Ancestry of Elizabeth II

Ancestry Of Elizabeth II

Queen Elizabeth II, present sovereign of the United Kingdom and the other Commonwealth realms, is the daughter of George VI, the second-eldest son of George V and Mary of Teck; and of Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (later Queen Elizabeth, and, after her daughter's accession to the throne, the Queen Mother), the daughter of Claude Bowes-Lyon, 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne and his wife, Cecilia Bowes-Lyon, Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne.

Queen Elizabeth II is the male-line great-granddaughter of Edward VII, who inherited the crown from his mother, Queen Victoria. His father, Victoria's consort, was Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha; hence Queen Elizabeth is a patrilineal descendant of Albert's family, the German princely House of Wettin. (Other notable members of this house are King Albert II of Belgium, former King Michael of Romania and former King Simeon II of Bulgaria.) Traced as far as possible, Elizabeth's male-line ancestry stretches back to Conrad the Great of Meissen; see Patrilineal descent of Elizabeth II.

Through Victoria, as well as several other of her great-great-grandparents, Elizabeth is directly descended from many British royals: from the House of Stuart, from Mary, Queen of Scots; Robert the Bruce, and earlier Scottish royal houses; from the House of Tudor, and earlier English royal houses stretching back as far as the 7th century House of Wessex: one member of Wessex being Aethelflaed of Wessex's younger sister, Elfthryth.

As a great-great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, she is related to the heads of most other reigning and non-reigning European royal houses. Through her great-grandmother Queen Alexandra, she is descended from the Danish royal House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, a line of the North German house of Oldenburg, one of the oldest in Europe. (Other members of the House of Glücksburg include Elizabeth's husband, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, as well as Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, King Harald V of Norway, Queen Sofía of Spain and former King Constantine II of Greece-—each of whom is also descended from Queen Victoria; one of her many cousins is King Juan Carlos I of Spain, also a great-great-grandson of Victoria.) Elizabeth is likewise descendant of Johan Willem Friso, Prince of Orange (1687–1711), who is the most recent common ancestor to all reigning European royal houses.

Elizabeth bears lineage from, amongst others, Armenian, Arab, British, Chinese, Cuman, Danish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Monégasque, Norwegian, Old Prussian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Yugoslavian ethnicities.