Is there is a Germanic connection to the British royal family?

Many, many years ago, when Diana was still Princess of Wales and we knew much less about phone-hacking, a tape surfaced of a phone conversation between the Princess and a friend of hers called James Gilbey. Though Diana was relatively guarded in the things she said over the phone, Gilbey suffered from no such restraint. Apart from referring to her as 'Squidgy' and making it clear that they shared some kind of special relationship, he also repeatedly assured her of his love and adoration.

As you would expect, the tape caused a scandal because, at that stage, Diana was married to the Prince of Wales and in line to be the next Queen of England. I have no idea whether she was actually having an affair with Gilbey (she certainly had one with James Hewitt, though) or how the tape came into the hands of the press (though Princess Diana's supporters, at the time, suggested darkly that the Princess's phone had been bugged by MI5 and that secret agents had ensured that the tape went public).
What interested me far more than Gilbey's declarations of love were the Princess's remarks about the royal family. Clearly, she did not like any of them very much (not even Sarah, the Duchess of York, who was supposed to be her pal, and the Queen Mother whom Brits regarded as a national treasure). But what was significant was the way in which she dismissed them all.
In other conversations, she was allegedly even more disparaging, referring to her husband's family as "a bunch of pasty-faced Germans."
Germans? The Queen of England? The royal family? Surely they were British. They were at the very heart of the English establishment.
So why was the most famous member of the royal family referring to them as Germans?
Well, because they are really Germans, perhaps?
Okay, that is a bit of an oversimplification. But what we don't often realise is that, in the 19th century, most of the royal families of Europe came from no particular country but had all descended from the same Germanic stock. Critics of Queen Victoria liked to claim that she spoke poor German-accented English for the early part of her reign. Her husband Albert was certainly German. And though the British royal family is now described as the House of Windsor, many people have suggested that it should actually be the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha because of its German roots.
Take Prince Philip, for instance. He was styled as Prince Philip of Greece before he became the Duke of Edinburgh. And when he served in the armed forces, he used the name Philip Mountbatten, a family name also used by Lord Louis Mountbatten, most famous as a former Viceroy of India.
Mountbatten's name was made up. His German ancestry meant that his family name was Battenburg. Only when relations between the UK and Germany worsened was his father forced to change it to the less Germanic Mountbatten.

THE LADY AND THE PRINCE: Prince Charles with his new wife, Lady Diana, after the royal wedding in July 1981. The couple divorced in 1996, a year before a tragic car crash took her life
The Battenburgs were related to many European royal families (as indeed were the Windsors) including, most famously, the Tsar of Russia, a country where the court also had a strong German influence. (Despite his original title, Prince Philip is hardly your average Souvlaki-eating, Retsina-drinking Greek; in fact, he is not Greek at all, but Brit-German.)
The German origins of the British royal family should not really bother us in this modern era - even if they bothered Princess Diana - except every now and then there are uncomfortable reminders of their Germanic links.
Last month, British newspaper The Sun carried stills from a home movie which showed the current Queen, when she was a small child, giving the Nazi salute. Her mother appeared to be part of this bizarre enterprise though defenders of the royal family said that, a) the Queen was so young that she probably had no idea what she was doing (which is fair) and that b) the Royals were parodying Hitler and the Nazis and mocking them by sending up their silly salute (well, who knows?).
So how did The Sun get the footage? A plausible theory is that the home movie remained with the Queen's uncle, the late Duke of Windsor. When his wife died, all of her possessions and those of the Duke's fell into the hands of Mohammad Fayed, the Egyptian millionaire who insists that the royal family had his son Dodi and Princess Diana bumped off. Fayed would certainly have enough reason to leak the footage.
But if the film did come from the Duke of Windsor's collection, then it re-opens old questions about his loyalty. We know that when he was Prince of Wales, the Duke was a Hitler fan. And there are stories to the effect that after he became king, he wanted Britain to align with Nazi Germany. In fact, one view is that when he abdicated the throne to marry a strange, androgynous American called Wallis Simpson "for love", he had actually been forced out by the British government because of his Nazi sympathies. (After he abdicated, Elizabeth's father became King and that is how she eventually became Queen.)
So, are the royal family members just a bunch of "pasty-faced Germans", as Princes Diana claimed? No, of course, not. They are as British as say, Ben Kingsley or Art Malik. Britain is a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society.
We think that this is a recent development. But, as the history of the royal family demonstrates, Britain has had its share of very successful immigrants for centuries. And just like today's South Asian immigrants still cheer for India or Pakistan at cricket matches, it is possible that one or two dodgy members of the royal family cheered for the country they originally came from: Germany.