Royal Descent - Europe

Europe

It is a long tradition that royalty predominantly marry those of their own class. Therefore the ruling houses of Europe have tended to be closely related to one another, and descent from a particular monarch will be found in many other dynasties – all present European monarchs, and a great many pretenders, are descendants of William I of England, for example.

The practice of restrictive marriages has been noted as increasing over the years until the 20th century: the passage of time strengthened the conviction that royalty only allied with royalty, and from the sixteenth century onwards marriages between crown and commoner became rarer and rarer. This is one reason why descent from more recent monarchs is rarer amongst commoners than from monarchs further back.

Many members of untitled families today descend from the illegitimate children of royalty. Since illegitimate children seldom married into other royal families (because their status made them unacceptable to most monarchs), these children had to marry upper-class or middle-class families from their own country.

Another reason for the greater number of descendants from chronologically distant monarchs is that likelihood of descent from a monarch increases as a function of the length of time between the monarch's death and the birth of the particular descendant. Thus, it is theoretically true that "statistically, most of the inhabitants of Western Europe are probably descended from William the Conqueror; they are equally likely to be descended from the man who groomed his charger." In reality, the two possibilities are not equally likely. On the one hand, rulers tend to have more children than the overall population, and the children of rulers are more likely to receive adequate food than the children of a less wealthy person, who are more likely to die of starvation or malnutrition. On the other hand, rulers and their children are more likely to be assassinated than ordinary individuals are.