Royal inbreeding: how reliable is one of history's most popular stories?

The Hapsburg Emperor Leopold I by Jan Thomas van Leperen, c. 1667

Portraits of the slack-jawed and bug-eyed Hapsburgs, hair fair and stare glazed, are a staple part of any discussions on one of the most familiar accusations hurled at the European royal houses: namely, that they were habitually inbred. By the time pretty Marie-Antoinette was born into the family in 1755, along with her bevy of attractive sisters, something had evidently worked itself out, to say nothing of the statuesque handsome poise of a young Franz Josef in the next century. However, the charge that the entire aristocratic and royal houses of Europe were essentially mad, bad and dangerous to know because they only married their cousins is repeated so often that it is taken to be veritable fact. Reviews of the wildly inaccurate historical romp Anonymous suggested that the unhinged behaviour of an ageing Elizabeth I (Vanessa Redgrave) must have been caused in part being the offspring of too much royal inbreeding (Elizabeth I's parents, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, were by no means closely related, but that's apparently by the by.)

However, I argue in my book The Emperors that the story of royalty being in-bred is in fact hugely exaggerated and I began by looking at the story of the most famous of its casualties, the Spanish side of the Hapsburg clan, in a chapter called The Dual Monarchy, giving an overview of the Austrian monarchy.

The Spanish branch of the Hapsburg clan had died out in 1700 after generations of inbreeding. This was never as much of a problem with their less insular Austrian cousins, and it is almost entirely to the Spanish side of the family that we owe the popular stereotype of royalty as habitual inbreds. That point has been both overstated and misunderstood. It is worth noting that in the medieval and early modern period what we would now recognise as inbreeding or incest was not uncommon. In an age when very few people left the village, town or county where they had grown up, inbreeding across the course of several generations was inevitable, regardless of one's social class. Royalty could no more marry outside the sacred confines of their class than most of their subjects could marry outside the limits of their locality.

So, it did occur, but no more or less than within the vast majority of the early modern populations. As attitudes changed and our horizons expanded, royalty moved towards marrying people to whom they were related as faintly as anyone marrying today, in much the same way as nearly everyone in the British Isles with Anglo-Saxon ancestry is likely to be, in some faint way, a descendant of the medieval king Edward III with his numerous children. The marriages to Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, Diana Spencer and Catherine Middleton were part of a trend set by many factors in history, including changing attitudes to class, love and geography. 

Competition winner!

Many congratulations to Libby, who won the competition to receive a copy of Sara Cockerill's new book, Eleanor of Castile: The Shadow Queen. The San Fernando Valley, named after Eleanor's father (above), is indeed in the US State of California. To all those who entered, thank you! 

Out of the Shadows: Review and Giveaway of "Eleanor of Castile: The Shadow Queen" by Sara Cockerill

It is often stated that writing a biography of a medieval person, particularly a woman, is impossible and that any effort will descend into quasi-fiction, littered with more than its fair share of "must haves" and "presumably would haves". In her new book, Eleanor of Castile: The Shadow Queen, Sara Cockerill disproves this assertion splendidly. Longshanks' queen and Edward II's mother emerges from this beautiful book full of fire, vigour and more than her fair share of deeply unlikable flaws.

At 410 pages in length, The Shadow Queen can hardly be accused of narrative anaemia and the decade or so of research that went into writing it bounces off the page, intellectually convincing but rendered readable by Cockerill's light narrative touch. There are touching and thought-provoking deviations about the humanity of her subject - a particular favourite of mine being when the author, weighing up evidence that Eleanor was either fair or dark, concludes, "her own colour choices make it almost certain that her colouring was dark; as will be seen, she favoured reds and greens, colours which no blonde would be likely to choose but which are very becoming to brunettes." This is set alongside a razor-sharp understanding of the quagmire of thirteenth-century international diplomacy and warfare, both of which shaped Queen Eleanor's life.

