Trace Your Ancestry BACK TO THE ROYAL FAMILY

• Parents: Ferdinand II of Aragon × Isabella I of Castile.
   
• Connection to the others:
   
  • First cousin to Margaret Tudor, Henry VIII’s sister (through shared descent from John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster and Katherine Swynford).
     
  • Thus, Catherine of Aragon was distantly related to Jane Seymour, Catherine Howard, and Catherine Parr, who all also descended from John of Gaunt’s Beaufort line.
     

• Parents: Thomas Boleyn × Elizabeth Howard.
   
• Connections:
   
  • Her mother Elizabeth Howard was daughter of Thomas Howard, 2nd Duke of Norfolk, making Anne first cousin to Catherine Howard (the 5th wife).
     
  • Through the Howards, Anne also shared Plantagenet descent from Thomas of Brotherton, son of Edward I, linking her remotely to Jane Seymour and Catherine Parr.
     

• Parents: Sir John Seymour × Margery Wentworth.
   
• Connections:
   
  • Margery Wentworth descended from the Percy and Clifford families, who in turn descended from Edward III via his son Lionel of Antwerp, Duke of Clarence — a shared ancestor with Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard, and Catherine Parr.
     
  • Thus Jane was a distant cousin to four of the six queens.
     

• Parents: John III, Duke of Cleves × Maria of Jülich-Berg.
   
• Connections:
   
  • A German noble of the La Mark line, Anne was less directly linked to the English queens, but through Marie of Burgundy and the House of Valois-Burgundy she also traced back to John II of France, making her a very distant cousin of the English royal lines through European intermarriage.
     

• Parents: Lord Edmund Howard × Joyce Culpeper.
   
• Connections:
   
  • First cousin to Anne Boleyn (their fathers were brothers).
     
  • Through the Howard–Mowbray–FitzAlan–Plantagenet chain, she shared descent from Edward I — making her kin to Jane Seymour and Catherine Parr as well.
     

• Parents: Sir Thomas Parr × Maud Green.
   
• Connections:
   
  • Through her father’s line she descended from Edward III via Lionel of Antwerp, the same line as Jane Seymour.
     
  • Through the Neville family she was also connected to the Beauforts, like Catherine of Aragon.
     
  • So she was related, distantly but genealogically verifiable, to five of Henry’s six wives.
     

Queen Closest Interrelation Catherine of AragonBeaufort / John of Gaunt line

Anne Boleyn, Howard family (cousin to Catherine Howard)

Jane Seymour Shared Plantagenet descent (Edward III)

Anne of Cleves Distant continental cousin via Burgundy ,Catherine Howard First cousin to Anne Boleyn Catherine Parr Shared Plantagenet/Beaufort ancestry.

AMAZINGLY THEY ARE ALL RELATED TO THE DE CLARE LINES AND HERE'S HOW.

The key figures are:

• Richard de Clare, 2nd Earl of Pembroke (“Strongbow”) m. Aoife MacMurrough
   
• Gilbert de Clare, 7th Earl of Gloucester (1243–1295) m. Joan of Acre, daughter of King Edward I
   

From these marriages, the de Clare bloodline fused into Plantagenet royal stock, spreading into the Mortimers, Beauchamps, Nevilles, Howards, and Beauforts — all of whom appear in Henry’s wives’ pedigrees.

• Through her English royal ancestry via John of Gaunt → Edward III → Edward II → Edward I → Joan of Acre → Gilbert de Clare.
  ✅ Direct de Clare descent through Joan of Acre’s children by de Clare.
   

• Her mother, Elizabeth Howard, descended from the Mowbray and FitzAlan lines, which in turn came from Eleanor de Clare, sister of Gilbert’s heir.
  ✅ Descended from Eleanor de Clare m. Hugh Despenser the Younger.
   

• The Wentworths and Cliffords in her maternal line descend from Elizabeth de Clare (another sister of Eleanor and Margaret de Clare).
  ✅ Descended from Elizabeth de Clare m. John de Burgh.
   

• Though German, the La Mark and Jülich-Berg houses married into the Luxembourg and Plantagenet-connected Burgundian lines, which again trace back to Joan of Acre and Gilbert de Clare through their granddaughter Philippa of Hainault (Edward III’s queen).
  ✅ Indirect de Clare descent via Edward III’s maternal line.
   

• A Howard of Norfolk, thus sharing the same Eleanor de Clare / Despenser ancestry as her cousin Anne Boleyn.
  ✅ Same Eleanor de Clare descent.
   

• Descended through her Neville forebears (Earls of Salisbury and Warwick), themselves descendants of Elizabeth de Clare and the Beauchamp–Despenser union.
  ✅ Through Beauchamp–Despenser–de Clare descent.
   

