The Secret History of The Royal Family
A study in autocracy: who they really are and what is has meant for the world
You may think that the title of this article sounds like a conspiracy theory. Perhaps it has triggered in you a dim recollection of eccentric Facebook groups and fabulist web communities, in which there are fearful discussions of eight-foot Lizards attended by a bloodthirsty host of Satanic paedophiles?
Regrettably, given the thrilling potential of a narrative that involves inter-galactic reptiles and Illuminati Satanists, that is not what this story is about. This story is about who the Royal Family really are in their genealogy, and not just the British Royal Family, but the Royal Family, the sprawling family that spans the history of both modern nations and states now vanished, the family whose rivalries and psychodramas determined the shape of our world. And though this story is not about lizards or Satan, it is one of high-drama, cold blood and plots and that are most definitely not on the side of the angels.
I should state at the outset, for the register of interests, that I am a Republican; not in the US GOP sense, but in the political philosophy sense, I think that the Royal Family has had a profound and deleterious effect on national life. This is a fringe view, most people in Britain see the Royals as benign guardians of tradition and the timeless interests of the British people, a selfless firebreak against the venal schemes of the political class.
Such an impression is naïve. The existence of the monarchy at the summit of the British state distorts all aspects of British life, it entrenches the class system, which determines life chances, it is responsible for the form and attitudes of the establishment and its institutions, which are not politically neutral, it controls huge areas of land and dictates property rights, it preservers a muddled, inadequate constitution and, though it pretends not to, it influences government policy. And it is completely, totally, immaculately unaccountable to anyone, which is why this story matters.
Some years ago I was having a drink with an old friend, the writer Johann Hari, in a small dark café shoved behind Liverpool Street Station. Johann looked crestfallen, he had recently published his first book, God Save The Queen?, and asked me if I liked it, I said I didn’t. I had stupidly blurted out this blunt verdict without offering any context, or laying the ground first, and had to then engage in some furious back-peddling that looked like a witless effort to spare Johann’s feelings, rather than what it actually was – an attempt to explain that, despite the elegant writing and engaging narrative, I simply disapproved of the premise of the book, no matter how good it may or may not have been as a work.
God Save The Queen? is an exploration of the personalities within the Royal Family and the effect that the demands and expectations of being part of the monarchy has on them. It includes the suggestion that a young Prince William did not want to be King, it’s an attempt to humanise and understand the Royals.
I explained to Johann that I didn’t feel that the lives and personalities of members of the Royal Family were relevant to a discussion of the monarchy. Worse, I felt, is that to focus on personalities is to play the Royalist game, which both attracts public support by broadcasting a soap opera that the British people find entertaining, and deflects public criticism from time to time by sacrificing some prince or minor royal. It is the institution that is at issue, I argued, the public must be focused on the political implications of institutional monarchy, not on horse-faced aristos decked out in medals that they didn’t earn.
I was wrong. I have since come to understand that the personalities are essential, who the Royals are, their ideas, psychology, desires and jealousies has had a profound effect not just on Britain, but on world history.
So, who are they?
They are German.
This fact is well known, but attended by certain myths. The first myth is that the house of Windsor changed its family name from the German “Saxe-Coburg & Gotha” at the outset of the First World War. It didn’t, it took over three years, until 1917, when a German heavy bomber named the Gotha started raining 1,000 pounds of fire down on London and the family panicked that they had a branding issue.
The second myth is that their relationship to Germany is some ancient remnant of early European history, it’s not, it extends all the way into the modern era.
For decades popular wisdom in Britain would remark, often with a wink, usually at the time of some public embarrassment committed by Prince Philip: “Philip is Greek”. This confused me as child, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, husband to Queen Elizabeth II, tall, blonde hair, blue eyes, did not fit with my archetype of “Greek”. This is because Philip was not Greek, Philip was German.
Prince Philip was born in Greece, Philip was a member of the Greek royal family, but the Greek royal family is German. So is the royal family of Denmark, and Russia, and Romania, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Holland, Belgium, Norway in fact, at one time or another, most of Europe. If one understands the European monarchies as essentially a single, giant family, certain aspects of world history take on a fascinating new light.
In Britain, two Queens are central to the Germanisation of the throne: Queen Anne, and Queen Victoria.
