On July 29, 1981, a shy twenty-year-old walked down the aisle of St. Paul’s Cathedral toward the Prince of Wales while an estimated 750 million people watched. The story broadcast to the world was simple: a kindergarten teacher marrying the heir to the throne, Cinderella in real life. But three months before the wedding, a consultant to Burke’s Peerage examined Diana’s ancestry and reached a conclusion that 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 one understands what it means. The House of Windsor did not exist until 1917.
Before that, the royal family was called Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. German. The name was changed during the First World War because fighting Germany while carrying a German surname had become untenable. The Spencers, by contrast, had been English nobility since 1508, nearly five hundred years.
While the ancestors of the Windsors were minor German princes, the Spencers had fought in English civil wars and advised English monarchs. Diana was not marrying up. She was bringing back something the royal family had lost centuries earlier. Diana Spencer was born into Althorp.
Althorp House sits on 13,000 acres in Northamptonshire, and the Spencer family has owned it since 1508, when Sir John Spencer, a wealthy sheep farmer, purchased the estate. That was nine years before Martin Luther posted his theses. The Spencers were already landed gentry before the Protestant Reformation began. For five centuries, they accumulated titles, influence, and connections to the crown.
They were fixtures of English power rather than mere aristocrats. Diana’s father, John Spencer, was the eighth Earl Spencer. He was godson to Queen Mary, grandmother of Elizabeth II, and served as personal equerry to both King George VI and the young Queen Elizabeth. The Spencers did not simply know the royal family; they worked for them.
Diana’s maternal grandmother, Ruth, Lady Fermoy, was even closer. She served as lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother for decades, and 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’s service to the crown stretched back centuries.
Henry Spencer, the first Earl of Sunderland, fought for King Charles I during the English Civil War and 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 Marlborough, was linked to the Spencer family when her daughter married the third Earl of Sunderland.
Sarah was Queen Anne’s closest confidante and at one point the richest woman in England. Her husband, the Duke of Marlborough, was the greatest military commander of his age. By the time Diana was born in 1961, the Spencer family tree was dense with earls, dukes, soldiers, and statesmen. A consultant to Burke’s Peerage put it simply: there could not be another family so stiff with royal connections.
Diana earned the title Lady in 1975 when her father inherited the earldom, 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 was not foreign territory; it was her neighborhood. Yet the most remarkable thing about Diana’s ancestry was not her titles but her blood.
Hidden in that family tree were connections far more significant than any earldom, connections that led directly to the bedchambers of kings. In 1981, Time magazine revealed a detail most royal watchers had overlooked: three of her ancestors had been mistresses to English kings. Charles II, known as the Merry Monarch, returned to England in 1660 after years of exile, restored the throne his father had lost, and enjoyed himself thoroughly. He married Catherine of Braganza, a Portuguese princess, but she never gave him children.
His mistresses did, at least fourteen of them. His illegitimate offspring became the foundations of some of Britain’s most powerful families, producing more than a quarter of all the dukedoms in Great Britain and Ireland. Diana descended from two of his mistresses directly. The first was Barbara Villiers, 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, created Duke of Grafton at age twelve. His descendants eventually married into the Spencer line through Diana’s great-grandmother, Adelaide Seymour. The second was Louise de Kérouaille, a French noblewoman sent to the English court by Louis XIV, possibly as a spy. Charles II was captivated.
Their son, Charles Lennox, was born in 1672 and made Duke of Richmond at age three. 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 Stuarts had ruled England and Scotland before the Hanoverians arrived. They were the dynasty of Mary, Queen of Scots, of Charles I, who lost his head, and of Charles II, who got it back.
The irony was striking. Diana’s royal ancestry was technically illegitimate. Charles’s was technically legitimate. But hers was English.
His was German. There was one more connection, one debated to this day, that if true would mean Tudor blood returned to the throne through Diana’s son. Diana was the thirteenth great-granddaughter of Mary Boleyn, the older sister of Anne Boleyn, who 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 Boleyn 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, since he had slept with the sister, creating a legal impediment to marrying the other. During her affair with the king, Mary gave birth to two children: a daughter, Catherine, born around 1524, and a son, Henry, born in 1526.
