Richard III's DNA throws up infidelity surprise

[CatWoman]

Analysis of DNA from Richard III has thrown up a surprise: evidence of infidelity in his family tree.

Scientists who studied genetic material from remains found in a Leicester car park say the finding might have profound historical implications.

Depending on where in the family tree it occurred, it could cast doubt on the Tudor claim to the English throne or, indeed, on Richard's.

The study is published in the journal Nature Communications.

But the scientists would not be drawn on what meaning it might have - if any - for the current Royal Family, as it was still unknown when the break, or breaks, in the lineage occurred.

In 2012, scientists extracted genetic material from the remains discovered on the former site of Greyfriars Abbey, where Richard was interred after his death in the Battle of Bosworth in 1485.

'Overwhelming evidence'

Their analysis shows that DNA passed down on the maternal side matches that of living relatives, but genetic information passed down on the male side does not.

However, given the wealth of other details linking the body to Richard III, the scientists conclude that infidelity is the most likely explanation.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-30281333

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. This is interesting but I hardly think it will lead to any real change.

I was thrilled when these bones were determined to be those of Richard III. And now he'll get a proper burial in a place where we can visit.

my dear CatWoman!

[jwirr]

32. In the article the one thing they talked about was the paternal DNA that now is leading to someone

other than the line they expected. A new mystery.

[Pacifist Patriot]

2. I'm fascinated by both Richard III and genetics, but...

the headline editor at BBC is dreadful! Infidelity a surprise? Not to anyone who's read any history...or anyone else for that matter. LOL!

[Skittles]

42. I always laugh at the idea people can trace their family history way, way back

only if you're following the mothers!!!

[haele]

3. Not suprising. After Edward II, things got a bit messy when it came to who should be king.

Bastards everywhere, multiple marriages (and annulments) and spouses spending a long, long time away from each other. Any "noble" within four removes of whomever sat on the throne of England during that time would have a claim. Several kings or princes/dukes back then had as many as 20 recognized children, and probably another 20 not known about.
That's why if you dig down at least six-eight generations, pretty much everyone with ancestory in the main part of Great Britain, the Lowlands, or France can claim to be descended from someone who was heir to the throne of England or at least a "noble" knight, duke.

Shouldn't affect any of the current "royal family", as most of the House of Windsor is from an offshoot German line that ended up several steps removed from the York/Lancaster lucky sperm contest that was predominant in the 14th-16th centuries.

Haele

[littlewolf]

7. interesting side note the naval rank of warrant officer

came from these self same children of these nobles.
they could not be given a commission those were for
the heirs, but the created the warrant rank so that
all the children by women other then their wives
could have a stake in the royal navy and not tie
everyone up in court.

[muriel_volestrangler]

18. I find that difficult to believe. Warrant officers were/are the 'working officers' of Navy and Army

who had to have the expertise for their position. For instance:

The "warrant" portion of the Warrant Officer's title comes from the old French word warant that meant variously a protector, a defense and an authorization. It is also the source of our modern word "warranty." In 1040 when five English ports began furnishing warships to King Edward the Confessor in exchange for certain privileges, they also furnished crews whose officers were the Master, Boatswain, Carpenter and Cook. Later these officers were "warranted" by the British Admiralty. They maintained and sailed the ships and were the standing officers of the navy. Soldiers commanded by Captains would be on board the ships to do the fighting but they had nothing to do with running the ships. The word "soldiering" came about as a seaman's term of contempt for the soldiers and anyone else who avoided shipboard duties.

The warranted officers were often the permanent members of the ships' companies. They stayed with the ships in port between voyages as caretakers supervising repairs and refitting. Other crewmen and soldiers might change with each voyage. Early in the Fourteenth Century the Purser joined the warrant officers. He was originally "the clerk of burser." During the following centuries the Gunner, Surgeon, Chaplain, Master-at-arms, Schoolmaster and others signed on.

http://www.history.navy.mil/trivia/triv4-5b.htm

You couldn't rely on the people with the necessary nautical expertise to have noble fathers.

[nichomachus]

25. Sounds like the royal family today

Bastards everywhere, multiple marriages (and annulments) and spouses spending a long, long time away from each other.

[AngryAmish]

30. Considering Di's...exercise...the genetics could be interesting.

[truebluegreen]

4. As if Henry had any claim to the throne in the first place,

even without infidelity in the male line...(I prefer my roses white).

[First Speaker]

5. Hear, hear! The White Rose forever...

...I was amazed, when I really studied the issue, how strong the lingering loyalty to the House of York was in the years after Bosworth. If Henry hadn't married Elizabeth of York, he would never have been able to hold onto the throne by himself. As it was, Yorkist blood was a serious factor in considerations of the royal succession even into Elizabeth's time...