Game of Thrones: The Stuarts & The Hanoverians
Queen Anne dies in 1714 and with her the Royal line of the House of Stuart is extinguished. Despite seventeen pregnancies, Anne has died childless, the realm is without a monarch.
Two major constitutional settlements had taken place during Anne’s reign, the first was the Acts of Union, which united the crowns of England and Scotland, creating the Kingdom of Great Britain; the second was the Act of Settlement, which would shape the future of the crown. Passed in 1701, The Act of Settlement sought to draw a line under a series of bloody and tumultuous religious conflicts by enshrining in law that only a Protestant could assume the thrones of England and Ireland. Not only are Catholics disqualified from acceding to the throne, but so is any Protestant who has married a Catholic.
When Anne dies without leaving an heir, Parliament has to scour the list of potential successors, searching not just for Protestants, but for Protestants who are not romantically involved with Catholics. The first ten candidates are out, then the next twenty; in all, a total of fifty Roman Catholics closest to Anne by primogeniture are disqualified from succeeding her. Buried right down in the depths of the hereditary records is the fifty-four-year-old Georg Ludwig, Elector of Hanover in Northwest Germany, who will assume Anne’s throne as George I, King of Great Britian and Ireland.
Upon George’s coronation, a rebellion to restore the Stuart Dynasty breaks out in Scotland, it is crushed within two years, after which George sees little point in hanging around in England, preferring instead to spend his time in Germany, administering his Principalities and engaging in the affairs of the Holy Roman Empire, the coalition of Princely Houses that comprise Germany and Central Europe. He dies after thirteen years as King of Britain and is buried in Hanover, it is said that he never learned to speak so much as a word of English.
While George is lowered into the ground, his son, George Augustus, accedes to the British throne as George II. Like his father, George is well into middle-age at the time of his coronation, and has a state to run in Germany. His first languages are French and German, with some English acquired later in life, he leaves affairs in Britain to Parliament, while he pursues the far more urgent business of German interests in the Austrian War of Succession. Riding into battle in Bavaria, George II is the last British monarch to command troops on the battlefield. He dies at Kensington Palace in 1760 and is the common of ancestor of every modern European monarch.
George II had outlived his eldest son, Frederick, and so it is his grandson, George III, who inherits his throne. George III is the first Hanoverian monarch to have been born in Britain and to speak English as a first language, though the family remains distinctly German: George is King of the German state of Hanover, his mother is Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg and his wife, with whom he sires no fewer than fifteen children, is Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, a Duchy in Northern Germany.
George III is harried by the violent furies of war and madness. There is a bloody conflict over the balance of power in Germany, the crimson drama of the French Revolution, the roaring guns and leaping flames of the Napoleonic wars, the euphoric birth of an Independent America, and with it the humiliation of England, its imperious governors stripped of their colonial bounties and hurled back across the Atlantic, thousands of its soldiers kicked into mass graves.
By 1811 insanity, and its limitless night, finally encloses George’s suffering mind. He is relieved of his powers and dies nine years later at the age of eighty-one. He remains the longest-reigning male Monarch in British history.
This brings us elegantly to Queen Victoria, granddaughter of George III, one of the most potent symbols of British Empire, a figure revered within the national consciousness.
The Grandmother of Europe
Victoria assumes the throne at the moment when Britain becomes the world’s leading industrial power, she is associated with the nation’s entry into the modern era, the towering pistons and chewing gears of the engines and factories, the grand scientific visions of Darwin and Faraday, and the crushing weight of what the poet William Blake described as England’s “dark Satanic mills”. Although her popularity during her own lifetime fluctuates, her historical image is of a selfless and redoubtable guardian of “Britannia” and the British people’s mythical sense of destiny, an image that will later be shared by Queen Elizabeth II.
By the time of Victoria’s coronation in 1838, the European monarchies are entwined as a single, vast family, decedents of the noble German houses that comprised the Holy Roman Empire and whose members had studiously intermarried over the preceding centuries.
These relationships are not distant, they are part of a living continuum in German ancestry. Victoria’s grandfather had been the first British king to be a native English speaker and Victoria herself reportedly speaks with a German accent. She is close to her uncle, King Leopold of Belgium, who is an advocate for her marriage to his nephew (and her first cousin) Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.
