00:00Ah, the British royal family, the ultimate symbol of tea-drinking, corgi-loving, stiff-upper-lip Britishness.
00:07When we look at the king, we see a man who appears as indigenous to the British Isles as bad
00:13food and worse weather.
00:15But if you peel back the layers of history, you'll find that the current royal bloodline is about as British
00:23as a bratwurst.
00:24You see, for the last 300 years, the British throne has been occupied by a family of Germans who pulled
00:32off the greatest PR rebranding campaign in history.
00:37To understand how this not-so-hostile takeover happened, we must travel back to the late 17th century.
00:44That century was not kind to Britain.
00:47It suffered through the Great Plague, the Great Fire, and a decade-long civil war that saw England's king beheaded
00:54by Parliament.
00:56Just when things were starting to calm down, the Catholic James II decided that being friends with the Pope is
01:03okay again,
01:05triggering a revolution that got him deposed, though unlike his dad, he at least kept his head.
01:11At the end of all the chaos, England and Scotland joined together to form the Kingdom of Great Britain,
01:19but not before swearing to never crown a Catholic ever again.
01:24Unfortunately, Great Britain's first monarch, the Protestant Queen Anne, had no surviving children who could inherit the crown.
01:32To be clear, it was not for lack of trying.
01:36Poor Anne endured 17 pregnancies, with only a single child surviving beyond infancy.
01:44This was a big problem, because Anne's closest living relatives were the exiled Stuarts,
01:50who were unrepentantly Catholic and were plotting their comeback in France.
01:54In fact, the next 50 heirs to the throne were all Catholic, so Parliament had to go all the way
02:02to Claimant No. 54 on the line of succession to find a Protestant.
02:07The Claimant in question was an old lady called Sophia, a granddaughter of James I.
02:14Well into her 70s, this German aristocrat from the small German state of Hanover,
02:20is the person Britain's Parliament found most suitable to be Monarch,
02:24a classic example of Parliamentarian competence that has unfortunately been greatly overshadowed since then.
02:32Sophia would have been the oldest British monarch ever to ascend the throne,
02:36but she sadly died of old age just two months before Queen Anne.
02:42And so the crown passed to Sophia's son, a 54-year-old German man named George Ludwig.
02:50He spoke virtually no English, having lived in Germany his whole life,
02:55and after claiming his crown in an awkward ceremony lost in translation,
03:00he spent the rest of his reign trying to stay back home in Hanover as much as possible.
03:05When he had to be in England, he invariably brought along his German mistresses,
03:10whom the emerging British press vividly named the Elephant and the Maypole.
03:17Nevertheless, the British put up with George I because, even though he was German,
03:22at least he wasn't Catholic.
03:25His reign marked the beginning of the Hanoverian dynasty,
03:29a distinctly German line of kings that would rule Britain for nearly two centuries.
03:35Now, while over time the family would assimilate and become more English,
03:40the dynastic politics of the Hanoverians remained sauerkraut flavoured.
03:46But while sauerkraut might not be the best taste,
03:50our friends over at Holi have created the most delicious energy and hydration drinks by a large margin.
03:58Holi is a start-up founded by three friends in Berlin with the aim of revolutionising the soft drink industry,
04:07and they've been taking the market by storm.
04:10Unlike the heavy sugary sludge you find in traditional soft and energy drinks,
04:16Holi has zero sugar and filler ingredients, and has fewer than 20 calories per serving.
04:22Because it's powder-based, it's not only better for the planet,
04:26but it's also much cheaper than buying cans, costing as little as 80 cents per portion.
04:32So, you don't need to marry into royalty to afford it.
04:36It's never too late to get better drinking habits,
04:39and with Holi you'll get better energy and hydration drinks with a massive variety of delicious flavours.
04:46I myself have a soft spot for the citrusy cobra, but there's plenty more to choose from.
04:51Best of all, you can grab the Holi Deluxe Starter Set,
04:56which includes a high-quality shaker and a variety of over 50 sachets to find your favourite flavour.
05:03So, stop sipping on syrup and start drinking Holi by clicking the link in the description
05:09and using the code SIDEQUEST5 to get 5 euro or pounds off your first order.
05:16Now, the Hanoverians were equally as consistent with their dating pool as we have been with drinking Holi this month.
05:24In fact, every single monarch of that line, from George I all the way to Queen Victoria,
05:31married a German spouse and simultaneously ruled the state of Hanover.
05:37So, ironically, the Victorian age, when the British Empire was at its height,
05:42had Britain's Queen talking to her husband in German every night.
05:46A fun fact about Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, was that he was her cousin.
05:53Actually, that's not a very fun fact, and neither is the painfully long name of his German dynasty,
06:00Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.
06:02When Victoria died in 1901, her son Edward VII inaugurated the reign of this much more German-sounding dynasty,
06:10and he also held multiple honorary ranks in the German military and absolutely loved vacationing in German spas.
06:20This was all well and good until 1914.
06:25Since King George V was the first cousin of the German Kaiser,
06:30the First World War put the British royal family in a very uncomfortable position.
06:35The King's name became a serious PR liability,
06:39especially once the Germans started bombing London with their Gotha G4 bombers.
06:44And so, in 1917, George V issued a royal proclamation
06:50declaring that his family would henceforth be known by the very British name of Windsor after the castle.
06:58He also forced his relatives to anglicise their names too.
07:02The Battenbergs, for example, became the Mountbattens,
07:06stripping away the last linguistic traces of their heritage.
07:11When the Kaiser heard about his cousin's name change,
07:15he reportedly joked about renaming Shakespeare's play to
07:19The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.
07:22But despite the jokes, the rebrand worked like a charm.
07:26The Windsors successfully reinvented themselves as the quintessential British family,
07:32navigating the chaos of the 20th century while their German cousins lost their thrones.
07:38So, while they may wrap themselves in the Union Jack and wave from the balcony of Buckingham Palace,
07:45the Windsor dynasty is, at its heart, a German success story.
07:50They redefined the British monarchy, just as our friends over at Holy are redefining soft drinks.
07:57Make sure to click the link in the description and use the code SIDEQUEST5 to save 5 euros or pounds
08:05on your starter set to fuel your next dynastic takeover.
08:10But now, thank you my friends for watching this brief genealogy of our favourite royal imports.
08:16If you want to help us maintain our own dynasty here on YouTube, please consider supporting us on Patreon.
08:25Make sure to like and subscribe for more tales of political intrigue
08:29and stay tuned for the next biologically confusing episode of SIDEQUEST.
08:36Why was Queen Victoria afraid of her breakfast?
08:40She feared the worst.
