Questions raised over Queen’s ancestry after DNA test on Richard III’s cousins
Tests on descendants of last Plantagenet king point to ‘false paternity event’
The skeleton found underneath a car park in Leicester in September 2012, now declared ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ to be that of King Richard III, whose remains had been missing for 500 years.
The bones of the king under the car park have delivered further shocks, 527 years after his death and more than two years after his remains were discovered in Leicester: Richard III was a blue-eyed blond, and the present Queen may not be descended from John of Gaunt and Edward III, the lineage on which the Tudor claim to the throne originated.
Five anonymous living donors, all members of the extended family of the present Duke of Beaufort, who claim descent from both the Plantagenets and Tudors through the children of John of Gaunt, gave DNA samples which should have matched Y chromosomes extracted from Richard’s bones. But none did.
Since Richard’s identity was proved by his mitochondrial DNA, handed down in an unbroken chain through the female line from his sister to two living relatives, the conclusion is stark: there is a break in the claimed line of Beaufort descent, what the scientists described as “a false paternity event”, which may also affect the ancestry of their distant cousins, the Windsors.
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/dec/02/king-richard-iii-dna-cousins-queen-ancestry
Tests on descendants of last Plantagenet king point to ‘false paternity event’
The skeleton found underneath a car park in Leicester in September 2012, now declared ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ to be that of King Richard III, whose remains had been missing for 500 years.
The bones of the king under the car park have delivered further shocks, 527 years after his death and more than two years after his remains were discovered in Leicester: Richard III was a blue-eyed blond, and the present Queen may not be descended from John of Gaunt and Edward III, the lineage on which the Tudor claim to the throne originated.
Five anonymous living donors, all members of the extended family of the present Duke of Beaufort, who claim descent from both the Plantagenets and Tudors through the children of John of Gaunt, gave DNA samples which should have matched Y chromosomes extracted from Richard’s bones. But none did.
Since Richard’s identity was proved by his mitochondrial DNA, handed down in an unbroken chain through the female line from his sister to two living relatives, the conclusion is stark: there is a break in the claimed line of Beaufort descent, what the scientists described as “a false paternity event”, which may also affect the ancestry of their distant cousins, the Windsors.
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/dec/02/king-richard-iii-dna-cousins-queen-ancestry