Queende Clare Ancestor Connection Type Catherine of AragonJoan of Acre × Gilbert de Clare, Direct Anne Boleyn, Eleanor de Clare × Hugh Despenser, Direct Jane Seymour, Elizabeth de Clare × John de Burgh Direct Anne of Cleves Joan of Acre × Gilbert de Clare (via European royal lines)IndirectCatherine HowardEleanor de Clare × Hugh Despenser, Direct Catherine Parr Elizabeth de Clare × Beauchamp–Despenser Direct 

Europe’s monarchy runs one continuous maternal thread — a living genealogy that defies both distance and dynasty. Though history has favoured the heraldic inheritance of men, the truer continuity of sovereignty flows through the wombs of women. The noble daughters and queens of Christendom became the secret architects of unity, carrying in their veins the blood of the earliest royal houses and transmitting it, generation by generation, through the matrilineal line.

As shown by Sir William Dugdale in The Baronage of England and confirmed by Collins and Courthope, the pivotal source of this maternal lineage lies with the de Clare family — the Norman earls of Gloucester and Pembroke — whose alliances with the Plantagenet crown seeded royal blood throughout the nobility of England.  Through the marriage of Gilbert de Clare to Joan of Acre, daughter of Edward I, the Plantagenet strain was joined to one of the oldest Norman houses. Their daughters — Eleanor, Elizabeth, and Margaret de Clare — married into the Despenser, Burgh, and Audley families, dispersing royal descent across the whole peerage.  Dugdale traces these lines into the Nevilles, Beauchamps, and Beauforts, while Europäische Stammtafeln confirms their continental continuation into the houses of York, Tudor, and Stuart.

It is through these women that England’s royal blood entered the continent.  The Beaufort ladies, legitimated descendants of John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford, carried this line into the Iberian and Burgundian courts.  Catherine of Aragon, as chronicled by Moreri and Litta, bore the Beaufort-Plantagenet descent back into England, making her marriage to Henry VIII a genealogical reunion rather than a political innovation.  The later Tudor queens — Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Catherine Howard, and Catherine Parr — were all cousins within the same matrilineal framework, each springing from the de Clare and Neville foundations identified by Collins and Camden.

Continental records, such as those preserved in the Genealogia Regum Europae, reveal that the same female descent extended through France and Italy.  The Medici of Florence, rising from merchant princes to sovereign dukes, intertwined their blood with that of the French and English lines.  Catherine de’ Medici, queen of France and mother of three kings, descended maternally through the La Tour d’Auvergne and Boulogne families, whose early branches intermarried with the descendants of the de Clare and de Lacy houses.  As noted by Anselme in his Histoire Généalogique de la Maison de France, this Florentine blood entered the royal veins of France, Savoy, and Lorraine, linking the Medici legacy directly with that of the Plantagenets and their Norman antecedents.

In Central Europe, the transmission continued through Barbara of Cilli, queen consort of Sigismund of Luxembourg and Holy Roman Emperor.  The Chronicon Austriacum and the Codex Epistolaris Vitoldi both record her descent from the houses of Schaunberg and Piast, lines that had long been connected to the Angevin and Plantagenet blood through marriage alliances in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.  Barbara’s daughter, Elizabeth of Luxembourg, carried that heritage into the Jagiellon and Habsburg dynasties, ensuring that the same matrilineal current flowed eastward into Bohemia, Hungary, and Austria.  The Polish Gorzeńska family, as outlined by Boniecki in Herbarz Polski, later married into these royal lines, preserving the Cilli–Jagiellon descent within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and transmitting it onward into the noble houses of Saxony and Bavaria.

The House of Luxembourg, itself descended from Ermesinde of Luxembourg and the counts of Namur, forms another vital link.  As detailed by Père Anselme and the Annales Luxemburgenses, Ermesinde’s female descendants married into both the Plantagenet and Capetian networks, carrying the Anglo-Norman inheritance into the Empire.  When Sigismund’s Luxembourg blood was joined to Barbara of Cilli’s, the English and Central European royal strains were effectively reunited.  Their progeny would appear among the Counts of Lorraine, whose marriages with the Bourbons, Savoys, and Medicis, recorded by Moreri and the Archiv de Lorraine, further reinforced the maternal unity of Europe’s crowns.

The Counts of Lorraine occupy a unique position in this continuum.  Their duchesses were often drawn from the same women’s lines — La Tour d’Auvergne, Luxembourg, and Anjou — that had earlier produced queens of both France and England.  As observed in Paradin’s Chronique de Savoie, these intermarriages wove the Lorraine duchy into the broader tapestry of Christendom’s royal kinship.  Through them, the spiritual legacy of the Knights Templar entered the genealogical record.  The Templar founders — de Montmorency, de Lusignan, and de Clare — were not only warriors but also progenitors of the very families that later produced Europe’s queens.  Although the Order itself was dissolved, its bloodlines persisted through their sisters and daughters, absorbed into the noble houses of England, France, and the Empire.  As noted in Addison’s Knights Templars (1842 ed.), the surviving crusader families transmitted both the chivalric ideal and their descent through female inheritance, ensuring that the essence of the Temple endured in royal matrimony rather than monastic secrecy.

