Cousin William

Let me begin by deflating this properly, because a claim like that deserves it. At thirteen generations' distance, nearly everyone with roots in these islands is a cousin of the Prince of Wales. That is simply how ancestry arithmetic works, and this Journal has said so before about grander names than these. What is uncommon, as always on this site, is not the kinship. It is the paper: a named chain, rung by rung, on both sides, checked.

So here it is. William, Prince of Wales, and I are thirteenth cousins exactly, and our most recent common ancestors are not any of the crowned heads on the charts. They are a churchman and his wife, already long settled in this family's tree: Adam Loftus, Archbishop of Dublin, first Provost of Trinity College, builder of Rathfarnham Castle, and Jane Purdon. By a symmetry almost too neat to print, the Archbishop sits exactly fourteen generations above each of us. He is my twelve times great-grandfather, and William's too.

The two lines part company in the Archbishop's own household, at two of his daughters. Mine runs from Catherine Loftus, who married Sir Francis Berkeley of Askeaton, and comes down the ladder this site has already climbed in full: Berkeley to Taylor to the Westropps of Attyflin, to the Hunts of Curragh, to the Lanes, the Whites, the Joneses of Drombeg, and so to a kitchen in Cork. William's runs from her sister Anne Loftus, who married Sir Henry Colley of Castle Carbery, and goes down through the Colleys to the Wellesleys, the family of the Duke of Wellington, then by Anne Wellesley into the Cavendish-Bentincks, to Cecilia, mother of the Queen Mother, and so to Elizabeth the Second, to Charles, and to William. Two sisters in one Dublin household, four hundred and twenty-one years, and twenty-six rungs between their descendants before a Damery and a Prince of Wales can shake hands as equal cousins.

And for once the honest flag flies on the other side of the fence. Every rung of my half is documented in the family tree, Catherine's included, double-sourced. The rung that needs a footnote is William's: Anne Wellesley was born in 1788 to the Marquess Wellesley's mistress, the actress Hyacinthe-Gabrielle Roland, six years before their marriage. It changes nothing about the blood and this site would never hold it against her, having recently celebrated a tanner's daughter of Falaise, but the record is the record, on royal rungs as on ours. For completeness: William's side of the chain runs through his father, King Charles, not through his mother, Diana.

This site has long enjoyed telling how the Duke of Wellington hangs off the Loftus line. It turns out the same road, followed patiently to its end, arrives at the heir to the throne. The wall at the head of the Damery name still stands, the crowns still came up the other side of the tree, and none of this will get me into the Garden Party. But the family that spent a month proving its descent from the kings of half of Europe can now add, quietly, at the bottom of the page: and the future king is my cousin, thirteen times over, exactly.