in which i overdo it just a bit

[fox]

Couple weeks ago I posted a little Red White and Royal Blue fic, and the other day I made a royal family family tree with, yes, the extra members I referred to in it, but also (obvs) those who appear in the book and the movie, and I think it can be made to comply with either canon with only a small number of slight adjustments.

Readers who are not interested in my fic will disregard everyone on the right side of the diagram, beginning with Princess Louise b. 1964 and all the way to the edge of the page. But otherwise, reading from the bottom up, check it out:

The film calls Philip Duke of Cambridge, but the book seems to suggest Cambridge is what Henry will be created duke of when he marries, so I gave Philip the dukedom of Kendal instead. (The film also makes Henry the middle child, so swap them round if you want.)

I believe making Catherine the Princess of Wales and her late husband the Duke of Edinburgh works for both the film and the book; in the book Henry says they all used Wales as a surname at school, but even if a monarch with no sons created their eldest daughter Princess of Wales they wouldn’t make her husband Prince of Wales, so Arthur can be imagined to have accepted the dukedom of Edinburgh out of necessity—so when film!Henry tells the kids in the oncology ward that his mother is the Duchess of Edinburgh, he’s not wrong (I mean, why would he get his own mother’s title wrong, but you know what I mean).

I’ve made Henry’s grandparents James and Mary so they can be either King James III (shown here) as in the film or Queen Mary III as in the book. (She wasn’t numbered in the book, but there have been two Queens regnant Mary, so.) I threw in John II for book!Henry when he yells at Philip that they had a great-uncle who abdicated because he was a Nazi; he’d have had to abdicate because he had been a Nazi or else he’d have had to have been much older than James Or Mary, but that’s fine. Lop him off the tree if you’re film-only and don’t care about that line in the book.

Take the previous generation or leave it; I needed that layer to get the extant Cumberlands into the royal family whose schedules Alex was looking up, but they’re not necessary for the film or the book, so it’s fine to stretch the generations out a few years if you like and make Helena Victoria the kids’ great-grandmother rather than great-great; then you can give her husband whichever surname you prefer, Mountchristen (book, and assume it hyphenated with Windsor after the royal family changed it to Windsor in WWI as happened in real life) or Hanover-Stuart (film, and I think that name had to come back in from outside, because in a world that has the Victoria and Albert Museum the Hanover and [especially] Stuart dynasties were both long gone).

Queen Helena Victoria is the furthest-back person I invented myself; I made her the matriarch of this fictitious (counterfactual, nonhistorical, whatever) royal family by suggesting that in RWRB world (a) Prince Albert Victor, the eldest son of Edward VII, did not die in 1892 as he did in ours and (b) Edward VII himself did die of the appendicitis that in our world only delayed his coronation ceremony by a few months. That gives us a solid year of Edward VII cementing the role he’d pretty well established for the whole royal family in his long tenure as Prince of Wales (he really instituted the “appearance” as we now know it) but gets him out of the way eight years earlier than in real life to make way for his fictitious heirs.

I have allowed this Prince Albert Victor, who isn’t dead after all, to marry his true love, Hélène of Orléans, who I assume in this timeline was allowed to convert to C of E to marry him rather than forbidden by both her father and the Pope to leave the Catholic church. That being the case, it could be that his younger brother Prince George—known to the real world as George V—would have married Mary of Teck (who in real life had, before she married George, been engaged to Albert Victor at the time of his death) and had the same children and grandchildren he had in real life, only nobody cares? But even more likely is that Mary of Teck never entered into the matter, because Albert Victor married Hélène so Mary wasn’t called for, and this fictitious spare George married Marie of Edinburgh, whom he proposed to first. Or maybe he died young, rather than surviving typhoid as he did in real life in 1892 around the same time pneumonia got his brother. In any event, given a surviving Albert Victor, George’s descendants would be as peripheral by now to the fictitious royal family as the descendants of Victoria’s younger children are to the real one. (That is, it’s probably been enough generations that they could marry back in, but otherwise, pfft.)