James Ord, a 40-year-old Utah lawyer, was a 13-year-old schoolboy growing up in Virginia when, he says, his grandfather took him aside and told him the extraordinary story of how his family had been tricked out of the British crown.
It is a tale that goes back almost as far as the foundation of America and involves the future George IV, his forbidden marriage to the Roman Catholic love of his life and a child whose very existence had to be kept secret for the sake of the monarchy — to whom Mr Ord’s family believe they can trace their ancestry.
‘I was raking leaves under his magnolia tree at the time and grandpa told me the story,’ Mr Ord told me from his home in Salt Lake City. ‘He clearly thought it very important to tell me, but I kind of laughed at him.
‘I thought he was mad — but he was a really intelligent man.’
James discovered that his father, a doctor, had been told exactly the same story by his own grandfather when he was about the same age.
Not only has the story been passed down through the generations of his family, but so has the name.
In nearly every generation of the so-called Maryland branch of the Ord family, the first-born son has been named James. This has made it easier to trace the Ord who appears to have the strongest claim to the British throne.
The most recent bearer of the name is a gay ex-Mormon and the step-father of four children, after he and his partner, Steve Hempel, became one of the first couples to exploit Utah’s legalisation of gay marriage.
The strange case of James Ord and the ‘Utah branch’ of the Royal Family re-emerged with the news that DNA evidence has been used to decide a disputed claim to the Scottish baronetcy of Pringle of Stichill.
The use of genetic testing to decide the rival claims of Murray Pringle and his cousin Simon Pringle had to be approved by the Queen.
Historians have long believed that George IV — or Prinny, as he was called in his days as Prince Regent — sired at least one child by the glamorous Roman Catholic divorcee Maria Fitzherbert, with one James Ord, the ancestor of today’s bearer of that name, viewed as the most likely candidate.
At the time, contraception was in its infancy and the twice-widowed Maria and her besotted prince were together for many years. In addition, some of Prinny’s friends were convinced she was pregnant shortly after their secret marriage.
The 1785 marriage, performed in the drawing room of her Mayfair home by a royal chaplain was technically invalid, as — under the Royal Marriages Act — he first needed the consent of the king or Parliament.
Marrying a Catholic divorcee would have been scandalous enough to have stopped George becoming king. Furthermore, given that the dissolute George never produced an heir and was succeeded by his brother William, the existence of a son by a Roman Catholic wife could have caused a major political and constitutional crisis.
Born in 1786, Ord never knew his parents and was raised by — and named after — an ex-sailor named James Ord who pretended to be his uncle.
While still a baby, the younger James was conveniently whisked out of Britain to Bilbao in Spain.
The British ambassador there was a cousin of Mrs Fitzherbert and — despite having been only an ordinary seaman and not speaking any Spanish — Ord Snr was appointed to be the prestigious superintendent of the royal dockyards.
In 1790, the Ords moved to Maryland — America’s Catholic state — and were befriended by a prominent friend of Mrs Fitzherbert, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Baltimore.
Ord attended Georgetown University in Washington DC, where his fees were paid by a British official. Equally inexplicably, British diplomats would regularly visit him while he was a student to check on his welfare.
Ord claimed he got his first clue that he was somehow special when his ‘uncle’ once solemnly told him — without elaborating — that ‘if you had your rights in England, you would be something great.’.
Ord married and had seven sons before his death in 1873 in Omaha, Nebraska. His family later described him in print as ‘the son of George IV and his lawful wife Maria Fitzherbert’.
‘Royal bastards were traditionally given titles or positions at court, but James Ord was shoved off to America with nothing,’ today’s James Ord says of his ancestor.
Daily Mail