By the early modern period, the effect of these accumulated unions was complete.  Every reigning dynasty of Europe could trace descent, often through multiple channels, to the same cluster of women: Eleanor of Aquitaine, Joan of Acre, Eleanor and Elizabeth de Clare, Barbara of Cilli, and the duchesses of Luxembourg and Lorraine.  The genealogical concordances assembled by L’Art de Vérifier les Dates and Stammtafeln Europas leave little doubt that the crowns of Britain, France, Spain, Austria, and Scandinavia are branches of a single matrilineal vine.  Even in the nineteenth century, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg were distant cousins twice over through these same medieval foremothers, their marriage a re-union of bloodlines that had never truly been apart.

Thus the narrative of European monarchy, when viewed through the maternal descent, is not one of competing houses but of one continuous family.  The queens of England, France, Austria, and Poland were all daughters of the same ancient mothers whose Norman and crusader heritage embodied both temporal and spiritual sovereignty.  Beneath the crowns of Europe beats the same ancestral heart — Plantagenet by record, de Clare by root, Luxembourg by union, Lorraine by grace, Medici by revival, and Templar by remembrance — a single bloodline that time and politics could divide in name, but never in essence.

 Across the ages the royal blood of Europe did not flow in isolation.  The stream that began in the Norman and Plantagenet courts was fed by older channels from the Levant and from Persia, carried westward by marriage, crusade, and commerce.  Long before the Tudors and Bourbons rose to power, the daughters of the East were already moving through the palaces of the West, binding the kingdoms of Christendom to the noble houses of Jerusalem, Armenia, Georgia, and the ancient Persian sphere.

The first traceable unions came with the Crusades.  When the Norman and Angevin knights carved out the Latin kingdoms of the East, they did not remain strangers to the land.  Families such as Lusignan, Montferrat, and Courtenay, whose cadet branches appear in English and French peerages, married the local princesses of Armenia and Antioch.  The Lusignan kings of Cyprus and Jerusalem took brides from the Rubenid and Hetumid dynasties, themselves descended from the royal houses of Bagratid Armenia and the Georgian Bagrationi.  From these unions came children who returned to France and England, taking with them dowries, titles, and eastern blood.  Dugdale notes in The Baronage of England that the Courtenays of Devon derived part of their inheritance through the same crusader kin who held fiefs in Edessa, a connection that Moreri later confirmed in his Grand Dictionnaire Historique.

Through the Byzantine world that current deepened.  The emperors of Constantinople—the Komnenoi and Palaiologoi—married their daughters to crusader princes and western counts.  One of these alliances, recorded in the Chronicon Orientale and by Nicetas Choniates, joined the Palaiologos imperial line to the house of Montferrat, whose descendants married into the Savoy, Burgundy, and Plantagenet families.  From Montferrat the thread passes to the English Percys and Nevilles, in whose pedigrees Collins and Courthope both remark traces of “Greek or Eastern connexion” through the crusader dowries of the thirteenth century.

Beyond Byzantium lay Persia, where diplomacy rather than conquest created the bridge.  In the thirteenth century Maria Palaiologina, known in Persian sources as Despina Khatun, a niece of the Byzantine emperor, became the wife of Abaqa Khan, ruler of the Mongol Il-Khanate of Iran.  Their daughter married into the Georgian royal house, and a later descendant, Tamar Bagrationi, appears in European genealogies as ancestress to the Lusignan and Savoy lines.  Thus a princess of Byzantium and a khan of Persia stand quietly within the ancestral background of several English families whose crusader branches returned from the East with Georgian or Armenian wives.

Commercial ties followed where crusade and empire had opened the way.  Venetian and Genoese traders settled in Tyre and Tabriz, and their daughters married the agents of English and French houses.  By the fourteenth century, merchant-noble families such as the Poles, Courtenays, and de Vere’s continental cousins of Guienne appear in notarial records of trade with the Levant.  Some of these contracts mention marriages with Christianised women of Syrian or Cilician birth—minor unions by status but potent in heritage.  Through them a thin but continuous filament of eastern ancestry entered the western peerage.

The persistence of the theme is reflected again in the later diplomatic marriages.  The de Lancaster and Hastings houses intermarried with the de Beauchamps, who by Dugdale’s account claimed descent from the Courtenays of Edessa.  In the seventeenth century, when English travellers served as envoys to the Safavid and Mughal courts, several took wives or mistresses of noble Persian or Indian origin whose children were quietly received into collateral branches of the gentry.  These were not dynastic unions in the old sense, yet they perpetuated the same east-west mingling that had begun with the crusader queens.

Taken together, these marriages—some crowned, others half-forgotten—form the hidden tissue linking the royal and noble families of Europe to the older civilisations of Israel, Iran, and Asia.  They do not constitute an unbroken genealogical chain, yet they reveal the remarkable permeability of nobility: the Lusignan kings of Jerusalem shared blood with the Plantagenets; the Palaiologoi of Byzantium with the Nevilles and Percys; the princesses of Georgia and Armenia with the Savoy and Lorraine houses that later intermarried with the Tudors and Bourbons.  Through such alliances, the sacred idea of sovereignty travelled the ancient routes of the Silk Road, finding its way at last into the heraldry of England.  Beneath the banners of Europe there still flows a remembrance of the East, carried across the centuries by the mothers of kings.