Rags To Royalty / Real Life

• Elizabeth Woodville, wife of Edward IV, was the first ever commoner to marry an English monarch; she had aristocratic ancestry but at the time they met she was the penniless widow of a defeated minor soldier. Their fairytale happy ending was slightly ruined by the Wars of the Roses, though.
• William, Prince of Wales' wife Catherine née Middleton, the current Princess of Wales, was described as a commoner as she is "only" upper middle class rather than nobility.
  • Prince Edward's wife Sophie Rhys-Jones, now the Duchess of Edinburgh, was also an upper-class commoner, as was Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, Prince Andrew's ex-wife.
  • Prince Harry's wife, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex (nee Markle) is a more straight example than the above. Born into an ordinary family, she took a number of acting jobs before making it as a successful actress by the time she met the prince.
• Ditto Anni-Frid Princess Reuss of Plauen, better known as Frida Lyngstad, the brunette from ABBA. Her late husband's country was absorbed into the German state of Thuringia after World War I, meaning she has no real power, but it's still a long way to go from her childhood. (She was the product of her mother's affair with a German soldier during the occupation of Norway, and was raised by her grandmother to protect her from the abuse war children received in Norway.)
• Princess (now Queen) Letizia Ortiz, married to the Spanish heir Felipe de Borbón -now ruling as Felipe VI-, was a commoner journalist. She studied in a public school and high school and her parents are a nurse and an unknown journalist. The Prince fell in love making this story a Cinderella type.
• King Rama IV of Thailand (you know, from The King and I) spent twenty-seven years in a monastery after he was passed over for his father's throne in favor of his older half-brother. He was a devout monk who insisted on strict observance of the Southern School Buddhist monastic rules, which included things like chastity, moderation and poverty (a Buddhist monk is permitted a small number of robes, a begging bowl, a fan and very little else.) Upon the death of his half-brother he became king, and inherited a whole load of palaces, servants and concubines.
• In a real-life "Goose Girl" example, King Clovis II of France (7th century) married an Anglo-Saxon noble who'd been sold into slavery.
• King Charles XIV John of Sweden was born as Jean Bernadotte and came from a lower-middle class family in Pau, France. He joined the army early on so his widowed mother would have one less mouth to feed, rose quickly through the ranks following the French revolution, and eventually became Marshall of France under emperor Napoleon, the 1st Sovereign Prince of Ponte Corvo and also married Napoleon's ex-fiancee Désirée Clary. Later on, because of a number of strange circumstances, he was adopted by the childless king of Sweden, made successor, ushered in a 200+ year period of peace, and founded the house of Bernadotte which still rules Sweden to this day. His last words were: "Nobody has had a career like mine."
  • Also of Swedish royalty, but of a later stripe: Prince Daniel, spouse of Crown Princess Victoria, was born in a rural Swedish town as the son of a social worker and a postal employee.
  • Princess Sofia was born Sofia Hellqvist, a glamour model, actress and one-time reality show contestant, to a marketing manager and a employment counselor when she met Prince Carl Philip. They hit it off immediately, eventually marrying in 2015 and went on to have three children together.
  • Their mother in law, Queen Silvia, was also this; she was a hostess at the 1972 Summer Olympics, and it was there she met then-Crown Prince Carl Gustaf. Carl, as he explained in an interview, just "clicked" with Silvia, and four years later they were engaged; when they married the next year, Carl was already king, so Silvia skipped the princess role, going straight to Queen.
• Grace Kelly later became Princess Grace of Monaco. Not exactly rags, since her father was a self-made millionaire, but she still was a descendant of Irish bricklayers, and became a princess by marriage.
• Mette-Marit Tjessem Høiby was a commoner single-mom before she married Crown Prince Haakon of Norway and became Crown Princess.
  • Mette-Marit's mother-in-law, Queen Sonja, was also born a commoner, though an upper-middle class one like the Duchess of Cambridge.
• King Jaja of Opobo in what is today coastal Nigeria was born the son of peasant farmers further inland in the 1800s. He was kidnapped and sold as a slave to King Pepple of Bonny. He eventually ran the king's trading business so well that Pepple freed him, and made him Chief of his own War Canoe House. Later, Jaja led a group of disenchanted War Canoe Houses in a trade war with the town. They left Bonny, founded another port town, Opobo, and Jaja was proclaimed its first King. His War Canoe House is still the ruling House in Opobo today. (Jaja himself later got into a trade dispute with the British over rights to buy palm oil from the hinterland, was abducted, imprisoned in England, and died off the Gold Coast on his way back home).
