Do Royals look funny because of inbreeding?
As far as the UK Royals are concerned, their looks don’t have anything to do with inbreeding. The Queen and Princess Margaret were both quite beautiful, and in his younger days, Prince Philip was wonderfully handsome. I think he still is quite handsome …. fit, trim, and still quite dashing in his uniforms as he stumps along with the Queen for formal occasions. I think that, in the past, the reason that a lot of royals didn’t look like the people they ruled over was that they were supposed to marry other royals…and to avoid marrying too closely, that meant marriage with a foreigner. As they all married more and more foreigners, they started to look less like their subjects who generally married someone from their own villages, not introducing any different genetic material from foreign mates. Like everyone else, even the Royals have funny-looking members in their families. Inbreeding doesn’t have anything to do with that.
They certainly don’t all look like that – you must be looking at different pictures of them from me. Throughout history, people at all levels have married cousins. It’s inevitable if you think about it – in the days when most people never travelled far as the only transport available was walking or horses, they tended to stay put and end up marrying their relatives as they were the only people around. Royal families do not inbreed enough to cause anything like that except in rare cases. Possibly the worst example there has ever been was Charles II of Spain. That Habsburg dynasty of Spain intermarried a lot to “keep the royal blood pure”. ALL of his ancestors going back for five (or six or seven, depending on which line you count) generations were descended from Philip I and Joanna the Mad of Castile, and in a lot of cases uncles married their nieces, giving the family tree an extremely strange shape – and making it hard to count the generations. It has been calculated that his genetics
