The princess and the invader

Every royal house in this tree arrives by a woman, and none of them arrives with a better story than Wales.

Nest ferch Rhys was a daughter of Rhys ap Tewdwr, King of Deheubarth, the old kingdom of south-west Wales. Her father fell in battle against the Normans in 1093, the kingdom fell with him, and Nest, still a girl, was carried into the new world of the conquerors as a hostage. What happened next made her famous for nine hundred years: a king's son took her as a mistress, a Norman castellan married her, a Welsh prince stormed the castle by night and carried her off, and half the great families of the invasion turn out to descend from her. The medieval writers, who liked their women quiet, called her the Helen of Wales and blamed her for the sieges. The record suggests a woman surviving the wreck of her father's world with more skill than any of the men fighting over her.

Her marriage to Gerald of Windsor, constable of Pembroke, founded the FitzGeralds, and that is the road into this family: her son Maurice FitzGerald was among the leaders of the Norman invasion of Ireland, and his line became the Earls of Kildare, whose daughter Margaret, the Great Countess, married the eighth Earl of Ormond and stands in this family's documented Butler ladder. So the Welsh royal blood came to Ireland with the very invasion that ended Welsh independence, which is the kind of irony this tree keeps producing.

And above Nest the Welsh pedigree climbs into the deep past of the country: her father's line runs through Hywel Dda, Hywel the Good, the king remembered not for a battle but for a book of laws that governed Wales for centuries, and beyond him to Rhodri Mawr, Rhodri the Great, who united the country against the Norse in the ninth century. The lawgiver and the unifier, both in the direct line, both reached through a hostage girl who outlasted everyone. The Welsh ladder is drawn in full in The Royal Houses.