The Hidden Ancestry: Investigating the Shared Shand Bloodline of Diana and Camilla – HT
They called it the War of the Waleses. On one side, Diana Spencer, the fairy tale princess, the people’s princess, the most photographed woman in the world. On the other, Camila Parker BS, the other woman, the villain of a billion tabloid covers, the shadow that hung over a royal marriage from the very beginning. The public picked sides.
The world split into two camps. And for 20 years, the story was told as a clean binary. Good versus evil, innocent versus calculating. The woman Charles should have loved versus the woman he always loved instead. But here is the question that nobody thought to ask. What if they were family? Not metaphorically, not in the vague sense that all of British aristocracy is distantly connected, but genuinely, documentably, traceably related through a lineage of royal bastards, French spies, and scandalous mistresses that winds back
through three and a half centuries to a king who fathered children with 14 women while his queen sat in the next room. This is not a tabloid theory. This is genealogy. And once you see the family tree, you cannot unsee it. seventh cousins to be precise. Though some genealogologists calculate it as eighth depending on the branch you trace, they share a direct common ancestor.
Charles Lennox, first Duke of Richmond, an illegitimate son of King Charles II, and his Frenchborn mistress Louise Deeray, Duchess of Portsmouth. Both women carry the blood of that union in their veins, not through some remote medieval ancestor that every European noble family shares, but through a specific traceable documented line that runs through the British aristocracy in a straight line from the 17th century to the 1970s when these two women were circling the same man without knowing how deep their connection ran. But that is only the
beginning because when you open Diana’s full genealogy, the scope becomes remarkable. Lady Diana Spencer was four times descended from King Charles II and once from his brother James II. Four of her ancestors were paramores of kings, Barbara Villars and Lucy Walters and Louise de Keroway all bore out of wedlock children of King Charles II and Arabella Churchill had a baby by James II.
Four separate lines, four different mistresses, all converging in one woman born in 1961 on the Sandringham estate who married into the family her own blood had helped to shape. She had more English blood in her in fact than Prince Charles himself. All of it illegitimate. Lady Diana’s wedding brought the romantic blood of the Stewart monarchs back into the present royal family for the first time in 280 years since Prince Charles has no direct descent from the later Stewart kings.
When Diana walked down the aisle of St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1981, she wasn’t just marrying into the royal family. In a genealogical sense, she was coming home. To understand how two women born in the 20th century share blood from the 17th, you first need to understand the man at the root of the tree. Charles II, the merry monarch, restored to the English throne in 1660 after 11 years of Puritan exile and determined apparently to make up for every lost year with extraordinary efficiency.
He had over 11 illegitimate offspring by 14 mistresses and brief affairs. Some histories put the number higher. From the young king in exile’s first mistress and the mother of his first child, Lucy Walter to the promiscuous courtier Barbara Villars. From the prettiest girl in the world, Francis Theresa Stewart, to history’s most famous orange seller, the witty Nell Gwyn, and to her fellow actress Mole Davis, who bore the last of the king’s 15 illegitimate children, from Louise Deeray, the French aristocrat and suspected spy for Louis 14th, to the
sexually ambiguous Hortense Manscini. All of this while married to Katherine of Banza, the quiet Portuguese queen who produced no children and turned a dignified blind eye to her husband’s procession of favorites. This was not a private man with private vices. The court of Charles II was a theater of open carnality where mistresses competed for influence as openly as ministers competed for office where children were acknowledged and enobbled almost as a matter of routine and where the bloodlines of England’s
most powerful families became permanently irreversibly entangled with the Stewart line through the wrong side of the blanket. Two of the women in that court matter most to our story. The first is Barbara Villars. Barbara Palmer, first Duchess of Cleveland, Nay Barbara Villars, was perhaps the most notorious of the many mistresses of King Charles II, by whom she had five acknowledged children, all subsequently enobbled.
She was described by contemporaries as beautiful, volatile, and ferociously ambitious. A woman who wielded her position over the king to place friends and family, and who threatened at one point to dash a disputed child’s brains out if Charles didn’t acknowledge it as his own. He got down on his knees and begged her forgiveness.
Barbara gave Charles a son, Henry Fitzroy, first Duke of Grafton. Through Henry Fitzroy, a direct line runs through the English aristocracy into the Spencer family. Diana descended from several different lines from illegitimate children of Charles II. Henry Fitzroy, first Duke of Grafton, son of Barbara Villas Palmer, has two lines of descent to Diana.