[truebluegreen]

6. Makes you kinda doubt all the smack the Tudors talked

about Richard III, doesn't it?

[sarge43]

11. Victors write the history.

Last edited Tue Dec 2, 2014, 07:07 PM - Edit history (1)

Shakespeare wasn't about to annoy the victor's granddaughter. She could close the theaters with a word.

[truebluegreen]

20. Indeed.."if it prosper, none dare call it treason." nt

[First Speaker]

15. Absolutely...though on the other hand, it turned out that Richard really *was* a hunchback...

...seeing that curved spine on that skeleton brought memories of Olivier back with a rush...

[sarge43]

24. Scoliosis normally doesn't cause a hunching of the shoulders

It does tend to tilt the torso which can misplace the internal organs. Richard was functioning male and a formidable warrior. He'd been a field commander since his teens and in the forefront of battle. Even the Tudors couldn't deny him that.

[ChazII]

28. +1 n/t

[historylovr]

8. +1

[MisterP]

19. Whiggery takes another hit! (maybe the 5,000th time's the charm!)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history

[Recursion]

36. The throne goes to the guy whose army wins. It's not like a monarch's claim can ever be "legitimate"

There's no such thing as a "rightful" monarch, so I've never understood this sense of a "rightful" claimant.

[eppur_se_muova]

46. "Ultima ratio regum" applies to inheritance of the title, among other things. nt

[Rowdyboy]

9. I've known for years I was the true king of England....

You may now refer to me as King Elvis III, obviously the last of my line

[CatWoman]

12. LOL Rowdy

[Rowdyboy]

40. Hi old friend!

This is my favorite thread of the day! The subject led me to a website that gave the various pretenders to current and former monarchies worldwide and it included some fascinating characters. These people take themselves so seriously you can't help but laugh.

Now if I were king......

[Retrograde]

37. I'll support your claim if

you appoint me to this position: it comes with the cutest little castle. You look a lot more fabulous than the current Queen of England et al, btw.

[Rowdyboy]

38. Hey, if I make it to the throne in this lifetime I'll immediately make you Lord Warden

before abdicating to write my memoirs.

Whoever it is in the picture can really wear a tiara. You have to have a certain style to pull off that look and I'm sadly lacking!

And wow are you right about the government subsidized housing...

[shenmue]

10. Oh snap!

Zoinks!

[struggle4progress]

13. I always thought the Wars of the Roses ended too quickly!

A new discovery that "could cast doubt on the Tudor claim to the English throne or, indeed, on Richard's" might be just what's needed to re-start those glorious battles when peasants butchered peasants to defend the rights and honor of high-born noblemen! As Thomas Paine once wrote: A French bastard landing with an armed Banditti and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original -- and as this was the English way of government for generations, it should be revered as traditional! It is time to overturn the 1701 Act of Settlement which stabbed England in the back and robbed brave Englishmen of their ancient heritage of slaughtering each other in disputes grounded in unspecified ancient adulteries!

[First Speaker]

17. Hear, hear! I'll begin by establishing my own claim to the throne...

...I'm descended from Edward I, as a matter of fact...like millions of other people. But to hell with *them*. I expect an army to materialize to defend my rights, thank you very much...

[nichomachus]

26. It's still going on

In the US today. Take a look at our current political system. It's basically the same thing.

[tclambert]

14. Tony Robinson (Baldrick from "Blackadder") uncovered the true monarch of England in 2004.

King Michael passed away in 2012. He was succeeded by his son, Simon Abney-Hastings. All hail King Simon, first of his name!

[SweetieD]

16. I saw that special. I can't remember it exactly.

I can't remember if they had the DNA when that special was done. I thought they just traced the matrilineal lineage and found the true heirs to the throne.

[whistler162]

33. Could lead to a interesting game of Simon Says...

Simon didn't say so off to the Tower and off with your head!

[mainer]

21. The most interesting statistic in that article

Speaking at a news briefing at the Wellcome Trust in London, she said that the lack of a match on the male side was not unexpected, because her previous research had shown there was a 1-2% rate of "false paternity" per generation.

I wonder how that number changes from century to century.

[Hell Hath No Fury]

23. Happened in our own family --

There was long talk about how how two white-bread Americans could produce a child with olive skin and black hair/brown eyes. Did some Ancestry DNA testing and they genetically matched my Mom to people currently living in Puerto Rico, and whose make-up were Spanish, African, and Indigenous! Mom has been in touch with several of them and we are trying to narrow down just who could have been the "baby daddy". I have always suspected that such goings on happened FAR more than ever suspected.

[mainer]

22. p.s. Thanks for posting this. Endlessly fascinating!

I love this sort of stuff.

[renate]

27. but how could infidelity in Richard's family tree affect the current royal family?

He wasn't related to Henry VII anyway, so...?

