It was the show that discovered that Danny Dyer was related to William the Conqueror and now Who Do You Think You Are? reveals that comic Josh Widdicombe is even more blue-blooded.
Josh was worried that his family tree might be “a bit boring”, but he is in fact descended from English and French royalty.
The star – from such a remote area of Dartmoor, Devon, there were only four people in his school year – learns that King Edward I who ruled from 1272 to 1307 is his 23x great grandfather.
Because Edward I was married to a member of the French royal family, it means that the funnyman’s 24x great grandfather was King Philip of France.
And Josh, 38, also finds that his 13x great grandmother Lady Katherine Knollys might have been the love-child of Henry VIII as there is evidence that her mother Mary – sister of his second wife Anne Boleyn – was his mistress.
In the opener to the new series he discovers that his 10x great grandfather Henry Rich, the first Earl of Holland, was so close to King Charles I that one of his duties was to take him to the toilet.
But it all went wrong for Henry when Charles I was beaten in the Second English Civil War by Oliver Cromwell’s Parliamentarians, and he was executed in Westminster for “high treason” in 1649.
On the discovery Last Leg star Josh says: “I was expecting a couple of farmers.”
*Who Do You Think You Are? October 12, BBC1.