The second woman is Louise Deroway. And this is where the story becomes not just interesting but genuinely strange. Louise de Kerwai did not stumble into the English court by accident. She arrived in 1670 as a lady in waiting to Charles’s sister Henrietta, Duchess of Orleon, who had come to England on a diplomatic mission for Louis I 14th.
She was French, aristocratic, beautiful, and according to multiple historical sources, almost certainly in the employ of French intelligence. Louise de Kerwai was the French aristocrat and suspected spy for Louis the 14th. The historians who have examined her correspondence and her actions at court most closely conclude that she was at minimum a highly useful instrument of French foreign policy, feeding intelligence about Charles’s court to the French ambassador and ensuring that England’s king remained sympathetic to French interests during a
period of critical diplomatic tension. Charles II, knowing or not caring, became besotted with her. She played the long game of ensuring the king’s affections before she gave in to him. After days of drinking, feasting, and entertainment, and some very public displays of affection, Louise and the king consumated their relationship.
She bore him one son. Charles Lennox, first Duke of Richmond, first Duke of Lennox, born 29th of July 1672, was the youngest of the seven illegitimate sons of King Charles II, and was that king’s only son by his French-born mistress, Louise Deeray, Duchess of Portsmouth. This boy, born to a possible spy, raised in the most lentious court in English history, granted three dups before he was 5 years old, is the common ancestor of Diana Spencer and Camila Parker BS.
The child was created Duke of Richmond, Earl of March, and Baron Setrington in August 1675. On the same day, King Charles II granted Louise the titles Duchess of Portsmouth, Countess of Fairhamm, and Baroness Petersfield in her own right. Louise also received an annual pension and a suite of 24 rooms in Whiteall Palace, richer and grander than Queen Catherine’s own apartment.
The queen sat in her rooms. The spies son ate at the king’s table. And the DNA that would eventually connect Diana Spencer and Camila Parker BS began its long journey through the centuries of English aristocracy. From Charles Lennox, the first Duke of Richmond, two separate branches grow, one leading to Diana, one to Camila.
And they do not meet again until 1970 at a polo match in Windsor Great Park when a young woman named Camila Shand caught the eye of a nervous bookish Prince of Wales and a 10-year-old girl named Diana Spencer was living in a house on the Sandringham estate. The path to Camila runs through the Dukes of Richmond over several generations.
The Spencer Hamilton lineage includes at least two lines of descent from Charles, first Duke of Richmond and Lennox, the son of Charles II and Louise Deeray. Interestingly, other Richmond and Lennox descendants include Camila, Duchess of Cornwall, and Sarah, the Duchess of York. The path to Diana is more complex and more extensive.
The Spencers are direct descendants, albeit illegitimate, of the House of Stewart, with the family boasting at least five lines of direct descent from the Stewarts. And from them the Spencers trace their ancestry to other royal houses such as the Bourbons, the Mediches, the Vittsbachs, the Hanovers, the Schwartzers, and the Habsburgs, and the houses of Howard and Berlin through Mary Berlin, Mistress of Henry VIII.
The Spencer family, in other words, is one of the most extraordinary genealogical intersections in European aristocratic history. They appear respectable, English, and landed, but beneath the surface, they are a living archive of royal illegitimacy stretching back 500 years. Diana’s maternal grandmother, Lady Fermoy, who would play a significant role in arranging her granddaughter’s introduction to Charles, came from a family that carried the Richmond bloodline through the marriage of Princess Diana’s grandparents, John II Spencer, and Lady
Cynthia Hamilton. The Spencer family enjoys a uniquely comprehensive range of descents from the royal house of Stewart/ Stewart. If they had been legitimate lines of descent, several of the ancestors in the Spencer Hamilton lineage would have been senior in the line of succession to the Hanover Palm Windsor family.
Read that sentence again. If the Stewarts had carried these bloodlines legitimately, Diana Spencer would have had a stronger claim to the throne than the Windsor themselves. If the shared bloodline of Diana and Camila is the hidden thread of this story, there is a second connection. One that is even more direct, even more personal, and one that Camila herself was acutely aware of from early in her relationship with Charles.
Her great great grandmother was Alice Keell through her younger daughter Sonia Cubitt. Alice Keell is the great grandmother of Queen Camila, the former mistress and second wife of Edward IIIth’s great great grandson, King Charles III. Alice Keell was the most celebrated royal mistress of the Edwardian age. Born Alice Frederica Edmonstone in 1868, raised in Dunreth Castle in Scotland, she married Lieutenant Colonel George Keell and moved in the upper reaches of London society before her life intersected with the crown.
