Guest fountainhall Posted April 10, 2011 Posted April 10, 2011 Although Songkran is clearly at the front of all our minds at the moment, we should not forget that most of us (all?) have missed out on that must-have invitation to the other event of the month: Britain’s Royal Wedding. What? You forgot about it? Well, be prepared, for an onslaught of media frenzy is coming your way. Surprisingly - or perhaps not – it is the Americans who seem to be going over the top on this one, much more than the phlegmatic Brits. The British Royals never cease to be the source of endless fascination across the pond. There’s a nice, slightly tongue-in-cheek article in The Guardian about those who will have the invitations in their sweaty palms and booked their seats to London on budget airlines – the members of the other European Royal Families, especially those who were tossed off their thrones a good while back. As the article points out, it all the fault of Queen Victoria (1837 – 1901), still Britain’s longest serving monarch, although the present incumbent is now hot on the former Majesty’s heels. Victoria is the one who threw the entire Court and Parliament into a mad frenzy when it was thought she was having a multi-year affair with her Scottish servant, John Brown, after the death of her German husband – indeed, it was feared that she had actually married him secretly (as portrayed in the excellent movie with Dame Judi Dench and Billy Connolly “Mrs. Brown”). Dear Victoria had so many children at a time when ‘one’ married within 'one’s' class, that the British royals came to be connected with almost every royal house in Europe – even, let it be noted, the Schleswig-Holstein-Augestenbergs, and the equally forgettable Schleswig-Holstein Glücksburgs! But then, Victoria almost caused the entire European monarchical system to collapse, 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. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/apr/05/royal-wedding-europe-royalty-invited The problems of inbreeding having had such a disastrous effect, those of royal lineage gradually learned the lesson and started marrying into the lower orders. Hence, in the fullness of time, Charles and Diana, Charles ("I wish I was a tampon so I can live inside you forever") and Camilla – and now William and Kate. Summing it up, a former editor of the Bible of the English upper classes, Debrett’s Peerage, puts it: Actually, quite of a few of the European royals today seem to be marrying PR girls . . . which makes a certain sense. They're often quite pretty and know how to present themselves, but, more importantly, they know how to sell, how to display, the couple, and the monarchy, and that's pretty much all it's about these days. So it all boils down to PR! And here’s me thinking it’s actually all about preserving the dignity and traditions of a 1,300 year-old monarchy! Quote
Guest fountainhall Posted April 10, 2011 Posted April 10, 2011 Two of Victoria's daughters carried the gene and one of her sons was infected as a result of it. As this chart shows, four of her granddaughters were carries, and three of her grandsons and six of her great grandsons were infected. http://www.sciencecases.org/hemo/hemo.asp According to this site on English monarchies, the first King of the English was Egbert. The site itself is rather confusing as on the page below it states he reigned from 802-839 A.D. On another, the reign is shortened to 827 - 839. Whichever it was, my subtraction is clearly as bad as my investment decisions! http://www.englishmonarchs.co.uk/index.htm Quote
