The Perfect King (86 page)

The intermarriage of Edward's descendants as a result of social expectation was at its height in the fifteenth century. As noted above, of the twenty-one great-grandchildren whose descendants perpetuated Edward's lineage, ten
(48%)
married another descendant, implying five of the sixteen marriages in this generation
(31%)
were intermarriages. But this proportion seems to decline over the centuries. Of all the marriages noted as taking place in the generation alive in and shortly after
1500,
less than
13%
were to other descendants of Edward III, so far as can be determined. This is surprising at first, until we reflect that it was only a few great families whose children were all expected to marry peers of the realm. The younger sons and daughters of younger sons and daughters of the gentry increasingly married merchants and local yeomen. Even by
1500
merchants and minor gentry were marrying descendants of Edward III. Thus the proportion of intermarriage which took place as a result of social obligation or bias (as opposed to pure chance) decreased, and this decrease was probably continual. Nevertheless, if the
13%
of intermarriage around
1500
is taken as a guide, this would have reduced the number of descendants in the generation centred on
1530
by a factor of 1
oo
/11
3.
Rather than doubling to roughly
872
descendants as implied in the previous calculation, the total would have been around
771.
Applying the same corrective factor would have led to a further decline in the increment of the next generation, so that the figure for the generation centred on
1560
would be
1,472
of the population of
2,963,505.
If we then apply this corrective factor once more to the increment, we arrive at about
3,424
of the population in
1590
(estimated at
3,895,749)
and
7,208
of the population in
1620
(estimated at
4,634,570)
as being descended from Edward III. A rough check on the acceptability of these figures is possible. If the twenty-two descendants of Edward's alive on
1
January
1380
had increased to at least
436
in
1500
(an increase of
20x
over
120
years of slowly increasing population levels), a
16
.
5X
increase over the
120
years from
1500
(a period of rapidly increasing population levels) is reasonable, and almost certainly an underestimate, as intended.

This implies that maybe up to
99.84%
of
the population of England was
not
descended from Edward in
1620.
Nevertheless, continuing to use the correction factor of
13%
of all marriages between Edward's descendants being non-accidental status-related intermarriages, we may estimate that the maximum proportions of the population who were
not
descended from Edward were as follows:

1620:
99.84447%

1710:
99.1416%

1800:
95.3596%

1650:
99.7249%

1740:
98.4873%

1830:
91.9774%

1680:
99.5138%

1770:
97.3428%

1860:
86.3703%

Up to this point we have been adjusting for non-accidental intermarriages in every generation at a level of
13%.
However, by
1860
the real level was much less than this. Therefore the percentages in the above table are very considerable overestimates of the population
not
descended from Edward. Also, from this point onwards, the emerging capitalist society and the railway network mean that, with the exception of remote areas of the country, the corrective factor applies less and less. If we dispense with this factor from now on, the remaining generations work out as follows:

1890: 74.60% 1950: 30.97% 1920: 55.65% 1980: 9.59%

And, following this pattern
, we should expect less than
1%
of English children born to English-descended parents after
1995
not
to be descended from Edward III.

The above working has been exceedingly cautious on several levels. The social bias affecting whom one married did not extend to
13%
of all marriages of Edward's descendants in
1860.
The population in that year was about
18,682,352,
and the above deliberate underestimate suggests that at least
2,546,348
of these were legitimately descended from Edward. Social considerations of ancestry were of importance to the minority: probably fewer than
100,000
members of the aristocracy, gentry and upper-middle classes (less than
4%
of Edward's descendants). In addition, the model above allows for a far higher level of intermarriage due to social bias in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than was probably the case. The reality is that the upper tiers of society would have become relatively quickly saturated with Edward Ill's genes, and thus almost every marriage out of class would have resulted in a dispersal of genes down the social hierarchy. Although the contrast in about
1600
is great - most of the nobility and gentry
were
descended and yet
99%
of all English people were not - the likelihood of anyone alive today having absolutely no gentry or nobility among his or her eleven, twelve or thirteen great-grandparents (eight thousand or so antecedents) is small. Furthermore, we have been working on minima throughout, and totally ignoring illegitimate conception as a factor to be taken into account. Historians tend to put the proportion of illegitimacy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries at around
5%
of all births, so the result of neglecting this
5%
increase in the number of Edward's descendants in each generation, as we have done above, amounts to an underestimate over a two-hundred-year period of roughly a quarter.
To
correct this we should increase the numbers of descendants at the end of the sixteenth century by
33%.
Obviously if by
1600
there were
33%
more descendants than estimated in the above model (including many more among the lower classes, reducing the need for a status-connected corrective factor), the proportion of people of English descent alive today who are not descended from Edward would be negligible.

As a result of this we may regard Edward III as being a common ancestor of well over
80%
— probably over
95%
- of the living English-descended population of England. It is conceivable that there are exceptional areas in some comparatively geographically isolated corners of the country which welcomed few newcomers before recent times and which have remained largely independent of the mobile middle classes, and have had few or no resident landowners, and never served as a port of any sort, and are isolated from the major highways, but there cannot be many of these. Rural and isolated poor farming communities which themselves practised inbreeding on a regular basis would be the most likely instances, and even then they must be considered exceptional if they have entirely avoid
ed the steady march of Edward III
's genes.

Finally, it is worth noting that the above conclusion implies that all the post-Conquest kings of England prior to Edward are also common ancestors of the vast majority of the English, with the exceptions of William II, Stephen and Richard I.
24
It also implies that among the common ancestors of the English people are the kings of France before
1314,
the kings of Castile before
1252,
the counts of Hainault before
1337,
the counts of Provence before
1245,
the counts of Savoy before
1233,
and the dukes of Aquitaine before
1204,
not to mention a multitude of earlier French, Italian, Spanish and German noble familes. The same thing may also be said for some of the English magnates who appear in this book. Probably the most notable example is Roger Mortimer, the first earl of March, Edward's erstwhile enemy, whose twelve children yielded more than thirty-five grandchildren, twenty-two of whom had had progeny by
1380.
Time has not permitted an accurate estimate of how many descendants of Roger Mortimer were alive in
1500
but it is very likely to have been many more than the total for Edward III, and they would certainly have been equally widely dispersed across all the English counties. The story told at the beginning of this book - of how Edward III survived and surmounted the terror of the first earl of March — is thus a story in which probably everyone of English descent has a stake. The political history of England up to and including the reign of Edward
III
is the collective family history of the English people.