Senarclens von Grancy
Leo van de Pas
of "The Mountbattens, The Battenbergs and young Mountbatten", this
book was published by Constanble, London in 1989, ISBN 0 09 468820 6
This book makes a very strong case for Freiherr/Baron August von
Senarclens de Grancy 1794-1871 to be an ancestor of many royals,
including Prince Charles, Prince William and Harry.
Page 42 :
The Princess (Wilhelmine von Baden)---her father-in-law was still alive---
had bought the property (Heiligenberg) in 1820, to enable her to live
with her chamberlain Baron Augustus Senarclens von Grancy.
In the next five years three children were born (the eldest died).
When Alexander (the second of these children) was ten Grand Duke Louis II
(von Hessen), although privately lamenting his wife's behaviour, accepted
with reluctance paternity of his two youngest children, and made the boy
a second-lieutenant in the first company of the Hesse-Darmstadt Life Guards.
His belated recognition was propbably caused by the intercession of his
wife's brother and sisters, the Grand Duke of Baden, the Empress of Russia,
the Queens of Bavaria and Sweden and the Duchess of Brunswick.....
But despite his reluctant acceptance of the two children, they did not
live with him.
Page 45 :
a quote by Prince von Bulow, Chancellot of Germany, 1900-1909 :
"In the Russian royal family the descent of the future Tsarina Maria
Alexandrovna and Prince Alexander of Hesse from the handsome Master of
the Horse was well-known. When I was attached to the Embassy of
St.Petersburg in 1865 or 1866, I drove with the Grand Duke and Grand
Duchess Vladimir from Tsarskoie Selo to St.Petersburg, the Grand Duke,
who had gone to bed late, fell asleep on the way, and his wife called
my attention to his fine, almost classical features. One could see, she
said, that her husband was not the grandson of Louis II of Hesse,
renowned for his ugliness, but of the handsome Grancy. As a matter of
fact, the Senarclens von Grancy were a good family and came from the Canton
Vaud, not far from Lausanne, where the ancestral castle stands.
William Addams Reitwiesner graciously pointed out where to find the
ancestorlist of this August von Senarclens de Grancy and, fortunately,
I had access to a Dutch source which gives further details and,
therefor, here is a bit more :
1.Baron/Freiherr August von Senarclens de Grancy
born 1794, died 8 October 1871
2.Baron/Freiherr Cesar August von Senarclens de Grancy
born 1763, died 1836
married 1789
3.Marie de Loriol
4.Auguste Victor de Senarclens, Seigneur de Grancy, Senarclens
born 15 February 1733 Vufflens-le-Chateau
died 27 February 1807 Lausanne
married 22 October 1756 Aubonne
5.Jacqueline Louise Madeleine de Chandieu, Dame de La Chaux
born 17 August 1731 Lausanne, died 7 DFecember 1811 Lausanne
6.Rodolphe de Loriol
married 1765
7.Catherine Tronchin
8.Pierre Daniel de Senarclens, Seigneur de Grancy, Senarclens
born 23 December 1689 Chateau Grancy
died 1751
married 25 September 1726 La Sarraz
9.Louise Benigne Salome de Gingins La Sarraz
born 1704, died 5 December 1779
10.Charles Esaye de Chandieu, Seigneur de Chabottes
born 1697, died 1787
married
11.Louise de Chandieu
12.Paul de Loriol
born 1674, died 1756
married 1695
13.Madeleine Monnier de Lisy
14.Pierre Tronchin
15.Catherine Armand
16.Henry de Senarclens, Seigneur de Grancy
born 1648, died 1726
married 1677
17.Benigne de Chandieu
18.Louis de Gingings
19.Anne de Buren
20.Frederic de Chandieu, Seigneur de Chabottes
died 31 January 1707
21.Susanne Elisabeth de Chandieu
Sources :
William Addams Reitwiesner
Kwartierstatenboek, 1983.
Europaischen Stammtafeln (Schwennicke, vol III p.224)
I hope this will invite some people who have access to those
Swiss genealogical books to flesh out this ancestorlist as so many
prominent Royals are the descendants of Wilhelmine von Baden and
(probably) Augustus von Senarclens de Grancy.