A study of the betrotheds’ immediate family is revealing, if you are able to keep up with it:
Albert’s Father is Ernest I, Duke of Saxe-Coburg & Gotha, in the present-day German states of Bavaria and Thuringia. Victoria and Albert’s uncle, King Leopold of Belgium, is Ernest’s brother.
Victoria’s Mother is Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, sister of Ernest I.
Victoria’s father, Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn (4th son of George III) was Princess Victoria’s second husband. Her first husband was Emich Carl, 2nd Prince of Leiningen, a Prince of the Holy Roman Empire and ancestor of Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden, Felipe VI of Spain, and Constantine II of Greece.
Ernest I’s other sister is Princess Juliane, later “Grand Duchess Anna Feodorovna”, wife of Grand Duke Constantine Pavlovich of Russia.
One of Ernest I’s other brothers, Prince Ferdinand Georg August of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha has a son, Prince Ferdinand, who becomes Dom Fernando II, King of Portugal and a grandson who becomes Tsar Ferdinand I of Bulgaria.
Leopold’s daughter Charlotte of Belgium even becomes Empress of Mexico after an attempt to install an Austro-German monarchy over there, before the Mexicans acquire the good sense to shoot the Emperor.
These bloodlines twist endlessly through the aristocratic dynasties, monarchies and politics of Europe. They are almost a state in and of themselves, a network of houses that sits above the political structures of European nations, and which are further consolidated by the union of Victorian and Albert, whose prodigious reproductive abilities and accompanying inter-marriages earns Victoria the sobriquet “Grandmother of Europe” with devastating consequences for their subjects.
Victoria gives birth to nine children, these nine children produce no less than thirty-seven grandchildren, who will go on to populate the thrones of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Russia, Romania, Spain, Finland and Greece.
Of these thirty-seven, two merit special attention: Friedrich Wilhelm Viktor Albert, son of Victoria’s eldest child, Princess Victoria, and George Frederick Ernest Albert, son of Albert Edward, Victoria’s second child.
The Three Cousins
Friedrich Wilhelm Viktor Albert, “Wilhelm”, is born on the 27th of January, 1859 in Berlin. He is the eldest son of the German Emperor Frederick III and Victoria, Princess Royal of Britain, and the first grandchild of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.
Wilhelm’s parents are a close and mutually supportive couple, they are both great admirers of Queen Victoria, and aim to rule Germany as consorts, in imitation of Victoria and Albert’s relationship in Britain.
Frederick is a modern Emperor with liberal instincts. He perceives the German state to be too conservative and complicated, reliant on divisive and antiquated bureaucracies that hamper progress, he aspires to reform Germany as a modern liberal state, with the power of the Chancellor curbed and a greater level of representation for common people. But tragedy strikes, when he assumes the throne Frederick’s failing body is being devoured by cancer, his reign lasts just ninety-nine days. An edict that he signs prior to his death that would limit the powers of the Emperor and the Chancellor is quietly forgotten.
The histories have since argued that had Frederick lived, the First World War, and by extension the catastrophic rise of Adolf Hitler and the outbreak of the Second World War, might have been averted, instead, at the age of twenty-nine, Wilhelm assumes control of the German Empire.
Wilhelm’s birth had been full of grim portents, screams echoing around the corridors of the palace as doctors rush to sedate the Empress Victoria, the infant trapped in the birth canal in the breech position, his life, and that of his mother, in the balance. When the desperate doctors had eventually managed to tear him from the womb they ruptured the nerves leading to the arm and shoulder, Wilhelm arrived starved of oxygen, brain damaged from the chloroform administered to his mother and suffering from Erb’s Palsy, a painful paralysis of limb that will leave his left arm withered, six inches shorter than his right.
The young prince’s childhood is submerged in tears, pain and a biting, vengeful anger. The Empress, wanting to rescue her son from a cripple’s life of pity and derision, desperately tries to drill him through a fight against his disability, insisting on riding lessons from the age of eight, in order that he might grow up to project a full image of masculinity and mounted, Imperial power.
The riding sessions are torturous for the young child, who topples repeatedly from his pony, face smeared with tears and dirt and shame, only to be commanded to remount. As the anguished days on the riding track tick mercilessly over, Wilhem’s sorrow eventually yields to rage, and a biting contempt not just for his mother, but for everything English. He will later say, "an English doctor killed my father, and an English doctor crippled my arm, which is the fault of my mother".
