Who do you think you are, the celebrity genealogy show with some surprising results, has returned to BBC1 on Thursday evenings. The twentieth series, of nine episodes, began with Andrew, Lord Lloyd Webber, whose parents, cellist brother Julian and late son Nick were also known to be musically talented, but makes some uncannily similar connections through his father.
Indeed, via his Scottish mother and some information he already had, Lloyd Webber traces his armigerous multiple great-uncle General Sir Peregrine Maitland, a commander at Waterloo, thus to Katherine Willoughby (Duchess of Suffolk) and her second husband, Richard Bertie, who fled during the Marian persecution. Indeed, this document shows Katherine Willoughby to be descended from Henry III through the Lancastrian line. Just click on Eleanor of Plantagenet and start a seperate descent.
Claire Foy, Emily Atack, Bear Grylls, Chris Ramsey, Chris and Xand van Tulleken, Dev Griffin, Lesley Manville and Kevin Clifton are the other guests but it was Grylls, the Chief Scout, who, like Lloyd Webber, Sir Matthew Pinsent, Alexander Armstrong, Danny Dyer, Clare Balding and Josh Widdicombe, proved to have some royal descent, as he was to discover on a visit to Scotland. Through his mother, he is descended from the Dukes of Argyll and thus from Robert II.
The other episodes include bigamy in Canada (as with Bruce Forsyth’s ancestor in the USA), a form of minor honour in the Netherlands,
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