Cockerill believes that Eleanor of Castile was a more likable individual than she has been presented in recent histories of the monarchy, for instance in Lisa Hilton's study of English medieval queens, from which Eleanor emerges as a chillingly avaricious matriarch, who bled the Anglo-Jewish community white in her relentless quest for personal financial security. Cockerill allows Eleanor's faults to show in all their ugliness, but she suggests that, by the standards of her own generation, England's second Iberian queen consort had more on the credit than debit side by the time she passed away in 1290. Personally, I emerged from my compulsive reading of The Shadow Queen still rather dubious about the Queen's personal plus-points, but that is a tribute to the wealth of detail that Cockerill relates to her readers. While the author wears her views plainly, she is too good a writer to force them upon her audience. Eleanor of Castile: The Shadow Queen is a compelling and exhaustive look at one of England's most fascinating queens and a beautiful example of a medieval biography.

***

To win a copy of Eleanor of Castile: The Shadow Queen, please answer the question below and provide your e-mail address, which will not be published. It is purely so that I can contact you when the competition has closed. The winner will be announced next Saturday (18th October), thank you.

QUESTION: The San Fernando Valley in the USA was named in honour of Eleanor of Castile's father, King Ferdinand III of Castile. What US state is the Valley located in?

Review: "Inside the Tudor Court" by Lauren Mackay

I once came across a comment on-line from Lauren Mackay fairly highlighting the difference between a blogger and an historian, and rather self-deprecatingly pointing out that having achieved her masters she did not yet consider herself an historian. It is therefore something of a relief that she has since used the work undertaken for her MA to pen this wonderful biography of Eustace Chapuys, the Hapsburgs' ambassador to England for most of the last two decades of Henry VIII's reign.

In much the same way as Chapuys' negative appraisal of Anne Boleyn helped shape her historiography for so many years, the academic swing in her favour following Eric Ives's 1986 biography saw Chapuys cast in the light of a malign intriguer who got more wrong than right when it came to Boleyn - and, by an extension of logic, everyone around her. Mackay sets out to rescue her subject from this two-dimensional view and she does so with great success. If Anne Boleyn was much more than suggested by Chapuys, he too is worth a lot more than the Anne Boleyn matter. The biography brims with the author's passion for her subject, beginning with a charming and vivid account of his home town in Annecy, where he is still commemorated in street names and local architecture. Mackay does well too where the sources are silent by sketching the broad outlines of his life before he was sent to England in 1529, freely admitting that there is much we do not know about Chapuys's life but credibly suggesting various possibilities based on what we do know. It's what all Tudor historians have to do from time to time, it's full of pitfalls and Mackay does better than most in weaving her way through it. Once Chapuys gets to England, where his legal training was intended to help the beleagured Katherine of Aragon, Mackay is able to make use of the mountains of letters that her subject wrote to the Emperor and the picture becomes clearer still.

Mackay's strengths are not just her zeal for the thin and rather elegant man she's writing about, but also her ability to analyse his thoughts and to make full use of his lengthy and colourful correspondence. She is right when she points out that without Chapuys's letters Tudor history, as we know it, would not exist. There were a few times when I did not agree with her conclusions and I thought there were one or two moments when she was slightly too prepared to take Chapuys at face value. However on moments when I, or any reader, might disagree with Mackay's conclusions on certain minor points they are still well-argued and well-written enough to be taken seriously and respected. There are no unreasonable assessments in Inside the Tudor Court and she presents the information clearly enough that she allows her readers to make their own conclusions. She invites them, as it were, to share her enthusiasm for Charles V's servant.

This is a wonderfully useful book that brings to life the colourful and often confusing world of the Henrician court, as seen through the eyes of one of its most gifted if controversial observers. Lauren Mackay deserves considerable praise for setting Chapuys back in his context and reminding us, regardless of whom he quarrelled with or why, what a debt we all owe him. She makes him both an esteemed intellectual but entirely human, she allows him her foibles - I particularly enjoyed the point she makes about his correspondence's relative lack of descriptions of the English court's numerous entertainments: he didn't enjoy them and thought them slightly frivolous, so he told the Emperor he wouldn't bore him with the details. There has long been a need for a biography of this brilliant and complex figure and Lauren Mackay has certainly delivered it.

