The houses of Europe

Chapter 24 told you about the doors. Two roads to Plantagenet blood were tried and shut on the evidence, and they stay shut. This chapter is about what happened next, because the research kept climbing by the doors that held, and in the last days of July the summit stopped being a council of five or six crowns and became something else entirely: thirteen royal houses, twelve sovereign crowns, documented rung by rung and drawn house by house in The Royal Houses. They did not arrive together, and they did not arrive by one road: each house came in by its own door, and nearly all of them through the wives' lines, the two great streams meeting at last in the Hunt family.

The door the family did not expect was the Plantagenet one, and it opened in Kilkenny. Helen Butler, wife of the first Earl of Thomond and a documented ancestress on the O'Brien ladder, was a daughter of the eighth Earl of Ormond by Margaret FitzGerald, the Great Countess. Climb the Butler Earls of Ormond, and the first Earl's wife is Eleanor de Bohun, granddaughter of King Edward I through his daughter Elizabeth. There it is. The family that proved it does not descend from Edward III descends from his grandfather Edward I, by a different child, and the two findings stand together, each making the other believable. Behind Edward the line runs as the textbooks run: Henry III, King John of Magna Carta, Henry II, Eleanor of Aquitaine, the Empress Matilda, so that King Henry I, already in this tree through his openly acknowledged natural son Robert of Gloucester, now stands in it a second time by his lawful daughter, the two descents converging seven centuries downstream in one Cork family.

The Empress's mother opens the north. Matilda of Scotland was a daughter of Malcolm III Canmore by Saint Margaret of Wessex, which brings in the Kings of Scots in one line and the old royal house of Wessex a second way in the other. The Scots line runs through Duncan, the king Macbeth killed, and the lay abbots of Dunkeld, back to Kenneth MacAlpin, reckoned the first King of Scots, dead in 858. And Wales arrives by a princess: the Great Countess's FitzGerald line climbs the Earls of Kildare to Maurice FitzGerald the Invader, whose mother was Nest ferch Rhys, daughter of the last independent King of Deheubarth, and through her the line runs to Hywel Dda, the lawgiver of Wales, and to Rhodri the Great, who united the country in the ninth century. Ireland's three kingships, Leinster twice over and Brian Boru's Munster, are the previous chapter's story, and they stand level beside all of these.

The Continent comes in by a single extraordinary woman. Isabel de Vermandois, wife of the first Earl of Leicester, carried three royal streams at once, and her blood reaches the de Veres by her granddaughter's marriage to the fourth Earl of Oxford. Her father was Hugh Magnus, brother of the King of France, which climbs the Capetians to Hugh Capet himself. Her grandmother was Anne of Kiev, a Rus princess on the throne of France, daughter of Yaroslav the Wise of Kiev by Ingegerd of Sweden, daughter of Olof Skötkonung, the first christian King of Sweden: two crowns nobody hunting an Irish pedigree has any right to expect. And her mother was the heiress of Vermandois, the county that descended from Pepin, King of Italy, son of Charlemagne. The Emperor, who entered this tree by the long Flanders road, now stands on a second and shorter one, with his father Pepin the Short wired above him, and the count is done honestly either way.

Two more things came up with the crowns. The dukes of Normandy, whom Chapter 23 left unwired because the Clare-side step to them is flagged illegitimate and this family's rule does not bend for dukes, arrived anyway, by the front door: William the Conqueror's own father, Robert the Magnificent, and his line back to Rollo, the Viking who became Normandy, with Herleva the tanner's daughter of Falaise, the Conqueror's mother, standing in the line beside the duchess she never was. The Clare-side step stays unwired, and the contrast is the method in one sentence. And the barons of Magna Carta multiplied: eight of the twenty-five sureties now stand in the direct line, both Clares, Robert de Vere, Saer de Quincy, John de Lacy, Robert de Ros, William d'Aubigny of Belvoir, and Robert FitzWalter himself, the man the barons chose to lead them, Marshal of the Army of God. The family now descends from King John and from the leader of the army that forced him to seal the charter, which feels like the right way to own that story.

Above every one of these houses the wiring still stops where the records stop: at Rollo the pedigrees pass into saga, above Kenneth MacAlpin into the king-lists, above Rhodri into the early genealogies, above Pepin the Short toward Charles Martel, and there the note-only frontier holds, exactly as it holds above Alfred, above Brian Boru and above Dunlaing. Nothing on this page became true because we wanted it to be. The two shut doors of Chapter 24 are still shut; the thirteen houses came by other roads, each rung carried by the standard authorities and graded in the tree. And it is worth saying, before anyone is too impressed, that having these ancestors is not the achievement: almost everyone of European descent has them. Naming the chain is the achievement, and the note at the front of this wing sets out plainly what is rare here and what is not. And one rung from the bottom of all of it, unchanged, unmoved, stands a man named Damery, arriving in Bandon about 1690 from an England no record has yet named. The crowns are the view. He is still the door the family most wants opened.