How Prince William and Prince Harry descend from Mary Boleyn
Posted By Claire on October 16, 2018
Yesterday, on Facebook, I shared the news that Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, and his wife, Meghan, are expecting their first child. I shared it saying that “the Boleyn bloodline continues” and I just wanted to write this article to explain this in more detail as I received lots of questions yesterday.
If you’ve been following the Anne Boleyn Files page, you may remember that I wrote an article back in 2015 about how our present queen, Queen Elizabeth II, is descended from Mary Boleyn. You can read that article here. So there is a line of descent from Mary Boleyn to Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, and Prince Harry (or Henry to call him his proper name!), Duke of Sussex, as they are obviously the queen’s grandsons. Here is the line from Mary Boleyn to Charles, Prince of Wales, the princes’ father:
(Just to clarify how it works, it’s a written bloodline rather than a family tree, as that woukd be very big and complicated, so I only mention the relevant people in the bloodline. Mary Boleyn married William Carey and they had a daughter, Catherine, who then had a daughter Lettice, who had a son Robert, who had a daughter Frances, and so on, all the way to the present day.)
- Mary Boleyn (d. 1543) m. William Carey
- Catherine Carey (c.1524-1569) m. Sir Francis Knollys
- Lettice Knollys (1543-1634) m. Walter Devereux, 1st Earl of Essex
- Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex (1565-1601) m. Frances Walsingham
- Frances Devereux (1599-1674) m. William Seymour, Duke of Somerset
- Jane Seymour (1637-1679) m. Charles Boyle, 3rd Viscount Dungarvan
- Charles Boyle, 2nd Earl of Burlington (d. 1704) m. Juliana Noel
- Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington (1695-1753) m. Dorothy Savile
- Charlotte Elizabeth Boyle (1731-1754) m. William Cavendish, 4th Duke of Devonshire
- Dorothy Cavendish (1750-1794) m. William Cavendish-Bentinck, 3rd Duke of Portland, Prime Minister
- Lieutenant-Colonel Lord Charles Bentinck (1780-1826) m. Anne Wellesley (Lady Abdy)
- Reverend Charles Cavendish-Bentinck (1817-1865) m. Carolina Louis Burnaby
- Cecilia Nina Cavendish-Bentinck (1862-1938) m. Claude Bowes-Lyon, 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne
- Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother (1900-2002) m. King George VI
- Queen Elizabeth II (1926- ) m. Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, now known as Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh
- Charles, Prince of Wales (1948- ) m. Lady Diana Spencer (1961-1997)
- Prince William, Duke of Cambridge (1982- ) and Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex (1984- )
What’s interesting, though, is that Princes William and Harry are also descended from Mary Boleyn through their mother’s Spencer line:
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As I said in a previous post, I’m counting the days to the next Anne Boleyn Experience tour – 213 days as I write this! I’m already excited. I just love it. 
