July 29th, 1981. St. Paul’s Cathedral. 750 million people watched a shy 20-year-old walk down the aisle toward the Prince of Wales. The story everyone told was simple. A kindergarten teacher marrying the heir to the throne, Cinderella in real life. 3 months before that wedding, a consultant to Burke’s puridge examined Diana’s ancestry.
His conclusion should have shattered the fairy tale completely. Diana, he said, had more English royal blood than Prince Charles himself, more royal than the future king. The claim sounds absurd until you understand what it means. The House of Windsor didn’t exist until 1917. Before that, the royal family was called Saxon Corborg and Gortar German.
They changed the name during World War I because fighting Germany with a German surname was becoming awkward. The Spencers had been English nobility since 1508, nearly 500 years. While the ancestors of the Windsor were minor German princes, the Spencers were fighting in English civil wars and advising English monarchs.
Diana wasn’t marrying up. She was bringing something back that the royal family had lost centuries ago. This is the story of two bloodlines. One came from Germany. One never left England. Diana Spencer was not born into obscurity. She was born into Alth House sits on 13,000 acres in Northamptonshire.
The Spencer family has owned it since 1508 when Sir John Spencer, a wealthy sheep farmer, purchased the estate. That was 9 years before Martin Luther nailed his thesis to the church door. The Spencers were already landed gentry before the Protestant Reformation began. For five centuries, the family accumulated titles, influence, and connections to the crown.
They weren’t just aristocrats. They were fixtures of English power. Diana’s father, John Spencer, was the eighth Earl Spencer. He was god’s son to Queen Mary, the grandmother of Elizabeth II. He served as personal equary to both King George V 6th and the young Queen Elizabeth. The Spencers didn’t just know the royal family, they worked for them.
Diana’s maternal grandmother, Ruth, Lady Fermoy, was even closer. She served as lady and waiting to the queen mother for decades. The two women were intimate friends. When Diana was being considered as a bride for Charles, it was Lady Fermoy who helped arrange the match. The family service to the crown stretch back centuries.
Henry Spencer, the first Earl of Sunderland, fought for King Charles I during the English Civil War. He died at the Battle of Newbury in 1643. Killed defending the monarchy against Cromwell’s forces. The Spencers bled for their kings. Through marriage, they connected to even greater power. Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Malbor, was linked to the Spencer family when her daughter married the third Earl of Sunderland.
Sarah was Queen Anne’s closest confidant and at one point the richest woman in England. Her husband, the Duke of Malra, was the greatest military commander of his age. By the time Diana was born in 1961, the Spencer family tree was dense with dukes, soldiers, and statesmen. A consultant to Burke’s Puridge put it simply, “There cannot be another family so stiff with royal connections.
” Diana earned the title lady in 1975 when her father inherited the Eldom, but she had been aristocracy from birth. She grew up on the Sandringham estate, playing with princes Andrew and Edward as a child. The royal family wasn’t foreign territory. It was her neighborhood. And yet the most remarkable thing about Diana’s ancestry wasn’t her titles. It was her blood.
Because hidden in that family tree were connections far more significant than any connections that led directly to the bed chambers of kings. In 1981, Time magazine revealed a detail about Diana’s ancestry that most royal watchers had overlooked. Three of her ancestors had been mistresses to English kings.
Charles II was known as the merry monarch. He returned to England in 1660 after years of exile, restored the throne his father had lost and proceeded to enjoy himself thoroughly. He married Catherine of Banza, a Portuguese princess, but she never gave him children. His mistresses did, at least 14 of them. Charles II’s illegitimate offspring became the foundations of some of Britain’s most powerful families.
His affairs produced more than a quarter of all the dukedoms in Great Britain and Ireland. When aristocrats today trace their lineage, an alarming number of them end up in Charles II’s bedroom. Diana descended from two of his mistresses directly. The first was Barbara Villas, the king’s most famous lover, a woman so beautiful and so scandalous that she dominated court gossip for years.