[sarge43]

31. It's a rather silly attempt at attention mongering

Big deal. The show started with William the Conqueror whose mum and dad never made him legal. None of us, including QEII, can know for certain what our ancestors were up to and the farther back in time the uncertainty will increase by a factor.

[muriel_volestrangler]

34. It lends some weight to the original rumour about John of Gaunt

They are all supposedly descended from Edward III. The house of York, including Richard III, was descended from one son; the House of Lancaster, including Henry VII (though he wasn't a direct male descendant), from John of Gaunt. The modern people they've compared the Y chromosome to are also (supposedly) direct male descendants of John of Gaunt, and Richard III was different from them (they all match each other, I think, with their most recent common ancestor from the eighteenth century). The present royals are descended from Henry VII and Elizabeth of York - Richard's niece.

Because of the number of generations, the most likely stretch with the infidelity is somewhere between John of Gaunt and the 18th century guy (Henry VII's line splits off from that after just one generation). But there was always a rumour that John of Gaunt wasn't really Edward III's son, so it could be there. And there's also a rumour that Elizabeth's father, Edward IV, was also a 'bastard' - not really the son of the Duke of York as claimed (at the most likely time of conception, he wasn't in the same place as his wife). If both the rumours were true, it might mean the current royal family aren't descended from Edward III at all (there might be some other descent line I don't know about, but it's not likely - they tended to marry Germans after that; a quick check on Wikipedia hasn't shown anything else from the line of Scottish kings that links back to England apart from through John of Gaunt again).

Which doesn't matter constitutionally, since the law says the monarch is the heir of Sophia, Electress of Hanover, from the start of the 18th century. But it would be a bit humorous. It might mean that the average English person is more closely related to, say, Edward I, than the queen is.

[renate]

41. thank you!!!

I love this stuff! Thanks for taking the time to spell it all out, with all those wonderful details!

[boston bean]

29. Well, King Joffrey never had the kings Baratheon blood.

he was conceived in an incestuous brother/sister relationship.



wasn't sorry to see his demise.



none of this is too suprising.... LOL

[xfundy]

35. We're all mutts.

[HeiressofBickworth]

39. The one unsolvable problem with genealogy research

We can trace records on families, but unless there is some revealing incident, we really don't know who was between the sheets at any time.

[sarge43]

44. More than a couple of generations back at best,

we have no idea about the intimate lives of our female ancestors

[muriel_volestrangler]

45. Except that Y chromosome testing does now give some idea for the all-male line

and this investigation did turn up one anomaly in the last few generations:

Male-line relatives are generally easier to trace than female ones historically, and ennobled and titled lineages are recorded in a number of published sources11. We were able to identify, locate and contact five such relatives, descended from the 5th Duke of Beaufort (1744–1803), who agreed to take part in the study, providing an, albeit distant (between 24 and 26 generations), set of patrilinear relatives (see Fig. 1a and Supplementary Fig. 2). It is worth noting that while easier to trace genealogically, the male line is far more susceptible to false-paternity than the female line is to false-maternity events12.

Four of the modern relatives were found to belong to Y-haplogroup R1b-U152 (x L2, Z36, Z56, M160, M126 and Z192)13, 14 with STR haplotypes being consistent with them comprising a single patrilinear group. One individual (Somerset 3) was found to belong to haplogroup I-M170 (x M253, M223) and therefore could not be a patrilinear relative of the other four within the time span considered, indicating that a false-paternity event had occurred within the last four generations.



http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/141202/ncomms6631/full/ncomms6631.html

Admittedly, a Y chromosome match doesn't rule out someone with a similar male ancestry history to the putative father. But if you did wide-scale testing of men, you'd get a pretty good idea of where the infidelities occurred.

[HeiressofBickworth]

49. Or the male ones

We don't know where they left their seed.

[tavernier]

43. Thank you!

I've "read" hundreds of hours of English history on audio CDs since I drive many miles as a home health nurse.

Thanks for the updates.

[Zorra]

47. Men of "royal" (snicker) lineages should not be surprised when they find out

that they are not related to their famous, (and usually infamous) "royal" (snicker) male (supposed) ancestors.

The pressure on women, the wives of the men of these "royal" (snicker) lineages, were expected, even often commanded, to bear male children. If they did not bear children, or especially if they did not bear male children, they were blamed for it, called "barren", considered inferior women, and were very often castigated, mocked, scorned, punished, and discarded (even murdered), if the "royal" (snicker) family was not pleased with a woman who did not bear children, or male children. Even when it was clearly the impotence or infertility of the "royal" (snicker) male that was responsible for a the royal "brood mare" not producing a male heir.

So...what's a woman to do in this "risky business"? The most logical solution is, of course, to go out, and, as often as possible, roll in the hay with another man, (or several other men), who is/are virile and/or fertile, until she becomes pregnant.

