Victoria : First cousins - still creepy

I still find it creepy that Victoria and Albert were first cousins. I can't imagine getting intimate with a first cousin of mine.

Same here, but things were way different back then.

I agree with the post above me. My grandfather's maternal grandparents were first cousins too (they married in the XIX century). People's mindset has simply changed.

Exactly. People don't realize how common cousin marriages used to be. It makes sense that when our ancestors rarely traveled more than a few miles from home, they'd likely be related to many of their neighbors, and marrying a cousin wasn't the taboo it is today. I know I have at least two cousin marriages in my family from the 1800s.

I knew a family who had a tradition of marrying cousins. My classmate was one of them and married his.
In the royal houses of Europe it was hard not to.

A lot of families nowadays spend a lot of time around each other. It's common for cousins to be more like siblings. In those situations, yeah, it's creepy.

Victoria's cousin was German. He lived nowhere near her, didn't grow up with her, they barely knew each other.

And during that time, and well before it, they believed in royal blood marrying royal blood and marrying royal women off to royalty men from other countries to create treaties.

Lord M said it right (even for that time). Not a good idea for the Queen to marry a first cousin or a German, but she did what other monarchs did while disregarding strong counsel.

And a lot of these people had multiple children, making it possible that you could have dozens of cousins. My dad had 3 brothers and 3 sisters and I ended up with 10 cousins and one uncle never had any kids. If my dad's siblings had ALSO had 7 kids each (as his parents did), it'd be over 40 cousins.

If they were all spread all over an entire continent, its possible you might have never met them at all and their cousin status would be a line on a chart and nothing more.

All royalty were basically related to one another. It was common practice and is called royal intermarriage. By your standards it is gross but to royalty it was considered necessary.

And they paid for the inbreeding with conditions like hemophilia.

Things were worse with the Spanish Habsburgs. Their family tree was so interwound on itself, that Charles II, was completely incapable of running the Spanish Empire, passing on his genetics, or in worst cases, feeding himself. His monarchy was run by a Regency.

Also, the Ptolemy Pharohs of Egypt were mostly brother sister matches, so at that point First Cousins don't look so bad.

They sometimes paid for all that inner-marriage with insanity in their offspring - look at King George III. The man went stark raving mad.

In modern times the royal family had to start marrying outside royal circles if they wanted to survive (thus, despite having a title, Diane as cultivated by Charles and ended up marrying him. Andrew married a commoner. So did Edward. So did Anne. And, as we know, William did too).



Dr Jason Bull: Don't give up on people, they're all we've got.

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And they paid for the inbreeding with conditions like hemophilia.

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Hemophilia would have been a problem for Victoria's sons even if she had married a non-relative. I certainly agree with you that inbreeding encourages genetic defects but hemophilia doesn't need a bad gene from both sides of the family to produce the sickness.

It has been determined by genetic analysis that the bad allele first appeared at Victoria's conception. (It was original with her rather than being inherited.)

It is now believed that the bad gene has probably "died out" among Victoria's descendants, though it is still possible that the royal family of Spain COULD still be harboring her defective allele among one of the females, such that a future male born from them could manifest the disease.

But yes, marrying a first cousin would be creepy.

Your mentality is the product of modern standards, imposed through scientific advancement, research, and knowledge of genetics that the Victorians did not have. ;)