Charles, Elizabeth and the illegitimate monarchy.
Why did the Queen decide to call her firstborn son, Charles? Today when 'King Charles III' gave a speech in Westminster Hall, the oldest part of the Houses of Parliament, I wondered why his mother Elizabeth of Windsor and his father Philip of Greece and Denmark decided on calling the obvious heir to this throne by the name of a tyrant, CHARLES.
Charles III addressed a combined parliamentary body. So did Charles I. In that very same Westminster Hall, Charles I had been tried by Parliament and sentenced to execution in 1648 for defying the people and for being a fanatic Catholic. This was at the time when Oliver Cromwell had established Puritan parliamentary rule.
When this revolution failed, his son, Charles II, then in exile in France, was to his surprise invited back. Why? There was no real successor to sustain the Puritan revolution. The people were tired of the lack of fun, theaters closed and Christmas being banned. Charles the second was no choice for sustaining Puritanism. He agreed to reinforce the Anglican church, showed Catholic sympathies and had around 14 mistresses.
What aspiration did Elizabeth want to give her son by naming him Charles? The name reflects the toughest believers in absolute monarchy to the detriment of parliament and democracy.
But is all this relevant? Is Charles a legitimate king?
To be legitimate under English law, an heir has to be the son of married parents and begotten of the legitimate father. The same goes for Hebrew royal families as delineating in the beginning of the gospel of Matthew. The Welsh, the ancient British, are insistent on the biological offspring of a kingly father. They took a different view from the Roman church about how marriage was to be recognized.
However it is now clear beyond doubt that the English lineage from Richard III on to the present is seriously flawed. Documentary evidence points to the fact that Richard of York was away when his wife Cicely became pregnant. An Archer, Blaybourne, was allegedly the father of her son who became Edward IV, and who was born on 28 April 1442. The begettal took place 9 months earlier when Richard was absent.
Genetic evidence bears this out. Descendants of later kings do not have the rare genetic marker found in ancestor Richard III and confirmed in others with a direct descent. Documents, chronology and genetics are the best riposte to history made up of acclamations by reigning royalty. Princely propaganda is what we now call disinformation or fake news. The rumors of this illegitimacy were well known. Shakespeare has a line of Richard saying that Edward IV was 'not his begot'.
Richard III Act 3 Scene 5
The implication is that Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and all regents following the 1400s up to Elizabeth II are not legimate descendants of earlier medieval kings.
Subsequent British law tried to remedy this. The 1701 Act of Succession restricted claims to the throne, not to British stock, but Protestant descendants of Sophia of Hanover. Hardly a recipe for stirring up British nationalism! Some of the Hanoverian kings spoke German not English.
What about the native British who had kings for hundreds of years before the Romans arrived in the first centuries, before the Anglo-Saxons and before the Norman invasions? The larger legal question about royal legitimacyy is about direct genetic lineage. A conqueror is just a conqueror, not a king by right. Thus the Romans were not legitimate kings of Britain, nor were the Saxons. The Normans were also unwelcome visitors who ravaged the country and gave estates wherever they could to their belligerent barons.
Who then is the rightful king? Who knows?
Times have changed. United Kingdom no longer has what is a pure monarchy in political-constitutional terms. Monarchy means rule by one person alone. Today’s constitution is what historian, David Starkey, calls a royal republic of balanced powers.
Elizabeth gained her worldwide reputation, not from publicizing a bloodline, but a lifetime of service in difficult times. She treated peoples and presidents as equals. She spoke on a human level to all. She based her interactions on the philosophy that we can all learn from each other. She turned an empire into a voluntary commonwealth of values.