I knew he was but mindful of that knife I thought it wiser to keep quiet

I knew he was; but mindful of that knife, I thought it wiser to keep quiet.. They are as British as the rest of us, many of whom, anyway, have foreign immigrant strains in our pedigree.That chap in the Glasgow pub was talking nonsense. The German origins of the Royal Family have long been irrelevant. Whereas we know little or nothing about our forebears, Queen Victoria could declare that she could never forgive her predecessor Elizabeth I for “her cruelty to my ancestress, poor Mary Queen of Scots”.She said that in English of course, for the little, German Princess became a very British queen. Not many of us can trace back our ancestry for more than a thousand years; and though the young royals will all have some bloodlines that get lost quite early in the mists of time – in this respect being just like the rest of us – on their royal side they go back beyond Stuarts and Tudors to Plantagenets, Normans, the MacMalcolm kings of Scotland and the Saxon kings of Wessex and England – all that before they even consider their connections with European royalty.

Instead, the young royals may now marry for love, and do so, even if the evidence suggests that this doesn’t necessarily make for happy or enduring relationships. But what it does mean is that the generation of royals now in their twenties or teens are more British, by birth and heredity, than any have been for centuries.They have the Queen and Prince Philip as grandparents of course, but on the other side of their genealogical table, you find names like Spencer, Phillips, Ferguson, Rhys-Jones. Only one of these names, Spencer, is aristocratic, and the Spencers themselves are very English, having first come to prominence as Midlands sheep-farmers in the 16th century.Most of the other grandparents of the young royals are solidly, comfortably middle-class and British, without foreign connections. When he eventually succeeds to the throne, Prince William will be the most English monarch since Queen Anne, and the most English king since Edward VI, Henry VIII’s son by his marriage to Jane Seymour, daughter of a West Country landowner.And through his great-grandmother, the late Queen Mother, he also has Scottish blood, less remote than that of the Stuart kings There remains of course a difference. But nobody can doubt that, ever since he served in the Royal Navy, he has also been wholeheartedly British.Royal exclusivity is now dead, since members of the Royal Family are no longer required to restrict their choice of wife or husband to members of other royal families. To do so would be to emphasise their difference from the rest of us, and since the reign of George V, it has been the policy of our Royal Family to present themselves as being in tune with Middle Britain The aim is to be like us, only royal So arranged marriages to foreigners are out.

Prince Philip is connected to almost every royal and imperial family, being for instance also a descendant of the Romanovs, the Tsars of All the Russias. (Christian’s sister Alexandra, incidentally, married Queen Victoria’s eldest son, the future Edward VII.)Subsequently, the Greek royals usually took German wives or married their daughters to German princes, for the old reason: that there were lots of German royals about. A descendant of Queen Victoria (like almost every European royal, even King Juan Carlos of Spain), he is a member of the Greek Royal Family who, however, are not Greek but Danish, a son of King Christian IX of Denmark having been elected King of Greece, as George I, in 1863. It would, of course, have been highly inappropriate for her, aged 13 in 1939 and the heir to the throne, to have been taught German In any case her mother would not have permitted it. She was anti-German, two much-loved brothers having been killed in the 1914-18 war.Prince Philip, on the other hand, speaks good German and has close German relatives.

Naturalised British, and known as Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten at the time of his marriage to the Princess Elizabeth in 1947, his heredity is complicated. So two sons of George V, the Duke of York and the Duke of Gloucester, married British women. York’s wife was Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, daughter of the Earl of Strathmore. After his brother’s abdication, he became George VI and she Queen Elizabeth, known to most people later as the Queen Mother. Being the daughter of a Scottish aristocrat, she regarded herself as a Scot, though her mother was English and she was herself born in England.Consequently, our Queen, being her daughter, is more British, or Anglo-Scottish than any reigning monarch for centuries. So completely has the German heritage been sloughed off – despite what my friend in that Glasgow pub thinks – that on her state visit to Germany this week, the Queen made her speeches in English, even though when she visits France she delivers them in French.It seems that her German isn’t good enough. His son became, eventually, Earl Mountbatten of Burma, and his great-nephew is Prince Philip.The shock of the Great War made all German associations suspect, while the collapse of the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian Empires left the British monarchy suddenly isolated.