1,200 Years of Royalty, Redux
Plus, Hollywood's Insufferable Southern Accents Analyzed
Wishing my monarchist-leaning British and assorted Commonwealth friends a splendid Coronation Day. To date, the most widely read Bastiat’s Window article ever was a piece I published last November titled, “1,200 Years of British Royalty in 5 Charts: English, Scots, Brits, plus Nordics, Germans, Slavs, Italians, French, and lots of blood.” This piece revolved around five densely populated charts I had made a few years earlier of the Royal Family’s tangled genealogical threads. An overwhelming number of today’s Bastiat’s Window readers were not yet subscribers last November, so I thought I’d revisit the topic on this day of pomp and circumstance.
By all means, forward this article to your friends in the UK and the other 14 nations of Charles’s Realm. Charts I and II show the English lines. Chart III shows the Scottish line. Chart IV shows the Scandinavians, Slavs, and assorted other Continentals. Chart V is a bonus feature, showing the rather colorful and horrifying ways in which each Scottish monarch died from 858 A.D. to 1714. Following are a few lightly edited tidbits from the November article:
Everyone knows that at 73, Charles III was older upon becoming king than any other English or British monarch had been on his or her first day on the throne. But less well-known is the fact that Charles III was older upon becoming king than almost any other English or British monarch had been on his or her final day on the throne (i.e., the day they died or abdicated). George II died at 76, George III and Victoria at 81, and Elizabeth II at 96. I believe that’s it. Edgar Æthling died at around 75, but he was booted from the throne at 15—if, indeed, he ever sat on it. Edward VIII died at 77, but Mrs. Simpson’s charms lured him from the throne at 41.
Under the Act of Settlement of 1701, all British monarchs must descend directly from Sophia, Electress of Hanover, who barely missed the opportunity to rule the United Kingdom. The elderly but robust Sophia, who was heir presumptive to the throne, died less than two months before the younger, but sickly Queen Anne (who was portrayed brilliantly by Olivia Colman in 2018’s The Favourite). So far as I know, no one has made a film about Sophia. Too bad. She’s an interesting character—an outstanding patron of the arts and a formidable intellect who sponsored Gottfried Leibniz’s work and who was hihgly conversant in the writings of René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and others. Sophia currently has around 5,000 living descendants, though not all are in the line of succession. (Catholics and those of illegitimate birth are excluded, for example.)
Harold Godwinson’s descendants pass through nobility and royalty in Kiev, Hungary, Naples, France, and then back to England, where, after 15 or 16 generations, his DNA makes its way to Edward III—ancestor of all subsequent English and British rulers (and likely a direct ancestor of 80% of all pre-immigration Brits). Harold’s mother, Gytha Thorkelsdóttir, had a brother, Ulf the Earl, who married Estrid Svensdatter, who was the daughter of the Sweyn Forkbeard—the first Danish king of England. I didn’t need to include all the detail in the previous sentence, but I really enjoy the opportunity to type all those Game of Thrones-type names.
After reviewing all this history, my wife asked, “Exactly how many of these Scottish monarchs died violent deaths?” The quite-striking answer is visible in Chart V’s color-coding. Blue indicates a natural death. Red indicates a violent death—the most recent of which was the English/Scottish king Charles I, beheaded at the time of the English Civil War. Suffice it to say that very few Scottish monarchs’ obituaries read, “Died peacefully at home, surrounded by loving family.” My personal favorite is James I of Scotland (who was not James I of England), who was slaughtered in 1437 because he had blocked up his escape route to prevent his tennis balls from going into a sewer.
The Danish line led into rulers of some smaller German kingdoms and then to James III of Scotland—from whom all subsequent English, Scottish, and British monarchs are descended. Scotland came to rule the Orkney and Shetland Islands because James married Margaret of Denmark, whose father, King Christian I of Denmark, was a financial idiot who wildly over-promised on his daughter’s dowry and had to use the Orkneys and Shetlands as collateral—which Scotland absorbed after Christian defaulted.
Lagniappe
Thuh Dah-lect-ology of the American House of Cahds
In the splendid British House of Cards, Prime Minister Francis Urquhart (Ian Richardson) is a highly complex character. He’s a murderous snake, but driven primarily by the egomaniacal notion that only he can save Britain from the abyss. His war with the the king, clearly modeled after then-Prince Charles (now Charles III), was a struggle between two deeply flawed, but somewhat principled adversaries.
The American reprise of House of Cards irritated me from the start, and my wife and I quickly abandoned it, though I read snippets about its arc over the years. Kevin Spacey’s Frank Underwood struck me as supremely uninteresting—a simplistic cartoon character who, unlike P.M. Urquhart, just enjoyed being evil.
But as much as anything, I disliked the American series because I am a Southerner and an amateur linguist, and I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate Hollywood’s chronic ineptitude with Southern accents. Spacey lived in New Jersey, California, and New York—where knowledge of things Southern begins and ends with Gone with the Wind. When I mentioned my distaste for Spacey’s accent to a friend who grew up near the fictional Underwood’s hometown of Gaffney, South Carolina, he said I should read this Vox article by Alex Abad-Santos and watch the accompanying video by Joss Fong (with Abad-Santos).
Summing up, Frank Underwood is an up-from-poverty 50-something from the hilly Piedmont, but his accent is more that of an upper-crust 80-something from the Coastal Plain. He sounds a bit like Jimmy Carter (born 1924) when he should sound like Lindsey Graham (born 1955). The video and article do a wonderful job of explaining the technicalities of what’s wrong with Spacey’s teh-ble, hah-ble, puh-tuh-bin, not ver-uh good accent.
Robert F. Graboyes publishes Bastiat’s Window, a Substack journal of economics, science, and culture—with an emphasis on healthcare. He is a health economist, journalist, and musician in Alexandria, Virginia, and holds five degrees, including a PhD in economics from Columbia University. In 2014, he received the Reason Foundation’s Bastiat Prize for Journalism. His music compositions are at YouTube.com/@RFGraboyes/videos.
When Sissy Spacek starred as Loretta Lynn in "Coal Miner's Daughter", she did a fine job of adapting her East Texas accent to a West Virginian one. She not only mimicked Loretta Lynn's accent in the dialogue but in singing Loretta Lynn's hit songs. I suspect the reason an actor finds it so difficult to mimic an unfamiliar accent is that he never knows whether he is underdoing it or overdoing it.
I've lived in one area or the other in the South for fifty or so of my 67 years, and while I admit to noticeable differences in accent between, say, Memphis and Savannah, I can't determine which is which when I listen. I admit it's a low bar, but I'm generally happy if a movie about the South just acknowledges that "y'all" is a plural pronoun.