Both were officially the children of Mary’s husband, William Carey, a gentleman of the king’s privy chamber. But the timing is suspicious. Catherine Carey was born squarely within the period of Mary’s affair with the king, and some historians believe she was Henry VIII’s daughter. If true, Diana would be a direct descendant of the Tudor king himself.
The evidence is circumstantial but compelling. Henry VIII showered William Carey with grants and favors during the affair, far beyond what a minor courtier would normally receive. When Carey 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 Carey children throughout her reign, treating them almost as siblings rather than cousins. Historian Alison Weir examined the evidence and concluded that Catherine was likely Henry’s daughter. Others disagree. Henry never acknowledged her, and without DNA evidence, certainty is impossible.
What is documented is that Diana descended from Mary Boleyn through Catherine Carey’s line. The connection to the Boleyn family is beyond dispute. Prince William and Prince Harry carried double Boleyn ancestry. Through their father Charles, they descend from Margaret Tudor, Henry VIII’s sister, giving them a legitimate Tudor connection.
Through their mother Diana, they descend from Mary Boleyn, giving them a second path to the same family. If Catherine Carey was indeed Henry VIII’s daughter, then William and Harry are his descendants twice over, through legitimate and illegitimate lines, through two sisters. Anne Boleyn’s bloodline supposedly ended when Elizabeth I died childless in 1603, but her sister Mary’s bloodline survived quietly for five centuries. The House of Windsor was invented on July 17, 1917.
Before that date, the British royal family had a different name: Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, inherited from Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s beloved husband. Albert was German, born in the small Duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. When their son Edward VII became king in 1901, he founded the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha dynasty on the British throne. For sixteen years, no one much cared.
Then came the First World War. By 1917, Britain had been fighting Germany for three years. Millions of young men were dying in the trenches, and anti-German sentiment was vicious. German shops were burned.
Dachshunds were stoned in the streets. Families with German surnames Anglicized them overnight. 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, and they shared a grandmother in Queen Victoria.
The king’s own surname announced this connection to everyone. So George V erased his family’s German identity by royal proclamation. Saxe-Coburg-Gotha became Windsor. The Battenbergs became the Mountbattens.
German titles were dropped. German connections were buried. Kaiser Wilhelm reportedly found this amusing, joking that he looked forward to attending a performance of The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. The name change worked.
Windsor sounded English, and the association with Windsor Castle, a royal residence for nearly a thousand years, stuck. Within a generation, people forgot the family had ever been called anything else. But a name change does not change blood. The Windsors remained descendants of the House of Hanover, which had arrived in Britain in 1714 when Queen Anne, the last of the Stuarts, died without surviving children.
Parliament needed a Protestant heir. They passed over more than fifty 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 and spent much of his reign trying to get back to Hanover. He was King of England essentially by accident of religion, and his descendants have sat on the throne ever since: George II, George III, George IV, William IV, Victoria, Edward VII, George V, Edward VIII, George VI, Elizabeth II, and 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 Althorp since 1508 and had never been anything but English. When Diana married Charles, even his own family noticed the contrast. The Queen Mother privately called Philip the Hun, recognizing the German blood she had married into herself.
July 29, 1981. St. Paul’s Cathedral. The Archbishop of Canterbury presiding.
A congregation of 3,500 guests. A global television audience approaching 750 million. Every detail was choreographed: the twenty-five-foot train, the horse-drawn 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. This 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 had not stumbled into Charles’s life by accident. She had grown up on the Sandringham estate, quite literally next door to the royal family. What the Palace got was more than a suitable bride.
They got a genetic inheritance they had lost when the Hanoverians took over. The last time significant English royal blood had entered the direct line of succession was 1714. That year, the Stuarts ended and the Germans began. For nearly three centuries, the British monarchy had married continental Protestants, German princes, Danish princesses, and Greek royals with German ancestry.
Diana broke the pattern. Her blood was Stuart, possibly Tudor, undeniably English. When she and Charles exchanged vows, two versions of royalty fused: the legitimate Windsor line, traceable through German electors and Hanoverian kings, and the illegitimate Spencer line, flowing from royal mistresses and hidden connections stretching 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 were not just Windsors.