The strange case of James Ord and the ‘Utah branch’ of the Royal Family has re-emerged in recent days

Americans like to boast of how they shrugged off the shackles of royalty in 1776, but for a 40-year-old Utah lawyer, cutting himself off from the British monarchy hasn’t been quite so simple.

James Ord was a 13-year-old schoolboy growing up in Virginia when, he says, his grandfather took him aside and told him the extraordinary story of how his family had been tricked out of the British crown.

It is a tale that goes back almost as far as the foundation of America and involves the future George IV, his forbidden marriage to the Roman Catholic love of his life and a child whose very existence had to be kept secret for the sake of the monarchy — to whom Mr Ord’s family believe they can trace their ancestry.

‘I was raking leaves under his magnolia tree at the time and grandpa told me the story,’ Mr Ord told me from his home in Salt Lake City. ‘He clearly thought it very important to tell me, but I kind of laughed at him.

‘I thought he was mad — but he had been a radio communications expert in the U.S. air force and a spy during the Vietnam War. He was a really intelligent man.’

James discovered that his father, a doctor, had been told exactly the same story by his own grandfather when he was about the same age.

‘It seems to have been a rite of passage — sharing the story with your children is very important,’ he says of the tradition.

Not only has the story been passed down through the generations of his family, but so has the name.

In nearly every generation of the so-called Maryland branch of the Ord family, the first-born son has been named James. This has made it easier to trace the Ord who appears to have the strongest claim to the British throne.

The most recent bearer of the name is a gay ex-Mormon and the step-father of four children, after he and his partner, Steve Hempel, became one of the first couples to exploit Utah’s legalisation of gay marriage.

The strange case of James Ord and the ‘Utah branch’ of the Royal Family re-emerged in recent days with the news that DNA evidence has been used to decide a disputed claim to the Scottish baronetcy of Pringle of Stichill.

The use of genetic testing to decide the rival claims of Murray Pringle and his cousin Simon Pringle had to be approved by the Queen. Might she now approve another application for a DNA test and allow Mr Ord to discover if he is indeed related to her?

‘I would love to do that,’ he says of a DNA test (which would, inevitably, require a sample of royal genetic material, too).

It should be stressed this bizarre tale hasn’t simply been plucked out of the imagination of an American family with grand pretensions.

Historians have long believed that George IV — or Prinny, as he was called in his days as Prince Regent — sired at least one child by the glamorous Roman Catholic widow Maria Fitzherbert, with one James Ord, the ancestor of today’s bearer of that name, viewed as the most likely candidate.

At the time, contraception was in its infancy and the twice-widowed Maria and her besotted prince were together for many years. In addition, some of Prinny’s friends were convinced she was pregnant shortly after their secret marriage.

On George IV’s death, Lord Stourton, one of Maria’s executors, asked her to sign a declaration on the back of her marriage certificate saying their union never produced offspring. ‘She smilingly objected on the score of delicacy,’ he recorded.

James is reportedly a descendant of George IV (left) and his secret Roman Catholic wife Maria Fitzherbert (right)

At stake was more than a lady’s delicacy. If Prinny’s marriage to a Roman Catholic had been common knowledge at the time, it would have seriously threatened his ascension to the throne.

The 1785 marriage, performed in the drawing room of her Mayfair home by a royal chaplain the prince had pulled out of debtor’s prison, was technically invalid, as — under the Royal Marriages Act — he first needed the consent of the king or Parliament.

The 1701 Act of Settlement would have made that consent most unlikely, however, as it disbars anyone who marries a Catholic from taking the throne.

Marrying a Catholic widow would have been scandalous enough to have stopped George becoming king. Furthermore, given that the dissolute George never produced an heir (his only child died giving birth) and was succeeded by his brother William, the existence of a son by a Roman Catholic wife could have caused a major political and constitutional crisis.