The sinking of the "Príncipe de Asturias"

The Príncipe de Asturias was built in Scotland in 1912 and, along with her sister ship the Infanta Isabel, she was one of the largest ships in the Spanish merchant fleet. Spain's commercial shipping did not rival Britain's or Germany's in size at the time and the Príncipe de Asturias (named after the title traditionally given to the heirs to the Spanish throne) weighed 8,400-tons, with room for 1800 passengers. 

Spain under King Alfonso XIII stayed neutral during the First World War. There seemed no obvious territorial or commercial benefit to embroiling herself in the conflict, furthermore she had no major long-standing alliance with any of the combatants. The Royal Family itself was divided on the issue - King Alfonso's mother, the 'tall, fair and sensible' Maria-Christina, was an Austrian archduchess by birth; his wife, Queen Victoria-Eugenie (often known as Ena), was a British princess, the cousin of King George V, but she was also Kaiser Wilhelm II's cousin and had a host of German relatives. Furthermore, public opinion in Spain was divided between the Allies and the Central Powers. 

With Spain officially neutral and King Alfonso's government acting alongside Sweden and Switzerland as a diplomatic conduit for many official negotiations between the warring powers, commercial life continued much as before in the Iberian kingdom. In 1916, the Príncipe de Asturias was re-assigned to operate the route between Barcelona and Buenos Aires. On a return visit in March 1916, the ship was sailing off the coast of Brazil in a dense fog, when she ran aground of a partially submerged sandback near the city of São Sebastião. The captain attempted to turn the ship towards the nearby port of Santos, but the damage sustained was too extensive. Tragically, the Príncipe de Asturias sank shortly before sunrise on 5th March, 1916, with the loss of 445 lives. 

The Kings and Queens of Spain

So, after posting on the Kings of France and England, here's a list of the Kings and Queens of Spain which, it has to be said, is a pretty complicated and tumultuous list.

THE HOUSE OF TRASTAMARA AND THE ORIGINS OF THE SPANISH KINGDOM

27th September, 1501: Katherine of Aragon sets sail for England

On The Anne Boleyn Files, Claire Ridgeway discusses the day the fifteen year-old Katherine of Aragon left her native Spain to marry into the English royal family. Due to adverse weather conditions, the Infanta's trip had already been forced to turn back to Spain once before, but, this time, the new captain, Stephen Butt, sent all the way from England by King Henry VII, carried the flotilla out into the Atlantic and towards England.

Review of a new biography of Mary Tudor

The superb blog Mary Tudor: Renaissance Queen reviews yet another biography of Queen Mary Tudor, by Oxford linguist and historian, John Edwards. Mary Tudor: England's Catholic Queen seeks to put Mary in her proper context as a mid-century European sovereign, rather than merely focusing on the alleged tragedies of her adolescence and private life. 

For the blog's excellent and expert review of Edward's biography, click here.

The Assassination of William the Silent

Author Stephanie A. Mann takes a look at the notorious assassination of Prince William "the Silent" of Orange in 1584, by Balthasar Gerard, and the reaction in Protestant England where it fuelled Queen Elizabeth's fears that she was next.

The fate of the prince's murderer is not for the faint-hearted!

Defending Katherine of Aragon

As part of a new series of articles, Claire Ridgway, creator of The Anne Boleyn Files and its sister site The Elizabeth Files, will be writing on the popular stereotypes which still govern the reputations of Henry VIII's six wives. She begins by querying if Katherine of Aragon really was the "boring one," before going on to discuss the nuances of various modern views of Henry's first wife and the mother of Queen Mary I.

