Question for (British) Royalty buffs?.... (1 Viewer)

[todd s]

My wife and I were watching some movie about royalty and it got me thinking about something. Do through the generations members of royal families become "commoners"? I mean if someones Great-Grandfather was a prince. An he had 3 kids who each had 3 kids and so on. How spread out would the wealth and status be for the Great nephews, neices who are not the eldest of the eldest. I know not all royals or lords are wealthy. But, even wealthy ones have limits of how disperesed their assets become.

 

[Richard Travale]

I have a friend who is in line for the throne(whatever that means)...if something like 400 people die that is.

Kind of a King Ralph type scenario.

 

[andrew markworthy]

I don't think there's a fixed rule on this. A decent rule of thumb would be that if you have less than 1/16th of genes in common with the monarch, then you wouldn't be considered part of the royal family. Thus, nieces, nephews and up to about third cousins of the monarch are in. Accordingly, a branch of the family could 'drop out' from being considered 'royal' over time. However, bear in mind that the majority of the upper classes breed amongst themselves (this explains the genetic abnormalities in the Hapsburgs, the haemophilia in the Russian royal family, etc) so 'dropping out' doesn't necessarily mean moving out of a rather small (over) priviledged world.

However, just to confuse matters, there is another meaning of 'commoner' as in not having a title or being heir to a title. Thus, we have the House of Lords and the House of Commons.

However, you can be in the House of Lords or be a member of a family whose head is in the House of Lords and still be a commoner. Thus, we have the confusing situation that e.g. Princess Diana was the daughter of a member of the House of Lords, but she was a commoner in the royal sense.

Hope this is of use.

 

[Jay Taylor]

Okay Andrew, I think I understand it all except for where the Lord of the Dance fits in.....

 

[andrew markworthy]

Right next to Duke Ellington

 

[Steve Schaffer]

But behind Prince

 

[Yee-Ming]

I've read up on this before, but can't remember the exact details now; IIRC the ones entitled to the honorific His/Her Royal Highness (HRH) are all children of the monarch, children of the monarch's sons, and if he's born that "early", the monarch's great-grandson through the eldest son of the eldest son.

To take the current royals as the example, Charles, Anne, Andrew & Edward are children of the monarch and are all HRH. The children of Charles, Andrew and Edward are also HRH, but Anne's children are not. If William has a son whilst his grandmother is still alive, that firstborn son will also be HRH, though I think his second son would not, at least not until Charles becomes King.

If we detour to a different branch of the royals, you'd recall the Duke of Kent, the Queen's cousin, is also HRH, as is his younger brother Prince Michael, since their father was a son of King George V, but their respective children (if any) would not continue to bear the title HRH.

As for succession, this is limited only to direct descendants of Sophia, Electress of Hanover, and who are not "Papists" (ie Roman Catholics), and consequently the list is only about 50-something long. Ironically the King of Norway is somewhere near the bottom of the list. I guess this would have to be revisited if the entire list gets wiped out (a la King Ralph as mentioned earlier), but I'd guess the House of Stuart would want to jump back into the fray...

The reason I looked all this up some years ago was because in Frederick Forsyth's book Icon, he suggested the restoration of the Russian monarchy, and his proposed candidate for Tsar was the aforementioned Prince Michael, grandson of George V, as he is (as are all the other British royals) related to the Romanovs, speaks Russian, is married to European nobility/royalty, yet was far down enough in his "own" succession that he'd probably be willing to forfeit that to take up the Russian crown.
That got me all curious about it and I found some interesting websites that spelled it all out. No doubt Google will throw up something interesting.