Category: Lost Tribes

• The British Royals and the Lost Tribes

  The British Royals and the Lost Tribes theory was a twentieth-century resurgence of British Israelism, the belief that the peoples of Britain descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel and that the British sovereign therefore stood in the Davidic line. In its strongest form, the theory claimed that the royal house was not merely ancient and legitimate in a constitutional sense, but the direct continuation of the biblical monarchy through a line preserved after the fall of Judah. The specific royal descent claim often ran through the British-Israel story of Tea Tephi, a supposed daughter of Zedekiah who was said to have reached Ireland and joined her line to the island’s kings. By the interwar period, older British Israelist arguments about empire, destiny, and royal lineage were easily reapplied to the reigning house and to the future queenly line.