The most royal candidate theory is the term given to the fringe belief that every presidential election in the United States has been won by the candidate with the most royal blood, i.e. the closest ties to the European bloodline.
Proponents of the theory, most notably the late Harold Brooks-Baker, claim that every U.S. president since George Washington can have their bloodline traced back to various European royals, with at least thirty-three presidents having been descended from Alfred the Great and Charlemagne. The theory is often cited as evidence that presidential candidates are not elected democratically, but chosen by a secret elite such as the Illuminati.
Critics of the theory claim that the odds of any given person being distantly related to royalty are remarkably high, with one estimate suggesting that more than 150 million Americans are of royal descent. This is because when ancestral lines are traced back through time, the number of ancestors doubles with each generation. If any person traced their bloodline back to the year 1500, for example, they would discover about a million ancestors. Although there are relatively few royal figures in history, pedigree collapse explains how so many people can be linked to famous rulers such as Alfred the Great, and indeed how any one person could be said to have a tenuous connection to almost anyone else in the world.
According to a chart published by twelve-year-old student BridgeAnne d'Avignon, all U.S. presidents except Martin Van Buren can trace descent from King John of England.
Famous quotes containing the words royal, candidate and/or theory:
“Bohemia is nothing more than the little country in which you do not live. If you try to obtain citizenship in it, at once the court and retinue pack the royal archives and treasure and move away beyond the hills.”
—O. Henry [William Sydney Porter] (1862–1910)
“Hear, then, a mortal Muse thy praise rehearse,
In no ignoble verse;
But such as thy own voice did practise here,
When thy first-fruits of Poesy were given,
To make thyself a welcome inmate there;
While yet a young probationer,
And candidate of Heaven.”
—John Dryden (1631–1700)
“We commonly say that the rich man can speak the truth, can afford honesty, can afford independence of opinion and action;—and that is the theory of nobility. But it is the rich man in a true sense, that is to say, not the man of large income and large expenditure, but solely the man whose outlay is less than his income and is steadily kept so.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)