"To our modern eyes, Catherine appears a religious fanatic, a victim, a woman who wallowed in her misery and would not let go of her marriage, and many blame her for the woman her daughter Mary became, an intolerant and cruel queen. People say that she should have accepted the failure of her marriage and gone into a convent, and that doing so would have saved her and her daughter a lot of grief, but, we have the benefit of hindsight; we know how the story ended and what a damaged woman Mary became. We are also looking on the situation with our 21st century eyes and not taking into account the times Catherine lived in or the beliefs that surrounded marriage... She stuck to her principles and her beliefs against a man who went on to execute two wives. She was prepared to die a martyr if she had to and I admire her strength and her courage."

To read Claire's full assessment of Katherine's life and career, click here.

Above: Irish actress Maria Doyle Kennedy as Katherine of Aragon in the television series The Tudors.

Hello, 2011!

Well, A.D. 2010 has been and gone and today is January 1st, 2011 - New Year's Day in the United Kingdom since the reign of King George III. (Prior to that, the English preferred to celebrate new year on March 25th.) 2010 has been like any year, namely a mixture of some good and some bad. As a family, we sadly lost my uncle, Richard Mahaffy, on the day before Saint Patrick's Day in March, an event which has obviously been personally very hard for my mother (his sister), his wife, daughter and stepdaughter, as well as (of course) for his parents, my wonderful, wonderful grandparents. Uncle Richard's funeral did however bear testament to how well-respected he had been, and also very much liked as well. It has not been easy, by any means, and Christmas this year was slightly more downbeat than others have been.

However, it's also had a lot of good things - my friends Emerald, Aisleagh, Laura and Elena Maria have had great success and been very inspiring in their career paths. Emerald's first major television appearance was aired at the end of the year. She played Lady Lottie Edgefield in Channel Four's adaptation of William Boyd's novel Any Human Heart - a fantastic show from a great novel. I think it's still on 4OD, if you're looking for it! Aisleagh has catapulted into the world of high-flying lawyer types (seems only yesterday we got stuck trying to climb out a bathroom window when we decided a high school house party we were attending was too boring, but we were too afraid to go out the front door in case it caused a scene... squealing like two stuck piglets in what was demonstrably a tiny, tiny window was how karma got us back.) Laura has just published her first book, Eat, Drink & Succeed: How to Climb to the Top using the Networking Power of Social Events and Elena Maria published her third novel, The Night's Dark Shade, set in 13th-century France during the turmoil of the Albigensian Crusade. Onwards and upwards, ladies - and congratulations!

I also had a wonderful summer vacation in America this year, with just a little bit of work thrown in, and I got to spend lots of time working with the team at Penguin, who are amazing and very entertaining. Puffin's 70th birthday party in London was riotous fun, although people seemed to be traumatised by the post-modern technological bathrooms. Not entirely sure that it showed either of us in a particularly good light when almost the first thing my editor and I discussed when she announced she was pregnant was the possibility of being able to shop in Baby Dior or the Ralph Lauren Children department... Still, it's best to be realistic about these things.

2011 is a year I have great reason to look forward to - my first novel, Popular, is being published in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland on July 7th by Penguin and I'm very excited about that, as well as handing in the manuscript for its first sequel on January 14th; I'm back to work in the United States for a week in February, I hope to complete my masters in medieval history, my friend Aisleagh is getting married and I have made some truly wonderful friends in the past year, who I'm very excited to be starting 2011 with in my life. Don't get too conceited though; I am very capricious! Literally, at any second I can change my mind. Bam! ... I jest ... I do not jest.

This also marks the start of the first full calendar year in which I will be keeping this blog, having started back in spring 2010. Bearing that in mind, I thought I would have a look back over some of this blog's statistics to see what we've achieved since starting.