Through her connections, she met the Prince of Wales, the eldest son of Queen Victoria, and began a relationship that would last through his succession as King Edward IIIth and until he died in 1910. Author Tina Brown writes, “The royal mistress Gene was in her blood. Her great grandmother Alice Keell was for 12 years until his death, a chief favorite of King Edward IIIth.
” Brown describes Alice as a stunning beauty whose staying power in the king’s life can be attributed as much to shrewd intelligence as it was to beauty. Now hold the parallel in your mind. Alice Keell was the mistress of a prince of Wales who became King Edward IIIth. Camila Parker BS was the mistress of a prince of Wales who became King Charles III.
Both women were married to other men while conducting their royal affairs. Both women were tolerated, even embraced by the highest circles of society. Both women outlasted the marriage of the heir to the throne. Alice was King Edward’s great great grandmother. Edward IIIth was Charles’s great great grandfather. And by a bizarre twist of fate, two women related by birth, but born decades apart, both became mistresses of a Prince of Wales.
But there is a darker dimension to the Alice Keell story that connects back to Camila’s bloodline even more directly. The paternity of the maternal grandmother of Queen Camila, Sonia Rosemary Keell, is being disputed. Alice’s second daughter, Sonia, was born in 1900. Nobody can say with certainty who her biological father was.
Sonia Keell was born in 1900. Alice Keell’s affair with Edward IIIth began in 1898. The Prince of Wales was by that point the most constant presence in Alice’s life. If Edward IIIth was Sonia’s biological father, and the question has never been definitively settled, then Camila Parker BS would not merely be a descendant of the king’s mistress.
She would be a direct descendant of the royal family itself. She would carry Windsor blood. Her relationship with Charles would not be an outsider entering the institution, but a bloodline returning to it. This has never been proven, but it has never been disproven. The question sits in the genealogical record like a locked room, and the family has shown no interest in opening it.
To truly understand what the bloodline means, you need to understand what it cost the women who carried it forward. Louise Deeray arrived in England as an instrument of French foreign policy and spent years navigating a court where her position was perpetually at risk. When Charles II died in 1685, his brother James II, who hated the Duchess of Portsmouth, stripped Richmond of his office as master of the horse on the grounds that the position could not be fulfilled by a deputy.
The spy who had given the king a son found herself suddenly vulnerable, stripped of court protections, dependent on the mercy of a king who despised her. Barbara Villas, for all her power at the height of her influence, was ultimately discarded. When she threatened Charles over the paternity of her final child, demanding he acknowledge it as his own.
She won the battle, but lost the war. She was gradually sidelined, her role given to newer, younger women. She died in 1709 in debt, having squandered the considerable fortune she had accumulated. Lucy Walter, Charles’s first serious mistress and the mother of his eldest acknowledged son, James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, died in Paris in 1658 in relative poverty, having contracted syphilis.
These were the women whose biology runs through the veins of Diana Spencer and Camila Parker BS. Women of extraordinary social intelligence who navigated the most dangerous game in England, proximity to power without the protection of legitimacy and who paid for that navigation with their security, their health, and their reputations.
The Shand family name that forms the apparent connection between Camila and Diana’s mother’s second husband is in the end a red herring. A surname coincidence that distracts from the real genealogical truth which runs deeper and darker and more interesting than any surface level name connection. What connects these women is not a name.
It is blood. The question that haunts all of this is a simple one. Did Diana know? She was famously perceptive about the royal family’s history and its internal dynamics. She read voraciously. She was close to her grandmother, Lady Fermoy, who was herself an intimate of the Queen Mother and had her own complex knowledge of what the Windsor family was beneath its public face.
Diana gave the impression of being naive about the institutions around her. But the woman who orchestrated the Panorama interview was not naive about anything that mattered. The genealogical connection between the Spencer family and the Steuart bloodline was not a secret in aristocratic circles. Lady Diana’s maternal ancestors rise to royal status was based on personal, not courtly, relationships.
The Spencer family knew what their tree contained. They lived in the houses and on the estates that the illegitimate Stewart money had helped to build. Whether Diana ever made the specific connection that the woman she saw as her rival carried the same 17th century blood she did is unknown. But if she did, the irony would not have escaped her.
