Legally nothing would change. The child of a married woman is considered to be the legal offspring of her husband. All it could do is show that maybe not always the lines tie up as nicely genetically as they do legally.
Still through both his parents King Charles III has various lines leading to earlier British, English and Scottish monarchs (as do most other hereditary reigning sovereigns in Europe).
That the Windsors or Mountbatten-Windsors do not represent the oldest line has been known and accepted since the Act of Settlement. 
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This would be the only way the British people would have the power to exhume the corpses of long-deceased kings, so as to perform the necessary Y-chromosome DNA tests to confirm or refute controversial paternities.
As long as a royal sovereign reigns over the United Kingdom, such a thing will NEVER be authorized: it's difficult to see that His Majesty King Charles III would be any more inclined to grant consent to such a thing than his mother, Queen Elizabeth II.
If Parliament had the energy or inclination, it could introduce a bill to issue an ultimatum on Charles III: either allow DNA tests on past kings, and also the remains on the children found in the Tower of London, or accept abolition of the hereditary monarchy -- which typically entails exile. Previous MessagePrevious Message
The Beaufort line is in my view a tricky one to compare to. They are the result of children born outside of a marriage to a woman who did not have a particularly high status. For her it would have been beneficial to have any children born to her after the death of her first husband to be attributed to a Royal prince. However unlike most royal wives she was not as strictly guarded and or protected from other men.
Unfortunately the Beaufort line is all we have to go on for surviving male line Plantagenet descendants however theoretical. That's why I favour using the DNA of a Plantagenet king to compare Y chromosomes. Anyone who's Y chromosome matches, for instance, King John's, who is as close to the origins of the dynasty as one can get, is obviously bona fide.
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on 18/1/2026, 22:48:31, in reply to "