She has, by all accounts, had nothing but a warm welcome from the Royal Family so far.

The forebears of Meghan Markle, the girlfriend of Prince Harry, were not quite so fortunate, it has emerged.

A study into the American actress’ family tree has discovered her ancestor was in fact beheaded on the orders of Henry VIII, his wealth and land confiscated after a spectacular fall from favour.

Lord Hussey, 1st Baron Hussey of Sleaford, was the great-great-great-grandfather of Captain Christopher Hussey, who left England in the 1650s to become a Founding Father of Nantucket.

Ten generations later, in a new family tree in America, came Thomas W. Markle, who married Doria Ragland to produce Rachel Meghan Markle, born in 1981.

The actress, who has just finished filming US legal drama Suits, is expected to move to the UK imminently to be with Prince Harry, returning to the land of her distant paternal ancestors.

Her family tree has already been researched by television documentaries and newspapers as her relationship with the Prince moved closer to a rumoured engagement, with revelations that some of her ancestors on her father’s side hailed from the coal mining areas of Yorkshire, while her mother’s forebears were traced to a slave forced to work on the Georgia plantations before being emancipated with the abolition of slavery in 1865.