Well, since March this blog has had 96,857 hits. Of those, nearly 40% came from the United States and trailing along in a distant second were my own compatriots in the United Kingdom. Canadian, German, Australian, French, Dutch, Brazilian, Spanish and Finnish readers made up the rest of the international Top 10. And perhaps most interestingly of all, here are the top ten most popular articles: -

1. "Elvis, Chatsworth, JFK and Me" 

(A link to The Daily Telegraph's interview with the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire)

2. "The Allure of Anne Boleyn"

(A post where I discuss the perennial fascination with Henry VIII's second wife)

Easter Sunday

"They returned from the tomb and reported all these things to the eleven and to all the rest. Now they were Mary Magdalene and Johanna and Mary the mother of James; also the other women with them were telling these things to the apostles. And these words appeared to them as nonsense, and they would not believe them. But Peter arose and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen wrappings only; and he went away to his home, marveling at that which had happened."
- The Gospel according to Saint Luke, Chapter 24

Of all Christianity's many relics, none is more famous, nor more controversial, than the Shroud of Turin, kept for centuries in the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist in Turin, Italy. Contrary to popular belief, the Vatican neither endorses nor rejects the authenticity of the cloth which, for centuries, has been venerated as the burial cloth of Jesus Christ. When shown under strong light, the Shroud reveals a haunting imprint of a crucified man in his early-to-mid thirties, the body bearing literally hundreds of wounds from scouring, the forehead pierced multiple times and the hands and feet pierced by nail-sized wounds.

For almost the last half-century, however, the Shroud has been a byword for religious hokum amongst the intelligentsia. Carbon dating tests carried out on the Shroud with the Vatican's permission concluded that the Shroud dated from the 14th century and, as such, was nothing more than a clever forgery. The insistence of those, like textile historian Dr. Lemberg, who argued that the intricate stitching on the back of the Shroud was utterly unknown in medieval Europe and dated from either the 1st or 2nd century AD, was ignored. So too were the queries of those historians who pointed out the technology to actually forge something as intricate and life-like as the Shroud was non-existent in the Middle Ages; a fact corroborated by forensic pathologists who argued that the anatomical details on the figure in the Shroud tally with everything we know of the physicality of death by crucifixion, facts which most people in the Middle Ages did not know due to a life-time of gazing at usually-inaccurate crucifixes. However, the carbon dating on the Shroud which placed it to over a millennium after the death of Jesus Christ was held to be incontrovertible and, for many - myself included - the fact that it was impossible for the Shroud of Turin to be genuine was more or less self-evident.

As with many things, I was rather jolted out of this complacency at Oxford by a tutor who, when I made an airily dismissive comment about the Shroud's authenticity, responded: "Ah, but what about the stitching? What about the folding patterns? What about the blood?" The blood? "Yes, the blood; it's AB. Common enough in Palestine at the time of the Crucifixion. Practically unheard-of in early modern Europeans. They couldn't have know that to 'fake it,' could they? And yet it's all over the Shroud. All over it." What about the carbon dating, I asked swiftly. "Yes, I've often wondered about that. Of course, it's equally possible that they made a mistake and simply analysed the polymers left on the Shroud from the last time it was exposed to the air for a prolonged period of time - which would be the 14th century. Still, I suppose it could be the most ingenious fraud in history, couldn't it? Anything is possible."

The Shroud's track record amongst the written sources, however, is not great. There is no evidence of it being in existence prior to turning up in France in 1360, but evidence or not, the sheer emotional impact of the dead, ghostly imprint on the Shroud was such that once it did come to the Faithful's notice it asserted a collective hold on the hearts of pilgrims that it was never, really, relinquished.

Lying sealed in a magnificent silver ark in the Cámara Santa ("Holy Chamber") of the Cathedral of San Salvador in Oviedo, north-western Spain, is another piece of cloth associated with the events of Easter. But this piece of cloth has attracted far less attention than the Turin Shroud. It is known as the Sudarium of Oviedo: a sudarium (Latin for 'sweat-cloth') would have been placed over the face of dead Jews in the time of Christ. In the case of those who died from Crucifixion, it would naturally have caught the blood and sweat of the dying man and, true to its claim, the Sudarium holds small pools of blood congregated around the nasal area, with the sweat and blood stains trailing off around the beard-line of the victim. Unlike the Shroud, however, there is no imprint. (The Sudarium would, in any case, not have stayed on the body for as long as the Shroud.) The Sudarium is simply an ancient, blood-stained piece of cloth, folded over in two unlike most of its kind because whoever it wrapped had died in a state of extreme shock, the head lolling onto outstretched arms already racked with rigamortis by the time the Sudarium was placed over the face.

