From the Telegraph, hardly a foreign source
The obvious place to start is the family tree, although unfolding it is enough to make even the most seasoned genealogist reach for a stiff drink. Yet what comes across very clearly — and very quickly — is that there is a lot of German in it.
There is no real starting point, but we may as well begin with 1714. Queen Anne died, and her direct Stuart line came juddering to a halt. This caused a thorny problem because her 50 (or thereabouts) closest suitable relatives were all Catholic, so distinctly non grata. They were passed over, and in the end Georg Ludwig, the Protestant Prince Elector of Hanover, got the job, and our royal house changed from Stuart to Brunswick-L?neburg-Hanover, bringing with it a wealth of connections to the ancient royal houses of Welf and Este.
It is worth pausing to note that, until recently, members of the Royal Family had no surname. They customarily used first names and the name of their house, which was inherited from the father (Richard the Lionheart was a Plantagenet, Henry VIII was a Tudor, George I was a Hanover).
Accordingly, the House of Hanover ended with Queen Victoria, and her descendants took the dynastic name of her husband, Prince Albert, which was also German: Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, a branch of the eminent House of Wettin.
Simple. But it does not end there.
The Queen and Prince Philip meet the cast of the Richard Strauss opera 'Der Rosenkavalier' after a gala performance at the National Theatre in Munich in 1965
When World War One bred increasing anti-German sentiment in Britain, astute observers noted that Kaiser Bill was Queen Victoria’s grandson and our King George V’s first cousin. In recognition of the delicacy of the position, George V changed the name of his royal house from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor, after the castle. At the same time, he also took the modern step of adopting Windsor as a surname for his family.
On her accession, Queen Elizabeth II chose to keep the name Windsor, and in 1960 the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh announced that they wanted their descendants who do not have an HRH title to be Mountbatten-Windsor. (Mountbatten is the Duke of Edinburgh’s adopted name. His German-Danish-Greek royal lines are Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Gl?cksburg on his father’s side, and Battenberg on his mother’s.)
Well, so much for the German genealogy – not to mention customs. The Royal Family still opens its presents on Christmas Eve, following the German tradition, which Prince Albert was particularly keen on following.