She bore Charles a son, Henry Fitzroy, in 1663. He was created Duke of Grafton at age 12. His descendants eventually married into the Spencer line through Diana’s great grandmother, Adelaide Seymour. The second was Louise Deeray, a French noble woman sent to the English court by Louis I 14th, possibly as a spy. Charles II was captivated.
Their son, Charles Lennox, was born in 1672 and made Duke of Richmond at age 3. His bloodline reached Diana through her other great grandmother, Rosalind Bingham. The third was Arabella Churchill, daughter of Sir Winston Churchill, the original one, not the prime minister. Arabella was mistress not to Charles II, but to his brother James II.
She bore James a daughter, and that bloodline too wound its way through the centuries until it reached the Spencer family. Through these women, Diana carried Stuart blood. The Stewarts had ruled England and Scotland before the Hannavarians arrived. They were the dynasty of Mary, Queen of Scots, of Charles I, who lost his head, of Charles II, who got it back.
Their blood ran through Diana’s veins, passed down through passion rather than marriage, but royal nonetheless. The irony was striking. Diana’s royal ancestry was technically illegitimate. Charles’s was technically legitimate, but hers was English. His was German. And there was one more connection, one that remains debated to this day.
A connection that if true would mean TUDA blood returned to the throne through Diana’s son. Diana was the 13th great granddaughter of Mary Berlin. That name should sound familiar. Mary was the older sister of Anne Berlin, the woman who changed English history. Anne became Henry VIII’s second wife, gave birth to the future Elizabeth I, and lost her head on Tower Green in 1536.
But before Henry ever noticed Anne, he had already taken Mary to his bed. Mary Berlin was Henry VIII’s mistress for several years in the early 1520s. The affair was not secret. Henry later admitted it publicly when he needed a papal dispensation to marry Anne. He had slept with the sister which created a legal impediment to marrying the other.
The church had rules about such things. During her affair with the king, Mary gave birth to two children, a daughter Catherine born around 1524, a son Henry born in 1526. Both were officially the children of Mary’s husband, William Kerry, a gentleman of the king’s privy chamber. But were they really? The timing is suspicious.
Catherine Kerry was born squarely within the period of Mary’s affair with the king. Some historians believe she was Henry VII’s daughter, not William K’s. If true, that would make Diana a direct descendant of the TUDA king himself. The evidence is circumstantial but compelling. Henry VIII showered William Kerry with grants and favors during the affair far beyond what a minor courtier would normally receive.
When Kerry died of sweating sickness in 1528, the king personally arranged for the children’s care. Catherine later received an advantageous marriage despite her family’s disgrace after Anne’s execution. and Elizabeth I showed extraordinary favor to both Kerry children throughout her reign, treating them almost as siblings rather than cousins.
Historian Allison Weir examined the evidence and concluded that Catherine was likely Henry’s daughter. Others disagree. Henry never acknowledged her and without DNA evidence, we cannot know for certain. What we do know is this. Diana descended from Mary Berlin through Katherine Kerry’s line.
The bloodline is documented. The connection to the Berlin family is beyond dispute. And here is where it gets interesting. Prince William and Prince Harry carry double Berlin ancestry. Through their father Charles, they descend from Margaret Tuda, Henry VIII’s sister, giving them a legitimate Tuda connection. Through their mother Diana, they descend from Mary Berlin, giving them a second path to the same family.
If Katherine Kerry was indeed Henry VIII’s daughter, then William and Harry are his descendants twice over through legitimate and illegitimate lines through two sisters. Anne Berlin was executed. Her bloodline supposedly ended when Elizabeth I died childless in6003, but her sister Mary’s bloodline survived quietly for 5 centuries.
It sounds as English as Westminster Abbey or the Tower of London. The House of Windsor was invented on July 17th, 1917. Before that date, the British royal family had a different name, Sax Cobberg Gotha. The name came from Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s beloved husband. Albert was German, born in the small duche of Sax Cobberg and Gotha.