The woman she was fighting was not simply a rival from another world. She was a cousin. And Charles, he was related to both of them. Both the Prince of Wales and Camila have shared ancestors dating back to the 17th century. Strangely, they are also both related to the late Princess Diana through shared ancestry dating back to King Charles II.
Charles and Diana were 16th cousins. Three people at the center of the most dramatic royal crisis in modern history. All carrying blood from the same 17th century bedroom. Three people whose triangular relationship consumed decades and destroyed a marriage and contributed to a tragedy and who were by any genealogical measure family.
There is one final thing to say about this story and it is the most important thing. The pattern did not end with Diana and Camila. It did not end with Alice Keell and Edward IIIth. It did not end with Louise Deraway and Charles II. These are not isolated incidents in the history of a dysfunctional family.
They are chapters in a single continuous story. A story about how the British monarchy has always worked. about how it perpetuates itself, not just through legitimate succession, but through the broader web of blood and alliance and calculated social proximity that the aristocracy has maintained for centuries. Despite fathering many illegitimate children with his mistresses, King Charles II had no children with his wife, Catherine of Bansza.
Charles II is an ancestor through his mistresses of many British aristocrats and of several women who married into the British royal family. Louise Renee Deeray and Charles II are ancestors of Diana, Princess of Wales, Queen Camila and Sarah, Duchess of York. Diana Camila and Sarah Ferguson. Three women from three different backgrounds who all entered the royal family in the same generation.
All three carrying Stewart blood. All three connected to the same illegitimate line. The monarchy didn’t marry outsiders. It circulated among the same bloodlines generation after generation, finding new women who already carried its DNA and bringing them back inside the institution. Sometimes through formal marriage, sometimes through affairs, sometimes through the deliberate social engineering of matchmakers and grandmothers and aristocratic networks that had been doing this work for 300 years.
Diana Spencer was not chosen because she was innocent and pure and untouched by royal history. She was chosen, consciously or not, because she was one of them. because her blood was already woven into the story. And Camila Parker BS, whom the world spent 20 years treating as a dangerous outsider, was not an intruder in the Windsor family.
She was a thread that had always been part of the same tapestry, running parallel to the throne through a great great grandmother who had sat at a dying king’s bedside through a bloodline from a French spy’s bedroom in a 17th century palace through centuries of aristocratic inheritance that the tabloids never thought to trace. They were not rivals.
They were cousins. They were both in their different ways the children of Charles II’s legacy and the man who stood between them, the current king of England was the heir to a bloodline that had made them both inevitable. There is one final chapter to this bloodline story and it sits in the present tense.
When Prince William becomes king, something will happen that has not happened since 1714. Prince William will someday be the first king ever descended from Charles II. He will also be the first descendant of Charles I to reign over Britain since 1714. The Hannavarian monarchs descended from James V 6th/ I by quite a different route through Diana through her four descents from Charles II through the illegitimate bloodlines of Barbara Villas and Louise Deeray.
The Stewart blood that was pushed off the throne in 1714 will return to it. Not through eucipation, not through revolution, but through the marriage of a girl from Norfolk to a boy from a palace in a ceremony watched by 750 million people in a dress that the whole world was watching. On a July morning in 1981, Diana Spencer was the vehicle.
The bloodline was the cargo. When William succeeds as king of England, the Stewarts and the Windsor’s blood will be reunited over the throne. That reunion was made possible by a French spy who seduced the merry monarch in 1670. It was sustained by a genealogical connection that runs through seven generations of English aristocracy.
It was carried unknowingly or knowingly by two women who spent 20 years as rivals and who were in the bloodline that both of them inherited always something more complicated than that. History does not move in straight lines. It folds back on itself, repeating patterns, reassembling relationships, circulating blood through the same channels generation after generation.
The story of Diana and Camila is told as a love triangle, as a tragedy, as a tabloid war, and it is all of those things. But it is also a genealogical story, 350 years old, rooted in a king’s bedroom, transmitted through women whose names most people have never heard. arriving at its strange culmination in the late 20th century when two women who shared an ancestor sat down for tea at Camila’s house in 1980 and a young Diana Spencer thought she was meeting a rival not recognizing that she was in a bloodline sense meeting a cousin.
The family tree is never as simple as the family would have you believe. If you want the next chapter, the hidden bloodlines of the Spencer family traced all the way back to the Tudtor through Mary Berlin’s line to Henry VIII. That video is next. Subscribe so you don’t miss