As her eldest grandchild, Wilhelm is doted on by Queen Victoria, who is blind to his developing arrogance and wilful disobedience. Wilhelm spends his summers in England in the company of his grandmother, but rejects his parents’ admiration for the British state and liberal tradition, seeking to instead to distinguish himself from his English relatives by cultivating fantasies about the nobility of Prussian aristocracy and German imperial might, and venerating the image of his grandfather, Emperor Wilhelm I.
As he grows up Wilhelm’s relationship with his family in Britain becomes increasingly fractious. He especially disdains his uncle, Bertie (later King Edward VII), whom he refers to as “that old peacock”. His relationship with Bertie’s son, his first cousin George Frederick Ernest Albert, the future King George the V, is equally strained.
Wilhelm has developed into an egotistical young man, sharp and intelligent, but impetuous, belligerent and quick to take offence. He feels belittled by his English family and is beset by petty neuroses surrounding the relative size of their empires. David Fromkin, in his book The King and the Cowboy: Theodore Roosevelt and Edward the Seventh, Secret Partners writes of Wilhelm:
“from the outset, the half-German side of him was at war with the half-English side. He was wildly jealous of the British, wanting to be British, wanting to be better at being British than the British were, while at the same time hating them and resenting them because he never could be fully accepted by them”.
But on hearing the news of his grandmother’s failing health, Wilhelm rushes to Britain, and the Isle of Wight, where he remains at Victoria’s bedside until she draws her final breath, on a cold January evening in 1901. Together with her two sons, Edward the VII and Prince Arthur, it is Wilhelm who lifts Queen Victoria’s body into its coffin.
Edward VII dies after only nine years on the throne, after which his crown passes to George V. George’s relationship with Wilhelm remains tense, but he is very close to another of his cousins, the emperor of Russia, Tsar Nicholas II.
George’s mother, Alexandra of Denmark, and Nicholas’s mother, Dagmar of Denmark, are sisters. The boys are separated in age by just three years, share a close personal friendship, and an even closer personal resemblance, the same round, piercing eyes, high foreheads and straight, aristocratic noses. The pair are drawn still closer together when Nicholas marries Alix, Queen Victoria’s favourite granddaughter and George’s first cousin.
Wilhelm’s own relationship with his cousin the Tsar is more strained. He had travelled to St. Petersburg to attend the sixteen-year-old Nicholas’s coming of age ceremony, and made a characteristically offensive impression on the Russian family. He had also fallen in love with his first cousin, Princess Elisabeth of Hesse-Darmstadt, but she had rejected his proposal and married Nicholas’s uncle, Sergei, instead. Now, with George and Nicholas in command of the other two great European empires, Wilhelm seethed under the collected weight of all his inadequacies and resentments, a legacy of grievance that would hurl the peoples of Europe into death and catastrophe.
In May 1913 the three cousins meet in Berlin for the lavish wedding of Wilhelm’s only daughter, Victoria, named after his mother and grandmother. Wilhelm has invited the whole family to join the celebrations, twelve hundred guests assemble to witness his grand spectacle of Imperial splendour.
In the months after the wedding George and Nicholas exchange a series of fearful letters in which they discuss the escalating rancour between the European powers. In early 1914 Nicholas appeals in desperation to their elder cousin, “to try and avoid such a calamity as a European war”, he writes to Wilhelm, “I beg you in the name of our old friendship to do what you can to stop your allies from going too far!”
A year after the wedding in Berlin, The Great War breaks out, the largest conflagration that the world has ever seen, rivers of blood flow through Europe, the muddy battlefields swallowing the continent’s young.
“To think that George and Nicky should have played me false!”, Wilhelm screams, “if my grandmother had been alive, she would never have allowed it!”
Protests against German rulers erupt across Europe. In Britain, George V moves to pacify the hostility by changing his family name from Saxe-Coburg & Gotha to “Windsor” and stripping the Royal castles of their German flags. In Moscow, Athens and Berlin, however, the people are not so easily appeased.