Leo van de Pas
John Carmi Parsons
helpful in supplying so much material proving that there was widespread
contemporary awareness of Baron Senarclens de Grancy's likely role in the
Grand Duchess Wilhelmine's private life (Lambton, in fact, reproduces
other documents including a diplomat's record of a conversation with Tsar
Nicholas I about the marriage of his son, the future Alexander II, with
Marie "of Hesse," one of the children evidently fathered by Grancy. The
Tsar was clearly aware of the rumors, and dealt with them by saying that
such a thing could never be proved--as Lambton remarks, an interesting
point of view given the questions that still hang over the paternity of
Nicholas' father Paul I--and that he would "not advise anybody to suggest
that the heir to the Russian throne is marrying a bastard"). (Lambton,
_The Mountbattens_, p. 43.)
As will become clear as the book is read, however, Lambton's primary purpose
was to heap as much scorn on the Battenberg/Mountbatten family as he could. To
be blunt, the volume is manifestly mean-spirited. His attitude appears to have
arisen from what he sees as the mistreatment of one of his elderly female
relatives by Princess Beatrice (1857-1944), Queen Victoria's youngest daughter
and the widow of Prince Henry von Battenberg, and from a feud over naval
matters between Louis Mountbatten's father and a male relative, Capt. Hedworth
Lambton, who apparently blamed the feud for his failure to win promotion
(Lambton, _The Mountbattens_, pp. 160-61, 197, 199-201, 211).
Consequently Lambton was delighted to report the Senarclens de Grancy
scandal in tremendous detail, as if he had discovered it himself, although
it was first made public as long ago as 1964 in Ghislain de Diesbach's
_Les Secrets du Gotha_ (Paris: Rene Juillard). Lambton's primary purpose
in reporting the rumors was to ridicule Louis Mountbatten's well-known and
near-obsessive interest in his Hessian ancestry in particular and in his
royal connections in general.
Lambton informed himself on the custom of morganatic marriage as practiced
by the 19th-century German princely houses, but never got it quite right;
indeed, he gets the terms "mediatised" and "morganatic" at times hopelessly
confused. Among his more astonishing statements is that the marriage of
King George VI of England and Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon was morganatic,
while he describes the morganatic wife of a Grand Duke of Baden as "un-
mediatised." Consequently the book has to be read with a good deal of
caution.
It's only fair to conclude by pointing out that Lambton's own political career,
made possible by his disclaimer of the earldom of Durham, ended spectacularly
with a sexual scandal which sent him into self-imposed exile in Italy for the
rest of his life. He lived comfortably with the woman in question, and spent
most of his time writing children's stories. He had projected a second volume
to deal specifically with Louis Mountbatten's career, but I don't know whether
that volume had appeared before Lambton's recent death.
John Parsons
Leo van de Pas
I was given this book by someone who maintained that Lambton
hated Mountbatten. But taken that aside, if the documents and facts
quoted are correct, then his dislike for Mountbatten is irrelevant.
I have not read Ghislain de Diesbach, but if he states the same then
this makes the case only stronger. Personally I don't care whether
Lambton liked or disliked Mountbatten, but genealogically it is
interesting and important whether Senarclens de Grancy did bring
'fresh' blood into royalty.
Leo van de Pas
Grant Menzies
>Anthony Claud Frederick Lambton (6th Earl of Durham) is the author
>of "The Mountbattens, The Battenbergs and young Mountbatten", this
>book was published by Constanble, London in 1989, ISBN 0 09 468820 6
>This book makes a very strong case for Freiherr/Baron August von
>Senarclens de Grancy 1794-1871 to be an ancestor of many royals,
>including Prince Charles, Prince William and Harry.
In Vol. 20, September 1991, of Hessische Familienkunde ("Die
geheimnisvolle und interessante Abstammung der Battenbergs"),
Friedrich Wilhelm Euler devotes a good deal of space to this case of
the Grand Duchess Wilhelmine of Hessen and her amour, the Baron de
Grancey, and includes a portrait of this gentleman that certainly
affirms his handsome classical profile. Euler soberly treats the
issue of Grancey's paternity of some of the Grand Duchess' children as
a received fact.
Grant
Grant Menzies
*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*
Il faut choisir
*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*