QUEEN CALLED FOR DNA TEST LAST YEAR TO SETTLE CLAIM The Queen commanded Britain’s most senior judges to decide if DNA evidence could be used for the first time to settle a dispute over a hereditary title, in a move that could have far-reaching consequences for the aristocracy. Her Majesty personally ordered Lord Neuberger, Britain’s most senior judge, and six other justices of the Supreme Court to rule on a bitter family dispute over who is the rightful heir to an ancient baronetcy. The feud was unexpectedly sparked by an innocent family tree project involving a distinguished lineage dating back to the 13th Century. Scientific analysis dramatically revealed that the last baronet came from a different bloodline to his relatives, suggesting there may have been an illegitimate child in a previous generation. The two rival branches of the family have now spent thousands of pounds on a legal battle over which is the true lineage. The peerage authorities were called upon to decide if the genetic material could be used to determine who should inherit the Pringle of Stichill baronetcy, and it was up to the Queen herself to order that a powerful but little-known court of top judges should make the ruling. If the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council agrees that DNA evidence can be admitted in the case, it can then be used in any future claim to the peerage. This could have huge implications for the whole of the British aristocracy – and possibly even the Royal Family itself – if it means ‘pretenders’ emerge with genetic evidence to prove their right of succession. Advertisement

A string of unlikely events in the earlier James Ord’s life very strongly suggest he was the product of that hushed-up marriage.

Born in 1786, Ord never knew his parents and was raised by — and named after — an ex-sailor named James Ord who pretended to be his uncle.

While still a baby, the younger James was conveniently whisked out of Britain to Bilbao in Spain.

The British ambassador there was a cousin of Mrs Fitzherbert and — despite having been only an ordinary seaman and not speaking any Spanish — Ord Snr was appointed to be the prestigious superintendent of the royal dockyards.

In 1790, the Ords moved to Maryland — America’s Catholic state — and were again befriended by a prominent friend of Mrs Fitzherbert, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Baltimore.

As a young man, Ord attended Georgetown University in Washington DC, where his fees were mysteriously paid by a British official, Notley Young. Equally inexplicably, British diplomats would regularly visit him while he was a student to check on his welfare.

Although he initially became a Jesuit priest, he later won a commission in the U.S. navy, then transferred to the army and even fought against the British in the War of 1812, rising to the rank of general.

Ord claimed he got his first clue that he was somehow special when his ‘uncle’ once solemnly told him — without elaborating — that ‘if you had your rights in England, you would be something great. God forgive those who have wronged you’.

His uncle appeared on the verge of saying more on his deathbed, confiding that he had ‘something of the greatest importance’ to tell him but lapsed into a coma from which he never recovered. Ord married and had seven sons before his death in 1873 in Omaha, Nebraska. His family — staunch Papists who clearly believed he was dreadfully wronged by anti-Catholic Britain — later described him in print as ‘the son of George IV and his lawful wife Maria Fitzherbert’.

B ut the rumours were so entrenched even during Ord’s lifetime that he wrote to Mrs Fitzherbert. He never received a reply.

Concerning the mystery of his birth, the plot had thickened back in Britain when a biography of Mrs Fitzherbert revealed the executors of George IV’s will placed crucial papers confirming their marriage, including a letter from her that might confirm she had children with the prince, in a vault of Coutts Bank in London.

Successive aristocratic relatives of Mrs Fitzherbert asked to unseal the package, but were turned down by her executors on the grounds she had requested they lie undisturbed. As late as 1944, another of her titled descendants, the Honourable Lady Beatrice Chichele-Plowden, claimed that both Queen Victoria and her son Edward VII blocked moves to unseal the papers.

Lady Beatrice made another sensational claim: James Ord’s family in the U.S. had sent her a copy of a letter from William IV, George IV’s brother and successor, offering him the title of Duke of Malta or a cash payment. Ord, she claimed, had chosen the money. Lady Beatrice thought the Coutts papers had been moved to one of the royal palaces.

The current James Ord’s family — especially the earlier generations — clearly thought they were ‘tricked out of their inheritance’ or at least treated badly by their royal cousins, he says.

‘Royal bastards were traditionally given titles or positions at court, but James Ord was shoved off to America with nothing,’ today’s James Ord says of his ancestor.

For his part, he says he knows of no paperwork in the family that supports any link to George IV. He is aware, too, that he couldn’t lay claim to the crown given that the Fitzherbert marriage was legally invalid.

But, with some irony, the Ords have finally settled on a religious denomination which would not preclude them, in theory, from claiming the crown.

Although Mr Ord was a keen Mormon, he left the religion when it ruled last year that gay couples were apostates from the church.

Now, he is a practising Episcopalian — the U.S. equivalent of our Anglican church.

And he says: ‘Having lived in Jamaica and travelled around the Commonwealth, there’s a lot to be said for the stability provided by the monarchy.’