In Russia, the privations of war are particularly severe: hunger, frostbite and a lack of ammunition decimates the troops huddled on the frontlines against Germany, behind them famine has forced many in the rural areas to eat the dead. Inflamed mobs burn homes and businesses belonging to Germans, and demand that Nicholas’s wife, Alix, granddaughter of Queen Victoria, be hanged alongside her spiritual adviser, the sinister mystic Grigory Rasputin. In 1918, as Lenin’s Bolshevik revolution overwhelms the state, George V directs the British secret service to rescue his cousins, but he is too late. The whole family, including the children, are led to a basement by Communist partisans and murdered in cold blood. The Russian Empire falls, and from its ashes will rise the Soviet Union.
With Nicholas toppled, the net begins to close on Kaiser Wilhelm…
As the course of the war turns against Germany, Wilhelm is increasingly caught in a trap of his own making. Faced with mutiny in the military and open rebellion in the streets, Wilhelm is forced to abdicate and flee to Holland, the ancient German monarchy in ruins. On November the 11th 1918, when the gun smoke clears and the final bugle sounds, only George V of Britain remains on his throne.
In the ashes of the war, the family that has ruled Europe for centuries struggles to rebuild its kingdom. A survey of its realms shows a map completely redrawn: Germany, the ancestral homeland and seat of its power is lost, its last Emperor, exiled, the royal houses dissolved into a Republic. The Austro-Hungarian Empire has fallen, and German monarchs have lost their thrones in Romania, Bulgaria and Greece. The communist wave that wiped out Nicholas’s Romanov dynasty now threatens the whole continent.
In the ruins of its German homeland, the family perceives a means of restoring its status and insulating itself against the red menace: it puts its weight behind the rising political force of Nazism, and its charismatic leader, Adolf Hitler. The exiled Kaiser Wilhelm, and his sons Crown Prince Wilhelm and Prince Auwi work towards placing the Nazis in power. Queen Victoria’s great-grandsons, Princes Phillip and Christoph von Hesse, join Hitler’s SS. In Italy, Prince Phillip’s father-in-law, King Victor Emmanual, assists the ascent of another fascist leader, Benito Mussolini, and the family now works to build a fascist block in which the monarchies will be protected. "Mein Fuhrer”, Wilhelm writes to Hitler, “I congratulate you and hope that under your marvellous leadership the German monarchy will be restored completely".
In Britain, the Royal Family is not immune from this emerging pact with fascism, the Nazi sympathies of George V’s successor, Edward VIII, is a matter of deep concern to the British government as angry clouds of war gather once again. But that, as they say, is a different story.
The story of the European monarchy in the run up to the First World War highlights the dangers both of concentrated political power and of hereditary power.
With little or no accountability, the interests of the monarchy and the interests of the state become uncoupled, with whatever the pre-occupations of the Royal Family might be from time-to-time taking precedence over the concerns of their citizens. I’m sure that this is not conscious on the part of the monarchy, but is simply innate within the system.
As we have seen, a hereditary system in which Royalty repetitively intermarries generates a supranational network of inter-related interests that transcend the interests of the individual nation state and its people. The hereditary nature of this system means that it carries within it the petty jealousies, rivalries, perceived slights, favouritisms and psychodramas that are common to most families.
This is where I was wrong to think that the institution of the monarchy is more important than its personalities, the two are inseparable. In the case of Imperial Germany, the institutions of the state, and its military, instigated the most catastrophic and merciless war that the world had yet seen, in order to satisfy the egoism and grievance of a damaged child. And if that sounds slightly reductive, the reasons for the outbreak of the First World War being numerous and complex, it was certainly one of the factors involved.
How does this relate to the modern world and our contemporary politics? Well, the European monarchies still exist, and although they no longer exercise or influence executive power in the way that they did a hundred and fifty years ago, they still distort the character of the state and its politics in the ways that I described, and their role is a self-serving one.
The monarchies are the earliest form of autocracy, but they are not the only form, and our world is becoming much more autocratic. The number of democracies reached its high point in 2016, with 95. By 2023 this number had fallen to 91, and the trend is downward. 3.9 billion people enjoyed democratic rights in 2016, today that number is 2.3 billion people, over the last decade, the number of countries that have fallen into autocracy is greater than the number that have been democratising.
This disturbing trend has in recent years threatened the world’s greatest democracy: the United States of America. As we have seen, the thing about autocracy is that it often expresses the grim pathologies of the autocrat, and if you want a study in self-serving hereditary power, of reckless politics led by id and suffused with historical grievance, you may want to look no further than the Trump family.