When he married Victoria in 1840, their children technically belonged to his house, not hers. When their son Edward IIIth became king in 1901, he founded the Sax Cobberg Gotha dynasty on the British throne. For 16 years, no one much cared. Then came World War I. By 1917, Britain had been fighting Germany for 3 years.
Millions of young men were dying in the trenches. Anti-German sentiment was vicious. German shops were burned. Daxonss were stoned in the streets. Families with German surnames anglicized them overnight. And on the throne sat a king with one of the most German names imaginable. King George V faced a problem. His cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II was the enemy.
They shared a grandmother in Queen Victoria. The same blood ran through both their veins. The king’s own surname announced this connection to everyone. So George V did something unprecedented. He erased his family’s German identity by royal proclamation. Saxobberg Gotha became Windsor. His relatives followed suit.
The Battenburggs became the Mount Battons. German titles were dropped. German connections were buried. Kaiser Wilhelm reportedly found this amusing. He joked that he was looking forward to attending a performance of the Merry Wives of Sax Cobberg Gotha. The name change worked. Windsor sounded English. Windsor Castle had been a royal residence for nearly a thousand years.
The association stuck. Within a generation, people forgot the family had ever been called anything else. But a name change doesn’t change blood. The Windsor remained what they had always been, descendants of the House of Hanover. The Hannavarians arrived in Britain in 1714. Queen Anne, the last of the Stearts, had died without surviving children.
Parliament needed a Protestant heir. They passed over more than 50 Catholics with stronger claims and settled on George, elector of Hanover, a German prince who barely spoke English. George I communicated with his ministers in French. He spent much of his reign trying to get back to Hanover. He was king of England essentially by accident of religion.
His descendants have sat on the throne ever since. George II, George III, George I 4th, William I 4th, Victoria, Edward II, George V, Edward VII, George V 6th, Elizabeth II, Charles III. A direct line from a German elector who never wanted to be English in the first place. The Spencers, meanwhile, had been at Halthorp since 1508.
They had never been anything but English. When Diana married Charles, even his own family noticed the contrast. The Queen Mother privately called Philillip the Hun. She recognized the German blood. She had married into it herself. July 29th, 1981. St. Paul’s Cathedral. The Archbishop of Canterbury presiding. A congregation of 3,500 guests.
a global television audience approaching 3/4 of a billion people. Every detail was choreographed. The 25- ft train, the horsedrawn carriage, the kiss on the balcony that became the defining image of the decade. But behind the spectacle, something else was happening. The palace knew exactly who Diana was. It was a careful selection.
Finding a bride for the Prince of Wales was not simple. She had to be aristocratic, but not too aristocratic. Protestant, virginal, or at least presumed so. Free of scandal, young enough to bear children, old enough to handle the pressure. The pool of candidates was vanishingly small, and Diana Spencer checked every box. Her family had been vetted for generations.
Her grandmother, Lady Fermoy, was the Queen Mother’s closest friend. Her father had served two monarchs personally. The Spencers were known quantities, trusted insiders who understood how the palace worked. Diana hadn’t stumbled into Charles’s life by accident. She had grown up on the Sandringham estate, quite literally next door to the royal family.
She had played with Andrew and Edward as children. The families had been intertwined for decades. What the palace got was more than a suitable bride. They got a genetic inheritance they had lost when the Hannavarians took over. The last time significant English royal blood had entered the direct line of succession was 1714.
That year the Steuarts ended and the Germans began. For nearly three centuries the British monarchy had married continental Protestants, German princes and Danish princesses and Greek royals with German ancestry. Diana broke the pattern. Her blood was Stewart, possibly TUDA, undeniably English. When she and Charles exchanged vows, two versions of royalty fused.
The legitimate Windsor line traceable through German electors and Hannavarian kings. The illegitimate Spencer line flowing from royal mistresses and hidden connections that stretch back to Henry VIII’s court. For the first time since Queen Anne died childless in 1714, the heirs to the throne would have significant English ancestry from both parents.
William and Harry weren’t just Windsor.
