The British Royal Family's German reputation began in 1714, when the last Stuart monarch, Queen Anne, died without an heir.
Although she had many closer relatives by blood – including her Catholic half-brother James Francis Edward Stuart (the “Old Pretender”) – they were barred from the throne.
Thanks to the Act of Settlement, the crown instead passed to her nearest Protestant relative: her second cousin George I of Hanover, then an independent German state.
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(George’s mother, Sophia of the Palatinate, was a granddaughter of James VI and I, giving him a perfectly valid – if rather distant – claim.)
But the German connection didn’t stop with George I: that was only the beginning.
For generations afterwards, British royals continued to marry into German princely families. George II married Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach, George III married Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, and Queen Victoria’s father, the Duke of Kent, married Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld.
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In 1795, George IV married the German princess Caroline of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel – who was also his first cousin. The pair had a child, but she did not survive them. The throne then passed to William IV, who married Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen. They had no surviving children, so the Crown passed to Queen Victoria, daughter of the Duke of Kent.
This pattern reached its most famous moment when Queen Victoria herself married her first cousin Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, whose influence on the monarchy – and on Victorian culture – was enormous.
Their son, Edward VII, became the first British monarch of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (although he himself married a Danish princess), cementing the dynasty’s German identity until the family name was changed to Windsor during World War I.
George V did this in 1917 and became the first monarch of the House of Windsor. His wife – Mary of Teck – however, had German blood on both sides of her family through her grandparents.
By this point, the British monarchy was unmistakably British in its role, but its family tree still carried a very audible German accent.
And while Prince Phillip, Duke of Edinburgh, was born into Greek and Danish royal families, it was his German links that initially attracted controversy during his engagement to Queen Elizabeth II. His mother Princess Alice of Battenberg was a Hessian princess by birth and Philip was descended from Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse – with the Battenberg family ruling the Grand Duchy of Hesse (a historic area of western Germany) until 1918.
In 1947, Philip adopted his maternal grandparents' surname Mountbatten – an Anglicised version of Battenberg – to distance himself from his German roots.
So when you ask 'how German is the British Royal Family?', the answer is probably 'sehr' (very).
