Published: 20220914
The monarch of the United Kingdom, Queen Elizabeth II (1926–2022), had ancestral relations with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania – there were representatives of the Lithuanian Gediminid dynasty among her ancestors. Thus, Queen Elizabeth II can be said to have had Lithuanian blood.
Queen Elizabeth II is a twentieth-generation descendant of the Grand Duke of Lithuania Gediminas, or the seventeenth-generation descendant of the Grand Duke of Lithuania and King of Poland Casimir Jagiellon (1427–1492), whose daughter Sophia was married off to Brandenburg and joined the Hohenzollern dynasty. The dukes of Brandenburg the Hohenzollerns later came to rule Prussia. The first Duke of Prussia Albrecht Hohenzollern was, among other things, the cousin of Grand Duke of Lithuania and King of Poland Sigismund Augustus (1544/1548–1572) and often visited the Vilnius residence.
According to Stephen Rowell, a British historian living in Lithuania, the female line of the Hohenzollern dynasty is closely linked to the Stewart-Hanover dynasty from which the ancestors of Queen Elizabeth II hail. Thus, the Hanover dynasty, today known as the Windsors, are female-line descendants of the Scottish Stuart/Stewart and German Hanover dynasties. These dynastic relations are reflected in all the genealogical diagrams illustrating the origins of Elizabeth II. So, by following the female line, we can trace a direct link between the Lithuanian Gediminid and the British Stewart-Hanover-Windsor dynasties.
Incidentally, the son of Queen Elizabeth II, the Duke of Edinburgh and Earl of Wessex Prince Edward visited the National Museum – Palace of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania in 2018 where he participated in an event here and left an entry in the museum Visitors' Book (nuotrauka komentare).
The community of the National Museum – Palace of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania, established in the reconstructed main residence of the Gediminid dynasty, mourns the passing of the legendary Monarch along with the citizens of the United Kingdom and the whole Commonwealth, and expresses sincere condolences to the royal family and the inhabitants of Her countries.
Image: Richard Stone, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. The David Ross Collection, 2021, Sotheby’s