In a further divergence to the Shroud, the documentary evidence about the Sudarium is a lot stronger. It is first mentioned in a European source by Antoninus of Piacenza, a 6th century Christian pilgrim, who saw the Sudarium being venerated in a cave of the Monastery of Saint Mark the Evangelist, just outside Jerusalem, where, according to locals, it had been kept for several hundred years. Such was the pious love accorded to the Sudarium that it is virtually impossible to believe that it had been forged recently. Moreover, its fame was such that despite being left untouched it was already under the careful watch of the Church hierarchy in Constantinople.

Forty-four years after Antoninus prayed in the presence of the Sudarium, the Persians invaded Palestine. Fearing that the Holy Relic would fall into the hands of non-believers, the monks and the Byzantine hierarchy arranged for the Sudarium to be smuggled out of the fallen province and it commenced its wandering, after the monks charged with its safe-keeping fled south. Moving through northern Africa, they eventually crossed at the Straits of Gibraltar and brought the Sudarium to the Kingdom of the Asturias, the first kingdom on the Iberian peninsula to convert to Christianity. There, the Sudarium was stored in the silver ark which it continues to rest in today and, in the next generation, a Holy Chamber was built for the relic by King Alfonso the Chaste. The Chamber today is part of the Cathedral of San Salvador and for the last thirteen hundred years, the Sudarium has called the Cámara Santa of San Salvador home.

Not long after the Shroud of Turin, the Sudarium too was carbon-dated. The result? That it dated from the 7th century, and no earlier. Yet, we know from the writings of Antoninus of Piacenza and from Byzantine writers that the Sudarium was already old in the 6th century. Perhaps, as one of the dons had suggested to me was the case with the Shroud, the carbon dating of the Sudarium had picked up only on the bacteria left by the last time the relic was properly left in the open air for a prolonged period of time - the 7th century - when it was smuggled from Palestine to Spain.

On the surface, the Sudarium's claim to authenticity - especially in the documentary sources - is much stronger than the Turin Shroud's. Moreover, there is absolutely no evidence in any written source that has survived (and those on the Sudarium are extensive) which places the Sudarium and the Shroud (which would have formed two parts of the same funerary equipment if one believes both their legends) together, at any point in history. Not in the writings of Antoninus of Piacenza, the first European to see the Sudarium, or any subsequent saint, writer or historian since has there ever been a source which even hints that the Shroud and the Sudarium met each other in Palestine, Africa, Byzantium, Spain, France, Italy or the Hapsburg Empire. As far as the written evidence goes, we know the two never met at any point after the sixth century AD.

Today, the Sudarium of Oviedo lies in its magnificent silver reliquary near the tombs of Saint Eulogius, one of the forty-eight "Martyrs of Córdoba," Saint Leocadia of Toledo, Saint Pelayo, King Fruelo the Cruel and three queens - Queen Munia Lopez, Queen Teresa of León and Queen Jimena de Pamplona. Every year, it is exhibited to the faithful on Good Friday, then in September on the Feast of the Triumph of The Cross and once more on the Feast's Octave in October. Then, for the rest of the year, this mysterious, bloody piece of cloth slumbers in the silver ark that was built for it by a pious king over a millennium ago.

And, in one of those rare sets of occurrences which science deplores and history loves, there is one final piece of information of the Sudarium of Oviedo which is perhaps worth considering: the fabric the Sudarium is made of, the geographical origin of the cloth, the type of stitching around the edges and the blood type which stains it? They are all exactly the same as those on the Shroud of Turin. To all intents and purposes the Sudarium and the Shroud, which history tells us never met and science tells us never could have met, may as well have been cut from the same piece of cloth.

Maybe they're both the most ingenious works of fraud in history.

Who knows?

Anything is possible...