King Charles III's Ethnic Heritage: A 46 Generation Analysis

A couple months ago I wrote a 23 generation analysis into the question: “What is King Charles III took a DNA Test?”. I explain the origin of the project and my methodology in a previous post, which you can find here. Since then, I’ve added an additional 23 generations to my analysis, reaching the farthest reaches of Charles III’s traceable ancestors to the 4th century AD. Here is some of the highlights of my interesting findings:

Going back 23 generations (approximately the 12th century), Charles’ ethnic breakdown is as follows:

• GERMANY 44.10%

• ENGLAND 20.63%

• FRANCE 9.51%

• HUNGARY 5.09%

• ITALY 3.47%

• POLAND 2.93%

• NETHERLANDS 2.87%

• IRELAND 2.30%

• CZECH 1.99%

• SWEDEN 1.52%

• RUSSIA 1.51%

• BALTIC 1.46%

• SPAIN 0.68%

• DENMARK 0.55%

• SCOTLAND 0.54%

• PORTUGAL 0.25%

• SLAVIC 0.21%

• WALES 0.13%

• GREECE 0.08%

• TURKIC 0.06%

• ROMANIA 0.06%

• NORWAY 0.06%

• MOORISH 0.002%

• ARMENIAN: <.0001%

However, many of Charles’ 12th century ancestors don’t have heritage from the kingdoms they ruled. For example, many of his 12th century ancestors that were counted as “English” had primarily French descent from the Norman conquest. Therefore, I decided to continue the analysis as far back as I could take it.

One of the interesting findings was an answer to the question, “how back can you trace back Charles III’s pedigree?” If you make guesses and use unsourced claims, Charles is descended from everyone from Norse Gods to Roman emperors. However, sticking to verifiable, contemporaneous evidence, Charles’ family can be traced back to the 5th century AD.

Who those ancestors are is surprising. My hypothesis was it would be the Merovingians, the dynasty of Frankish kings descended from Merovech, who allied with the Romans against Attila the Hun. However, even though Charles is descended from the Frankish Carolingian dynasty, there is no verifiable connection to the Merovingians. The earliest Germanic ancestor from whom is is likely descended is Lethuc, an early king of the Lombards. However, the earliest verifiable ancestor is Cunedda, a Welsh king from the 5th century. Cunedda is the founder of the dynasty that would rule the kingdom of Gwynedd, and ultimately marry into the English royal family. Perhaps it is fitting that Charles’ earliest ancestor is a king on the Great Britain 1500 years ago.

As a reminder from my last post, because the number of ancestors doubles with each generation (each person has two parents), by the 8th century there are trillions of ancestors, far surpassing the population of Europe. Therefore, when you get that far back, every person of European descent shares the same earliest traceable European ancestor: Cunedda. His wife Gwawl may have been daughter of Coel Hen, possibly going back one additional generation, but Coel Hen is usually considered to be legendary.

Another interesting tidbit is the amount of folding of the family tree that occurs over the course of 41 generations, especially among European royalty where there are only a limited number of families and individuals routinely marry cousins or second cousins. As a result, Charles III is descended from Charlemagne “The Father of Europe” at least 619 billion verifiable ways. This sounds like a lot until you realize Charles has over 30 trillion ancestors if you go back that many generations.

So, after the additional generations of analysis the ethnic breakdown of Charles III is

GERMANY 41.78%

ENGLAND 20.71%

FRANCE 11.03%

HUNGARY 5.11%

ITALY 3.85%

IRELAND 2.27%

SWEDISH 2.12%

RUSSIAN 1.85%

CZECH 1.79%

NETHERLANDS 1.77%

POLAND 1.76%

BALTIC 1.34%

GREEK 1.05%

DENMARK 0.82%

SCOTLAND 0.64%

NORWEGIAN 0.45%

SPAIN 0.41%

TURKIC 0.40%

SLAVIC 0.39%

ARMENIAN 0.14%

WALES 0.13%

PORTUGAL 0.08%

BULGARIA 0.06%

ROMANIA 0.06%

MOORISH 0.003%

As you can see, these portions have changed with an additional 20 generations, though not in large amounts. For one, the amount of German declined. This is a long term trend of the analysis. If you go back only 9 generations, you would find that 66.99% of Charles' ancestors were German! As you go further back, many of these German royals have French, Italian, Polish, and other blood, resulting in the proportion gradually going down the further back you get. This is true for 27 generations of analysis, which puts Charles’ Germanic heritage at 40.19%. After that point the Germanic percentage begins to creep back up as many of the rulers of France and Italy were actually descended from Germanic tribes, especially the Franks.

The proportion of French went up. This is mostly because many of the ancestors marked as English in the 23 generation analysis are actually of Norman/French descent. The proportion of Italian also went up, as in general, farther back in history, Italy was a more important power center and Western European nobles were marrying more Italian families.

The proportion of Polish descent declined markedly from the 23 generation analysis. This is mostly because the Polish nobility is not as old as it’s neighbors, and many have significant proportions of German descent. Similarly, Dutch declined, as many Dutch nobles were descended from the same Germanic tribes as the German nobles.

Finally, the proportion of Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian increased a lot between the 23 and 46 generation analysis. This is because many of the English, French, and Italian noble families were descended from Viking invaders.

Another interesting line of inquiry was looking at how “British” each British monarch is. Charles is 21.48% British in total, which is not nearly as much as his mother Queen Elizabeth II who comes in at 42.03%. Prior to Queen Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (Scottish nobility) entering the bloodline, British monarchs were much less British, with King Edward VII coming in at just .94%. Interestingly, his wife Alexandra of Denmark was actually more British than him (the British monarch) resulting in his son King George V being .98% British.

My analysis only includes monarchs in the direct bloodline. Therefore, monarchs without descendants, such as Queen Elizabeth I and Queen Anne are not in the analysis. With the monarchs analyed, the most British monarch in recent history is King Henry VII with 52.25%. He has a large amount of Welsh as well as English descent. William the Conqueror had no Anglo-Saxon blood, but his son, Henry I had .83%. After him, each of the monarchs would have at least some Anglo-Saxon descent. Prior to William, the Anglo-Saxon kings were of 100% Anglo-Saxon blood as far as records go back. Below is the table showing the breakdown of ethnicity by monarch:

I’m attaching the file with the full analysis. It’s probably a bit hard to interpret, so if there is interest, I will do an explainer on how to interpret it. Regardless, there is LOTS of interesting data in there!