Political News of the Day

The Daily Mail is reporting that a twelve year old girl has conducted genealogical research and proven that all but one of the presidents of the US (the one being Martin van Buren) are descendants of King John I. "They all have the trait of wanting power," d’Avignon [the girl] said.

That's incredible.

Incredibly fucking stupid, that is. For one thing, royal lines tend to be well-monitored. The scions of royal families know of their histories, and so does everyone else. They also tend to dwindle as progeny die in coups, wars, revolutions, and intrigues. I'm confident that some herald, somewhere, has tracked down the Plantagenet line to its final points.

Oh. Look. "When Henry VII executed Edward, the Earl of Warwick in 1499, the House of Plantagenet went extinct in the legitimate male line. Margaret Pole, the Earl of Warwick's sister and last legitimate Plantagenet, was executed for treason by Henry VIII in 1541. Edward IV's illegitimate son Arthur Plantagenet, 1st Viscount Lisle was a member of Henry VIII's court until he was arrested and charged with treason in 1540. He was cleared of the treason charges but just before he was to be released from the Tower of London in 1542 he suffered a heart attack and died."

Huh.

For another, that any class of people in a country as varied as the United States spread over more than two centuries shares any measurable common ancestor is unbelievable. Even the German Eisenhower? The Dutch Roosevelts? The Kenyan Obama? The Irish Kennedy? Somehow, they're all descended from English royalty? The SAME king? Please.

Third, was there some sort of sorcerous force that conspired to ensure that only these lost sons of royalty won their elections and obtained their offices? Was it divine providence that had Franklin Roosevelt, descendant of King John, select Harry Truman, descendant of King John (one of the few presidents to have not graduated college before serving in office, chosen to be a non-threatening, working class appeal to Middle America), for his Vice President? Did fate conspire to have frontier-dwelling-but-secretly-Plantagenet-royalty Lincoln select the Scotch-Irish-but-secretly-Plantagenet-royalty Andrew Johnson as his VP, or was it because he was from Tennessee and represented a symbolic attempt to hold together the union, like the history books and primary documents say?

Fourth, there are real difficulties in tracing most American ancestors before the 18th century. Hardly a surprise, since literacy was not universal and people sort of appeared on the American continent in drips and drabs with spotty records, if any at all. Yet 43 of the 44 US Presidents can be traced with certainty to 12th century England? And, since the legitimate Plantagenet line was made extinct, these bloodlines were traced with certainty through royal bastards?

This sounds like an asinine conspiracy theory given a veneer of legitimacy; 'oh, a little girl has researched this, it must be true.' That anyone is taking this seriously in the absence of thorough, and I mean mountainous, proof makes me want to weep.