Wills and Kate, kissing cousins! How the Royal lovebirds are related thanks to a Tudor tyrant so bloodthirsty he's been airbrushed from history



Blast from the past: Kate Middleton and Prince William

A dark and deliciously murky secret hovers over the continuing relationship between Prince William and his girlfriend Kate Middleton - a skeleton so large that even a vast royal closet would struggle to contain it.

For the Mail can reveal that William and Kate are distant cousins. Not only that, the common ancestor who links the two lovers is a murderous despot whose bloody deeds have been deliberately forgotten by history. Until now.

The man who links William and Kate as kith and kin is Sir Thomas Leighton, an Elizabethan soldier, diplomat and, for 40 years, the cut-throat Governor of Guernsey.

He is William's 12th generation great-grandparent, and Kate's 11th, making them 12th cousins, once removed.



A despot and a dictator, Leighton brooked no argument and made life hell for those he ruled.



'He disregarded civil liberties and kept the people down by main force,' reads a rare account of his life.

This hard-nosed figure was, however, a gentleman; which will come as a timely snub to those critics of Kate Middleton who dismiss her antecedents as being working-class and - extraordinary in this day and age - therefore deem her unsuitable as a future princess.

So Kate may be relieved to learn of her posh ancestor. On the other hand, she might not be too keen to boast over the dinner table about his bloody modus operandi.

So hated was Leighton, that on his death in 1610, the official report on his demise was defaced by angry Guernsey residents. And uniquely for such an important figure in the Elizabethan court - his wife was the Queen's cousin - no portrait of him survives. All were destroyed or lost.

So what makes this gruesome fellow, whose blood courses through the veins of our future king and queen, into such a figure of hatred? Why do historians prefer to ignore his existence?



The answer lies in his despotic, nepotistic rule of Guernsey - a small but crucial stronghold during the days when Spain was amassing its armada against Britain.



Leighton had been a hugely successful soldier, serving with distinction in France and Ireland, and lustily enjoying the quelling of a revolt in northern England in 1569.

Some said he enjoyed the sight and smell of blood just a little too much. An enthusiastic supporter of hanging, drawing and quartering, Leighton never shied away from the meting out of justice, and the bloodier the better.

To reward him, or perhaps just to get this gentleman thug out of her way, Queen Elizabeth gave him Guernsey to govern in 1570 - and so his reign of terror began.

From the moment he landed at St Peter Port on a blustery May day, he took a hearty dislike to the locals.

For a century or more, the Channel Islands had determinedly maintained international neutrality, but this inspired in the warlike Leighton a deep contempt: 'a people cowardly in their courage and somewhat too kind to the French,' he snorted.



And, in an early warning of what was to follow, he added menacingly: 'I will keep them Her Highness's subjects maugre [despite] the instinct of their hearts.'

With the threat of Spanish invasion just around the corner, and discovering that the island's defences were paper-thin, Leighton started out as he meant to go along - lavishly spending Guernsey's revenues on fortifications without reference to the locals.

Within a year, sensing a growing well of resentment to his profligacy, he used his contacts in London to secure a royal Warrant to endorse his actions.



Family tree: How William and Kate are related thanks to Sir Thomas Leighton

Voices raised against him were silenced. Civil liberties were curtailed, people were arrested and riots broke out: he responded with gusto, locking his opponents up without trial.

Word got back to London that the gout-ridden governor was out of control. The Bailiff and Jurats - distinguished elders of the community - complained to a visiting Royal Commission that Leighton alone was to blame for the riots.

The root of the problem was his misappropriation of funds, his tyranny, his taste for imprisonment without trial, and his press-ganging of Guernseymen to go to sea against their will to fight pirates (during which many lost their lives).

In fact, the Royal Commission - dispatched by the Queen to answer the locals' complaints - was a fix. The moment its members arrived, Leighton announced he would join their number, thereby sitting in judgment on his own actions.

It came as no surprise to the hard-pressed islanders that when the Commission reported, it exonerated their dictator.

