Red hair: royal family and other connections

Red hair and blue blood

Red hair is quite common in many of the British royal dynasties.

Richard the Lionheart and Henry II are reported to have had red hair.

Plantagenets Elizabeth Woodville and her daughter Elizabeth of York have red hair in paintings.

Queen Elizabeth I had red hair; this resemblance to her Tudor father Henry VIII did her no harm.

Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, is said to have had red hair.

Sarah Ferguson brought very red hair into the royal family.

The Spencers often have red hair too – the fifth earl was known as the ‘Red Earl’ - which could be where Prince Harry gets it from. Britain's wartime leader Winston Spencer Churchill was another great British redhead, and he was apparently nicknamed ‘Copperknob’ at school because of it.

Here is Princess Diana’s sister Lady Sarah Spencer:




What can we learn from this? Red hair = red heir = the next monarch will be Lancastrian not Yorkist?

Interesting topic, indeed. Thanks for starting it!

In terms of Royalty, it reminds me of Egyptian royal mummies being found to have red hair. I've seen claims that it is the result of the mummification process dying the hair red. I have not yet had time to see the truth in the matter. It was also regarded that red hair was the mark of the Egyptian god Set. I think it is because he was the ruler of the desert, (the red land,) and red would be associated with him that way...

Another thing of interest is the Milesians. They travelled to Ireland from Spain, though they had originally started off in Egypt. Could this be a connection, or is it a tangent?

Prince Harry: red hair with blue eyes

“The title of rarest hair color/eye color combination belongs to red haired folks with blue eyes. According to Medical Daily, both the blue eye trait and the red hair trait are recessive, so their likelihood of simultaneous appearance is pretty slim.

Red hair alone occurs with a frequency of one to two percent of the human population, while blue eyes occur in approximately 17 percent of the human population. Without taking into account varied genetic likelihoods based on race, the grand total of people in the world with this combo is roughly 12.75 million out of a world population of 7.5 billion people.”

www.rd.com/health/beauty/hair-eye-color-combination-rare/

Prince Harry has red hair and blue eyes, so his colouring is very rare:




Benedict Cumberbatch looks to have blue eyes in the picture in the post above...

Red hair and the Norsemen: two conflicting theories

From an earlier post:

“...the lower percentages for the gene variants in the south of England and the far north of Scotland suggested that Anglo Saxons diluted the red headed gene in England, and Norse Vikings diluted it in the north and west of Scotland.”

So the Norse Vikings were not red-headed then.

But what about this, a short extract from an interesting article that promotes the theory that the gene for red hair came from southwest Norway:

“The perception that the Norse were blond is nothing more than a prevalent myth. Genetically speaking, the chances of them having blond hair weren’t that likely. The chances are that they would have had red hair. Interestingly, if you look at where red hair occurs in the world you can almost map it to Viking trading routes.”

Detailed map of trade routes and territorial possessions of the Norsemen during the Viking Age with frequency and distribution of the red hair gene in Europe:



thedockyards.com/red-hair/

The gene could have from the Celts; it could have come from the Norsemen; it could have come from Celto-Germanic sources.

Appropriation and wishful thinking undoubtedly play a part when such theories are proposed. People want their own ideas to be accepted at the expense of other people’s theories.

I favour the Celtic origin myself. Maybe the Norsemen got the gene from the Celts.

The Norse god Thor

Another red man from the north I remembered.

He was described as being red-haired and red-bearded:

Isn't Princess Beatrice a redhead?

Red hair, presidents and revolutionaries

There are some people of great interest and importance who are reported to have had red hair. This includes three leaders of revolutions and rebellions, British, French and American.

Oliver Cromwell
His hair when his body was exhumed after the Restoration was said to be red. As with the Egyptian mummies, this could have another cause. Maybe his hair had a reddish tinge when he was alive.

Maximilien Robespierre
His hair was said to be light chestnut coloured, but like men of the time he wore a wig or powdered his hair white. His eyes were said to be pale or blue too.