The "royal family" (snicker) is happy, and the woman/wife, the royal "brood mare" is safe, provided no one ever catches her in her completely understandable and justifiable "infidelity".

It's not rocket science.

Nowadays, however, thanks to easily available DNA testing for determining ancestry, a "royal (snicker) lady's" options in this scenario are severley diminished.

ISOGG: Non-paternal events

The term non-paternity event is used in law, sociology, clinical genetics and genetic genealogy on issues concerning paternity.[1] Genetic genealogists often use the term in a wider context than others, to denote a break in the link between a male’s surname and the Y-DNA he inherited.[2] Put another way, in genetic genealogy it is generally accepted that a non-paternity event is any circumstance since the lineage adopted a hereditary surname that has led to the surname by which a son was known to differ from that of his biological father.[3]
(more)
http://www.isogg.org/wiki/Non-paternity_event

[CatWoman]

53. Catherine of Aragon

[MrScorpio]

48. If he just got that damned horse he would have been saved this embarrassment.

[BillZBubb]

51. And he was offering a really good deal for that horse!

[frogmarch]

50. The Royal Bastards society

http://royalbastards.org/

Welcome to the internet home of the Descendants of the Illegitimate Sons and Daughters of the Kings of Britain, known to many as the "Royal Bastards.”

The “Royal Bastards” is a sixty-four year old hereditary society founded by some of the English-speaking world's foremost genealogical scholars. Its purpose is to foster the highest standards of genealogy.

Membership is open to individuals who demonstrate meeting these standards through the Society's process of proving descent from an illegitimate child, grandchild or great-grandchild of a king of England, Scotland, Wales, Great Britain or the United Kingdom.

Several years ago I recall seeing online an association called Bastard Sons and Daughters of Kings, but I don't see it now.

[sarge43]

52. That's not an exclusive list.

Henry I, the Conqueror's son, had at least 20 recognized illegitimate children. Some historians claim twice that many by drive by shootings. So, if an individual has deep English ancestry, s/he probably is a descendent of Horndog Hank.

Then there's George's III busy boys.

[frogmarch]

54. Yes, but

proving one's descendancy could be tricky.

Some years ago for fun I applied for membership in Bloodlines of Salem. Two of my distant grandmothers and an aunt were hanged as witches, and two of my distant grandfathers were jurors in the 1692 trials. Another one was a grand juror for the 1693 trials. It took a lot of work to present BoS with all the required documentation. Applying for membership in The Flagon and Dragon did too, but I have only one ancestor who was a pre-Revolutionary War tavern owner, so it didn't take as long to do the paperwork.

http://www.bloodlinesofsalem.org/

http://www.flagonandtrencher.org/

These kinds of organizations can be fun and interesting to be part of. I'm a blood relative of princes William and Harry through Princess Diana, and now I'm tempted to try to find out if I'm a blood descendant of any long-ago kings.

[sarge43]

55. Several of them married into the English noblity and the Scottish royal house

so even after all these years it might not be too difficult to trace descent.

Diana's ancestors, among others, Charles II, Henry IV of France and Marie de' Medici

[frogmarch]

56. Princess Diana: John and Elizabeth (Thompson) Cogswell

are our common ancestors. Through her mother, Diana was a descendant of their son William. Through my dad, I’m a descendant of their daughter Sarah. I don’t think the Cogswell line before Diana and the princes includes any royalty, but John Adams and John Quincy Adams were also descendants of John and Elizabeth Cogswell, which is fun to know.

A cousin of mine wrote me this in an email a few years ago:

I finally found royal connections. They are through Mary Lamb (chart). From this site I found she is descended from Alice Freeman. Alice is thought to have more famous descendants than any colonist. Anyone who is a descendant of her is a cousin of ours.

In looking at the sources I found three kings, Ethelred II the Unready, King of England (d 1016), King John I and Charlemagne that Alice Freeman is descended from. Unfortunately there is a note under Alice Freeman (9) that says the links to King John I and Charlemagne are incorrect. So we are stuck with just the Unready. Actually we are descended from many of the Saxon Kings of England according to Wikipedea from 829-1016. That is something like 37 generations back from us.

Even though the information seems reliable, I’ve been going on the sources cited. I’ve found the actual records in physical libraries and I’ve uploaded the scans for you to see. There are still several more and I hope to see them by next week.

Here are the scanned sources and uploaded them so you can see them. I put a note about the broken link in the Charlemagne book.

A little while later, he wrote:

Added more stuff. The French line is crawling with saints. I haven’t listed them all. What a hoot.

He knows as well as I do that we may not actually be “stuck with the Unready” in our family tree, or with any saints either. Also, one of our dubious ancestral kings claimed to be descended from the god Odin, so...

When I said I'd like to find out if I'm descended from royalty, I meant really.