Leighton's intransigence flourished: he dismissed local laws and democracy, turfing out the Bailiff and installing his nephew Thomas Wigmore as a puppet figurehead.

Years later, he made his son a Lieutenant of the island, too.

Surrounded by allies, Leighton felt emboldened to seize four French ships tied up in St Peter Port - even though Guernsey was supposed to be neutral.



The Royal Court in London, embarrassed by this act of brigandry, declared the seizure invalid: Leighton airily ignored their judgment. This was too much for his nephew Wigmore, who accused him of tyranny.

'In 1587 Leighton sailed to England to advise Sir Walter Raleigh on defence. In gratitude, the Queen gave him a knighthood, and her cousin Elizabeth Knollys' hand in marriage'

But Wigmore had miscalculated the power Leighton still wielded - and found himself being hauled back to London to explain himself.

Fearful for his life, Wigmore responded by hiring two hitmen to murder the prosecutor - just the kind of behaviour Leighton himself was capable of - and was jailed for his pains.

Later, Leighton was to dispatch further senior Guernseymen to London for disagreeing with him, their price usually being a spell in jail. Rough justice was the order of the day in Elizabethan times, and to the victor came the spoils.

Exonerated from the successive charges against him, in 1587 Leighton sailed to England to advise Sir Walter Raleigh on defence strategy in the face of the threat from the Armada. In gratitude, Elizabeth gave him a knighthood, and her cousin Elizabeth Knollys' hand in marriage.

Elizabeth Knollys had important connections: not only was she a cousin of the Queen, but also a relation of Anne Boleyn, second wife of King Henry VIII. In her Tudor ruff, she rather resembled an early Kate Middleton, and soon became Sir Thomas Leighton's most valuable conquest, on or off the battlefield. Together the couple had three children - their son Thomas, and daughters Elizabeth and Anne.

It is from Elizabeth Leighton's side that Kate descends, while William's ancestor is her sister Anne. Curiously, there is not a single titled person on Kate's side of the family tree, yet on William's side he can count the earls of Rochester, Lords Lisburne, and a few baronets among his ancestors before his forbears marry into the Spencer family.

In fact, Kate's family slid decidedly downmarket for a few generations before picking itself up and becoming respectable again.

Sir Thomas and Elizabeth's daughter married one Sherrington Talbot, a member of an ancient and respectable family of landowners, but in a couple of generations' time, things were beginning to look decidedly iffy.

Sherrington and Elizabeth's granddaughter wed Henry Davenport, after which the bloodline began to sink slowly down society's totem pole until they reached the point at which Henry's great-granddaughter Sarah Davenport married Tom Ashford of Stratford-on-Avon - a lowly ironmonger and 'saddler's bridle cutter'.

The whole family lived in stables in the town - the only legacy Tom could leave his daughter Elizabeth when she married Robert Hobbes in 1800.

Hobbes, who described himself as a gentleman (others might not) was, in fact, an early property developer, buying up properties around Stratford; but the couple's daughter moved things upmarket again when she married an Oxford-educated clergyman, the Rev Thomas Davis.

Their daughter, Harriet, married into the Luptons, a rich upper-middle-class family of merchants and property owners around Leeds - and Harriet's daughter, Olive, married a successful Leeds lawyer, Richard Middleton. Richard's son Peter was a pilot, so too was his grandson Michael - the father of Kate.

For the heralds whose job it will be to come up with a convincing coat of arms for Kate when the Palace finally announces her engagement to William, this latest revelation of near-royalty in the family will come as a relief, given that so many of her ancestors were working men without, as they say, escutcheon.

On the other hand, not everyone would wish to be associated with an ancestor who cared so little for the sanctity of life.

The short official record of Sir Thomas, who is after all the blood-tie between our future king and queen, could hardly be more dismissive: 'Leighton is recalled in Guernsey with . . . rancour. In England, he is barely remembered at all.'

Perhaps that's about to change.