George Washington
Another man who hid his natural hair colour, which is reported as being red.

In addition to the three great men above:

Thomas Jefferson, the third US president, had hair that was inclined to red, and blue eyes.

Andrew Jackson, the seventh US president, had penetrating blue eyes and sandy red hair.

Martin Van Buren, the eighth US president, had red hair. His nickname was “The Red Fox of Kinderhook”.

So there were two US presidents with red hair and blue eyes – the rarest combination of them all.

The authors of this and other articles I have found seem eager to claim red hair for as many great men as possible, even when the evidence is absent, conflicting or of dubious origin. Perhaps they think it makes prominent people even more interesting, unusual and special.

www.themythsandhistoryofredhair.co.uk/redhairinamerica.html

Red Red Red



Royal team: Sarah Ferguson and daughters Beatrice, left, and Eugenie, right

sinless69uk your little comment has got me really confused now.

I always assumed that people with red hair got their colouring from one parent, and it was usually obvious which one it was. I thought that the York girls just took after their mother.

Assuming that it is really true that there needs to be a carrier of the red hair gene on both sides of the family, then once again, where did Prince Andrew get it from?

Ginger Aryan supremacist plotted to kill Charles so Harry would be king

You couldn’t make this up.

In revenge for being bullied for having ginger hair, a ‘ginger extremist’ planned to kill Prince Charles in the hope that this would make way for red-haired Prince Harry to become king!

“Red-haired Mark Colborne has been detained indefinitely under the mental health act over plan to assassinate Prince Charles...

Patricia Colborne, 59, from Southampton, and her other son Kevin, 30, raised the alarm after discovering he had amassed ingredients for cyanide, along with deranged diary entries which praised mass murderer Anders Breivik and idolised the IRA as proud redheads...His plot was foiled in June last year when his brother Kevin stumbled on his stash – including notes from The Terrorist Handbook - while doing some DIY...

Displaying apparent misunderstanding of the royal succession, he wrote in his diary: ‘Kill Charles and Prince Harry becomes king... Kill the tyrants and become free from tyrannical future rule.’

He plotted a terror attack ‘for the Aryan people’, likening himself to Breivik, who killed 77 people in bomb and gun attacks in Norway in 2011.”

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/12063521/Ginger-extremist-Mark-Colborne-plotted-to-kill-Prince-Charles-sentenced.html

L. Ron Hubbard had red hair and maybe blue eyes too

A few sources say that Hubbard had green eyes, but fellow SF writer Jack Williamson had this to say about the teller of tall stories:

"I recall his eyes, the wary, light-blue eyes that I somehow associate with the gunmen of the old West, watching me sharply as he talked as if to see how much I believed."

With relevance to Sol Invictus, the Church of Scientology bought a ship and renamed it Apollo. It became Hubbard’s residence and flagship.

L. Ron Hubbard and his red hair:

Red hair in the Markle family

Meghan’s half-brother Thomas Markle Jr. when he was younger:



His mother Roslyn looks to have sandy-coloured hair:

Red-haired, blue-eyed seal pup in Russia

“Sitting all alone on a beach, this little seal is an outcast from the colony.

Its crime? Having reddish-brown fur and the palest of blue eyes. The rest of its sleek black family took an instant dislike to the ginger pup, leaving it to fend for itself...the poor seal is almost blind and so was unlikely to survive in the wild.
The pup – whose colour is the result of an accumulation of iron in its fur – might have had more luck in the U.S. One of the biggest concentrations of red-haired seals is in San Francisco.”

Read more: www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2037734/The-lonely-seal-wanted-Pup-abandoned-having-rare-brown-fur.html#ixzz52GZsCBv4

Iron causes red pigmentation in fur?

Ed Sheeran has red hair and blue eyes

He came up on one of the monarchy threads.

Rupert Grint again

Some shades of red hair with blue eyes correspond to the blue/orange theme, in which the London Bridge shirt design is featured: