Topics: Royal Family, Prince George, Prince William, Kate Middleton, UK News
Amid what has been described as a 'transitional period' for the British Royal Family, genealogists believe that Prince George's reign will revert the monarchy to 'an older model'.
He only recently celebrated his 12th birthday, but George has long been making serious 'training for monarchy' type appearances.
The public observed the youngster attending prestigious VE Day 80th-anniversary events last year, for example, where he joined Prince William to meet war veterans and drink tea with other senior royals.
He's also been spotted enjoying some more light-hearted outings, however, like the nail-biting Euro final in Germany the summer prior, which he attended with his 43-year-old father.
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Experts have predicted for some time that the Royal Family might look and feel a little different by the time George takes the throne - especially given that William has already heavily hinted at implementing a more 'streamlined monarchy' when he's in charge.
During a visit to Cape Town in November 2024, William opened up on his plans to modernise the firm by focusing on approachability, empathy, and impact rather than traditional formalities and rigid protocol.
With this in mind, commentators predict his eldest son and heir will be the perfect person to embody the more accessible king William described, being that the 12-year-old has a unique trait that's been absent from the monarchy for centuries.
As explained by genealogist Anthony Adolph, George will be the first king to come from a non-aristocratic mother.
"Prince George has all the royal ancestry of his father, but unlike all previous monarchs since William the Conqueror, this future monarch will have half his ancestry from perfectly normal families, across the whole spectrum of society and from across the whole of England," Adolph wrote in a blog.
"Right across Britain, thousands of genealogists who have traced their ancestry back to forebears who were lorry drivers, coal miners, agricultural labourers, industrial workers, servants, carpenters and clerks, not to say bank managers, cloth manufacturers, clergymen and mayors, and had thus found a link to the ancestry of the Duchess of Cambridge, were able to add the new royal baby to that branch of their family trees."
That's right, Kate Middleton, the mother of George and his two younger siblings, Princess Charlotte, 11, and Prince Louis, eight, grew up in a largely middle-class household. Back in Medieval England, she'd have even been considered a 'commoner'.
This technically makes George's blood a little bit more 'normal' than that of his father, whose mother, the late Princess Diana, hailed from a highly aristocratic family, the Spencers.
"The modern royal family is reverting to an older model, whereby monarchs, rather than being genealogically isolated from their people, are very much the head of the greater families of their nations," Adolph noted.
"The marriage of Prince William and Catherine Middleton provides new royal links for countless people with 'ordinary' British blood and creates an exciting focus for many family trees."
It's not just his nature that experts predict will lead George to fall under a whole new definition of 'royal', but the way he's been nurtured.
Noting the Prince's cultural interests, the way the family spend their time - largely, on the beach with their dogs - and the fact he attends a school close to home, royal correspondent India McTarggart believes his upbringing has been markedly different to that of kings who came before him.
"[The Princess of Wales] has brought so much from her Middleton upbringing and her family values, that I think has completely informed the way that she is raising the next generation of royals," she told The Mirror.
Speaking to the same publication, psychotherapist Lucy Beresford agreed: "I think William and Kate, making sure that George, Charlotte and Louis have these normalising experiences where they just interact with really normal people, actually gives them that grounded sense that they are human beings like the rest of us, they're not rarefied, they're not elevated and it could hopefully dilute that sense of 'I'm invincible'."
