A Study Into “Royal” Genealogy
There’s a peculiar kind of confidence that appears when some people discover a monarch in their family tree. Suddenly, history becomes a personality. A surname turns into a credential. A long-dead king is treated like a résumé reference who can’t be checked.
This is where genealogy stops being interesting and starts being embarrassing.
Let’s get one thing straight at the outset: ancestry is not accomplishment. It’s not virtue. It’s not evidence of refinement, intelligence, leadership, or worth. It’s a record of biological succession — who had children with whom — nothing more. Treating it as anything else is a category error dressed up as pride.
I say this as someone who does not lack the credentials people usually mean when they talk about “real” royal descent. I have a line of descent from Henry II of England, Henry I of England, Edward III of England, James I of Scotland, Robert III of Scotland, Robert II of Scotland, and William I of Scotland, running through medieval noble families and largely along the male line for centuries before dissolving — inevitably — into ordinary modern lives. If inherited status were supposed to mean something today, this would be about as strong a test case as one could reasonably imagine.
And it means nothing.
It doesn’t make me wiser. It doesn’t make me more authoritative. It doesn’t give my opinions extra weight or my character a higher grade. I didn’t build the Angevin Empire. I didn’t govern England or rule Aquitaine. I didn’t earn anything involved in that history. I was born — like everyone else — at the end of a very long chain of people who were mostly trying to survive their own eras.
This is the part that people who fetishize lineage never seem to confront: bloodlines do not preserve greatness. They dilute it. Every generation spreads whatever distinction once existed thinner and thinner, until what remains is paperwork and imagination. The idea that virtue, superiority, or entitlement can survive intact across 800 years of random inheritance is not romantic — it’s magical thinking.
Worse, it misunderstands how history actually works. Monarchies were systems, not merit badges. Kings ruled because institutions, armies, and accidents of birth put them there — not because their descendants were destined to be impressive centuries later. Feudal privilege made sense only inside a feudal world. Outside it, all that’s left is cosplay.
The truth is, almost anyone of European or British descent can trace a royal line somewhere. Royal ancestry isn’t rare — it’s inevitable. What’s rare is thinking that makes you exceptional today.
And here’s where this becomes personally irritating: when people inflate their ancestry into identity, it gives everyone with documented royal descent a bad reputation. It turns a neutral historical fact into a social affectation. It invites eye-rolling, not respect. The quieter truth — that most people with such ancestry regard it as mildly interesting trivia — gets drowned out by the loud minority who think they’ve uncovered proof they’re special.
They haven’t.
If even direct, well-documented descent from a medieval king confers no meaningful distinction today, then no amount of distant, romanticized ancestry ever will. The problem isn’t how royal someone’s lineage is. The problem is the belief that lineage should matter at all in a world where status is supposed to be earned, not inherited.
So by all means, research your family tree. History is fascinating. Genealogy can be rewarding. But leave the imaginary crown at home. You didn’t inherit a throne — just a past. And like everyone else, what matters is what you do now, not who ruled before you were even conceivable.
— Alexander FitzJames