Houses of Hesse - branches and titles

[Maria_Pavlovna]

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[pushkina]

it is very odd: i've looked all over for a surname for the hesse-darmstadt house (indeed for all four hesse houses).  from the time of the original landgraviate, the split in 1567 until the end of the house, there is no family name attached to them, only the various names of the landgraviate  and then duchy as it evolved.  there is acknowledgement of the common ancestor, philip. but no surname.  this is probably because the split happened before surnames but if that were the case, then most of the oldest royal houses woudln't have names.  and if the danes (the oldest royal house) can have a surname, why not the hessians?

tis' a puzzlement.

[Forum Admin]

I think the confusion here seems to arise from not making the distinction between "surnames" and the names for "Dynastic Houses".  Dynastic House names are NOT surnames.
From Debrett's:
"The Duke of Edinburgh belongs paternally to the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg which, in turn, is a branch of the House of Oldenburg. When the Duke of Edinburgh became a British subject in 1947, since he possessed no surname, one had to be selected. Oldcastle from Oldenburg was suggested, but rejected. Eventually he chose Mountbatten, the anglicised form of his mother's name of Battenberg."snip
There has been controversy as to the surname of members of the Houses of Hanover and Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, but since both families were of ruling status before surnames came into being, they did not possess one. Nevertheless dynastic names, as distinct from surnames, came to be used."

http://www.debretts.co.uk/royal_connections/royal_surname.html

[Jane]

OK, so I understand the distinction of a dynastic name as opposed to a surname, etc.  My objective is not to argue with anyone here, but I am going to ask a few more questions, because I am just trying to satisfy my curiosity now that it is stirred (anything to avoid the to-do pile on my desk).  

Lisa makes a good point with the Battenberg example.  The Hesse family was, at the time, a ruling family.  So I can see that members of a ruling family (or dynasts or whatever the correct term is) might not really have "surnames" in the sense that we do, which is understandable.

However, what happens after a dynasty is no longer a ruling family?  Or if someone voluntaily relinquishes their status?  For example, members of the former royal family of Greece and their descendants?  Or pretenders to say..I dunno, the Portuguese throne? Also, there are examples of descendants of the Spanish ruling family using the surname Borbon/Bourbon/var. spell. etc. Is this just a choice on their part or is it a legal name?

Enquiring minds need to know!

[Forum Admin]

Let me first quote from Antony Lambton's 1989 book "The Mountbattens".  
"Few sovereigns or subjects worried about the correct names of their Royal House and family until George V was upset by anti-German hysteria during the First World War. In July 1917, with an uncharacteristic flamboyance, he tried to silence patriotic criticism by renouncing his German ancestry and proclaiming the new House of Windsor."  snip
"King George's proclamation of 1917 did not only change the name of the Royal House, it also adopted a surname for his family, Windsor."small snip
"by Letters Patent under the Great Seal he declared that the style of Royal Highness and the titles of Prince and Princess should cease to proliferate.  This was sensible; he had four sons and saw modern medicine would produce a mass of royal descendants without the means to support their dignity.
His decision meant that in future the Royal House would be confined to the grandchildren of the sovereign in the male line only and to the eldest living son of the son of the Prince of Wales. There the attributes of royalty were to stop.  The following generations - his great grandchildren - were to either be non royal peers or commoners, which would require a surname."

As for Ruling House members who cease to rule, for whatever reason, they select surnames for themselves, like when GD Dmitri chose "Ilynsky" after the Revolution, or the taking of the name Battenberg.

[brnbg aka: liljones1968]

thank you, FA, for the link.   i appreciate it very much.
======================================


i would like to add, that if something similar had been offered earlier  in the thread, it would have been much more effective.     in any case, i appreciate the FA's input.   i sincerely wish ms. Davidson had offered to be helpful instead of just telling us all that we were wrong.    

  over time, i've come to realize in a very literal way, that when you're trying to get a point across, it will almost always fall on deaf ears, if you deliver it like  a high-school teacher in a bad mood.      smugness will get you very little.    


and i'd like to make a general apology to everyone involved with this thread for my participation in drawing this thread somewhat away from it's original path.    my only defense is that i genuinely resented the tone i felt was taken in an earlier post;  but i allowed that resentment to continue when the tone i felt i had encountered, seemed to continue.        call it a flaw in my character, but i can't let certain things go unchallenged.....one of those things is a condescending attitude or tone (however unintentional).    

i should have just let it go & laughed it off.   but because it wasn't very important, i let it go on much longer than i should have.  

so, again, i sincerely apologize to my fellow members for helping to pull the thread slightly off the subject.    


lastly, it may seem as though i'm making WAY  too much of this, but there may be some members who resent the previous exchange as much i resented the tone that got me started.      hopefully not, but ya never know.


thanks much.

[LisaDavidson]

I agree with what the FA has said. I'll also be happy to address Janet's questions myself, with this proviso: we need, as I have said, to distinguish agnates - members of dynasties - from royal descendants, who are not members of dynasties - and hence non-royal.

