I decided a few months ago to start a commissioned art project to depict the English and British Monarchs as anthropomorphs, which ran me into a bit of a wall. What species would the British Royals be?

The Disney movie Robin Hood has them as lions, in keeping with the heraldic arms of the nation, and I always thought that they could have been ‘furryized’ as horses (the House of Hanover’s heraldic symbol), but it didn’t seem to quite fit.

In a normal (i.e., our) universe, creatures like dogs and cats cannot interbreed. In Spontoon, an interspecies marriage would likely require shopping around for a compatible mate, or create a mixture of two species. In fact, two of my characters in “Luck of the Dragon” have produced a son who is part rabbit, part red panda.

My new line of reasoning is this: Two otherwise incompatible species can, in fact, breed; the result of that breeding would be either one species or the other, with the sons taking after the fathers, and the daughters resembling their mothers. Let’s face it - you’ve seen things like this in cartoons, haven’t you?

Getting back to my ideas regarding the British Royals, I had a conversation with the other voices in my head one morning. I also threw some ideas back and forth with  eocostello, and here is the result.

We begin with a fourteen-year old boy, spirited out of Rome during the first years of the reign of Nero. Being of the Claudian gens, the boy (Britannicus, son of the Emperor Claudius) was a lion, either descended from antecedents from Africa or a descendant of the earlier Eurasian cave lions that were native to Italy. As a guest of Caratacus’ clan, he grew up and married. The clan, however, was made up of wolves.

As Roman rule over Britain ebbed, local chieftains became kings. A few of these were lions, explaining (according to an uncertain tradition) why the heraldic symbol of England has been the lion. An equally uncertain tradition holds that King Arthur was also a lion.

Now we come to the barbarian invasions. Hengist and Horsa were, in fact, equine, and for a brief time the rulers of early Britain were horses. Slowly the species makeup shifted, and Alfred the Great was a lion – or, at least, a leonine feline.

A tincture of canine blood entered the Saxon aristocracy after the Norman invasion, with a wolfhound William of Normandy defeating the equine Harold Godwinson at Hastings. Therefore, William really was a "son of a bitch.”

Feline blood was also an inheritance from France, so much so that Edward I Longshanks was described as a leopard or a spotted cat. Many of the Scottish nobility that he warred against were canine or cervine.

Moving up to the Wars of the Roses, we encounter the Tudor Henry, Earl of Richmond. Henry was a distant descendant of John of Gaunt and the Welsh prince Rhys ap Gryfudd. The Tudors were predominantly lapine.

(Insert “Welsh Rabbit” joke here.)

Henry VII and his second son, Henry VIII, were both rabbits. Henry VIII married his brother’s widow; Catherine of Aragon was an Iberian Lynx, as was Bloody Mary. His other two surviving children, Edward VI and Elizabeth I, were lapine. Henry’s sister married into the Scottish House of Stuart, and James VI succeeded Elizabeth as James I. James was a crossbred hound/wolf, heralding a predominance of canines in the Stuarts until the Glorious Revolution.

William III was described by a (real-world) contemporary as a “low-Dutch bear,” so I’ve made him ursine. Queen Mary was canine, being Stuart; her sister Anne was also a dog.

(In more ways than one.)

We see equines come back in full force with George I and the Hanoverian Dynasty. I suggest that the German electors were a bit sticky about who they allowed to marry into their bloodlines. The Habsburgs were particularly rabid about inbreeding, which might explain the vaunted Habsburg chin and the unfortunate Charles II of Spain. The old Rurik line in Russia were bears (I can so see Ivan IV Grozny as a bear; think about it). The Valois/Bourbon line would have more than a few cervines in it – I mean, just look at Francois I. He wasn’t called “King Big Nose” for nothing.

Getting back to my main "Luck of the Dragon" timeline, King Edward VIII and his wife, Queen Wallis, are both equine. They will have their first child, a son, in January 1938. Prince Edward Albert John George Aethelwulf* will be a fine and very healthy colt. King Edward’s brother Albert, Duke of York, is also equine, and his wife Elizabeth is a fine descendant of Scottish nobility, specifically a red doe. You can imagine what their daughters might be (I have to keep some secrets until the story gets posted, don’t I?)

So that’s the general idea.


*(The Saxon regal name didn't mollify those who suspected he was named for a certain Noble Wolf.)