it was more of a mixed bag prior to that, but still a lot of non-English/British in the gene pool). There's some Danish in there, and Prince Phillip hails from Greece (how much Greek is actually in him requires looking at his pedigree).
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