The British have attempted to clean this muck up by designating surnames for their non royal descendants from 1917 on. So, technically speaking, two royal houses are exceptions to the "royals have no surnames" statement. The British are one because by inference, they have made up a surname twice for non royal descendants, we can say that the royals among them have surnames which they do not use out of custom.

The second are the Bernadottes. The Bernadottes had a surname before becoming a royal house, and their non royal descendants continue to use it either as part of a title or as an actual surname. The royal Bernadottes also do not use surnames out of custom.

It is very touchy about non-ruling royal houses and their names. Germany has come up with a system whereby the former titles are now part of a surname. If I did not have to worry about offending people, and I do, I would say that non-royals are welcome to use whatever surnames they choose. Some use the dynasty's name, and others make up a new surname. If they're not royal, and that's the real issue, the point is moot.

[brnbg aka: liljones1968]

ms. Davidson ---

i must admit that your last post in this thread (when coupled with what the FA stated earlier & the info contained in the link provided) makes  much more sense to me than anything stated previously.

i apologize for taking personally, something that had never been intended that way.  and for allowing it to continue.    childishness & petulance can occur at any age, unfortunately.


sincerely --
Brian von R
brnbg aka: liljones1968





okay, i'm done.

[LisaDavidson]

Brian - you are so right that any of us can be childish at any age. I want you to know it was never my intention to push your buttons, as it were. I know I can be annoying when it comes to royal history, but I have always tried to keep my sense of humor. I am very serious about history, but not about myself. I hope you will find something you can study as passionately as I have studied the Romanovs for the past 35+ years.

[brnbg aka: liljones1968]

that's why i'm here.   and i've got almost exactly 20 years under my belt, as it were.... and i'm very familiar with the passion you mentioned ---
it's what motivated me to get a minor in (pre-revolutionary) russian history (i needed a break from my major, so i finshed-up what i needed to get my minors: the one in russian history and one in anthropology).

and i must say, my interest, passion, fascination (et cetera) in the various personalities that made up the clan Romanov, has not diminished a bit....as a matter of fact, it's grown to encompass all aspects of their world, those around them, not to mention the buildings and trinkets with which they decorated their lives & person.

they occupy an enormous part of my day and, indeed, my life....as well as a big chunk of whatever disposable income i have at any given time.    

they're an addiction that i gladly endure  

[Jane]

Thanks to all--especially Lisa, FA, and Brian--this has all been very informative.

Jane

[Angie_H]

I have found several different names of Duchies with the Hesse in them
Hesse-Kassel (Cassel?)
Hesse-Marburg
Hesse-Nassau
and of course Hesse Darmstadt
Were the rulers in these duchies all related to one another in someway? At one time was it a bigger kingdom then split up between descendents? I have often read how MF really didn't want Nicholas to marry Alix and one of the reasons is because she was German and the defeat of Denmark by Prussia made her extremely prejudiced  against Germans. But if the families in these duchies are related wouldn't Dagmar somehow been related to Alix since her mother was Princess Luise of Hesse-Cassel?

And why is it sometimes Hesse-Darmstadt and others Hesse and by Rhine?
Angie

[Jane]

Brief, very brief outline:

Hesse was a landgraviate of the Holy Roman Empire.  In the sixteenth century, Hesse was divided up among four sons upon the death of their father, Philip.  Kassel, Marburg, Rheinfels and Darmstadt were the respective capitals.  

Within a few generations, only the lines Hesse-Kassel and Hesse-Darmstadt remained, having abosorbed all the Hessian territories.  Both duchies gained land after the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

Following the Austro-Prussian War (1866), in which both Hesse-Kassel and Hesse-Darmstadt supported Austria, Prussia annexed most of Hesse-Kassel.  Hesse-Darmstadt lost a smaller bit, and was able to later join the German Empire under its own steam as a sovereign state, due in no small measure to the fact that its Grand Duchess was none other than Quen Victoria's daughter (and sister in law to the Crown Prince of Prussia).  Thus Hesse-Darmstadt carried a bit more political clout.

Its no secret that Empress Marie Feodorovna hated Prussians, but I think her initial objections to Alix were more on the grounds that Hesse-Darmstadt was an impoverished little grand duchy--not a very grand match for the future Russian Emperor.  And any relationship between her mother (Luise of Hesse-Kassel) and the Darmstadt family would have been very tenuous and distant.

I think that Hesse-Darmstadt became officially called Hesse und bei Rhein after the A-P War, etc, but I will prepare to be corrected on that.

edited to correct Rheinfels, not Nassau

[Jim1026]

  Didn't the Grand Duke of Hesse Darmstadt have to
give up the "by the Rhine" after the war of 1866.  I thought  I had read that somewhere.

[Eurohistory]

Do not forget about Hesse-Homburg...a great source of information on the Hesse family is l'Allemgane Dynastique's Volume I, authored by a dear good friend of mine, Alain Giraud, with the late great genealogist Michel de Huberty.

Arturo Beéche