Great Britain: Royal Revelations

For the past 182 years, Britons have engaged in a strange vernal rite. Armed with a strong reading glass and a stronger curiosity, they amble attentively through the scarlet-and-gold-bound thickets of Debrett's Peerage, Baronetage, Knightage & Companionage, the annual compendium of who's who in the British aristocracy. The sport is more sedentary than bird watching, but the discoveries can be just as fascinating. Take this year's 6-lb., 3,202-page edition, which made its appearance last week.

Not only could Debrett watchers read for the first time the biographies of Scottish clan chiefs,* but in a special introductory article by Editor P. W. Montague-Smith they learned some new facts about Queen Elizabeth II. Everybody knows that the Queen is descended from William the Conqueror, who defeated Saxon King Harold at Hastings just 900 years ago this October. What Montague-Smith has discovered, though, is that Elizabeth also carries the blood of Harold in her veins.

Montague-Smith traces the line through Harold's daughter Gytha, who after the fateful day at Senlac Hill wandered to Denmark, where she met and married Volodymyr Monomakh, Grand Prince of Kiev. The line then meanders through many monarchies—Hungarian, Aragonese, French—and finally back to Britain at the time of Edward II, whose brutal murder in 1327 provided a gory conclusion to Christopher Marlowe's biographical play. To Britons of Saxon descent who may still harbor resentment over the Norman Conquest, the fact that their Queen shares brave Harold Godwinson's blood can only come as a relief.

But the revelation also has its embarrassing side: Gytha's great-grandfather was none other than the cruel 11th century Earl Leofric of Coventry, who according to legend agreed to the pleas of his wife—Lady Godiva—that taxes be reduced, but only if she would ride naked through town. In the light of the new British tax hike by a latter-day Harold (Wilson), some Britons may hope that the Godiva instinct is not dead in the breast of her queenly descendant. Elizabeth, after all, is a fine horsewoman.