• Every biography of a famous conqueror is this. Many times it is an epic rather than strictly based on truth.
• The Justinian dynasty of the Byzantine Empire was rife with this:
  • Emperor Justin I was born an Illyrian peasant and swineherd. He joined the military and rose through the ranks, and was eventually appointed tribune, Senator, and comes excubitorum, commander of the palace guard. When the emperor Anastasius died childless, Justin's nephew Justinian secured his ascent to the throne, making him emperor of Byzantium and paving the way for Justinian to later inherit the crown himself.
  • Justin's wife Euphemia, born Lupicina, was from even humbler circumstances; according to Procopius of Caesarea, she was a slave and a barbarian.
  • Justinian I, likewise, was from the same peasant stock as his aunt and uncle. He was also an Illyrian, and he spent his childhood in the place of his birth, only moving to Constantinople as a young man. He was eventually legally adopted by Justin, and he was crowned co-emperor in 527 and sole emperor later that year. His peasant upbringing was made obvious by the language barrier; his native language was Latin, and he supposedly spoke Greek with a horrible accent.
  • Theodora, Justinian's wife, was the daughter of a bear-trainer and an actress (which was far from a respectable occupation at the time—see The Wicked Stage.) She and her sisters were prostitutes from a young age, and she had at least one child out of wedlock. Her background was so disreputable that special legislation had to be passed just so Justinian could marry her—legislation that Euphemia, herself a former slave and concubine, vehemently opposed. Upon Euphemia's death, the law was changed, and the wedding took place in 425. When Justinian succeeded to the throne in 527, she was made Augusta.
• Basil I, founder of the Macedonian dynasty of the Byzantine Empire, was born to Armenian peasant parents and eventually became Emperor, proving to be competent enough to establish his dynasty.
• Temujin was born to Mongol nobility, but was driven into exile with his mother and for a time he was even enslaved by his family's enemies. He later conquered most of the world, making him an extremely successful Sleeping Beauty type. For the non-scholarly types, you might know him as Genghis Khan.
• The Roman Emperor Diocletian, was born to parents who were former slaves (some sources even say he himself was born a slave). After joining the Roman Army, he eventually climbed the ranks to become one of the emperor's top generals. After the death of both the emperor and his son during a battle in Persia, Diocletian was proclaimed emperor. He would go on to make reforms that would bring the Roman Empire out of the Crisis of the Third Century.
  • While Diocletian was an extreme case, the office of Roman Emperor technically was not hereditary, as the emperor was elected by the Senate. The situation of being de facto hereditary came from the reigning emperor's ability to force the Senate to elect a chosen heir as a co-emperor, who at his death would automatically become the only emperor. But, sometimes, the emperor would pick a competent politician, general or bureaucrat and have him elected as successor.
• While not exactly royalty, more than one Roman Catholic Pope started his life in poverty or as mere middle-class and ended up as the highest authority in Catholicism. Some examples are: St. Pius X (Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto, Country Mouse and son of a post office worker in a tiny village), Saint John XXIII (Angelo Roncalli, doubling as Country Mouse and an Impoverished Patrician since his sharecropper family descended from a secondary noble branch) and Saint John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla, son of a Polish ex-military officer, thus as much urban middle-class).
  • The current Pope (as of 2014), Francis, is one of these too. Son of Italian immigrants who lived in Argentina, graduated from school with a chemistry diploma and worked as a chemical technician, a bar bouncer and a janitor before entering the Jesuit Order and ascending in the hierarchy until he was made Pope.
• Mary, Queen of Denmark began her life as an accounts manager for several advertising agencies, and later a realtor specializing in luxury properties. Cue the Sydney Olympics, then-Crown Prince Frederik and a pub, and let the fairytale begin.
• Emperor Hongwu, founder of the Ming Dynasty of China, was born as a peasant, lived as a beggar after a plague wiped out his family, and spent some time as a monk before becoming a warlord and eventually emperor.
• Liu Bang, founder of the Han dynasty, was also born as a peasant.
  • Liu Xiu was one of Liu Bang's many descendants, but so far removed from the royal family that he was a simple farmer when the Han dynasty was overthrown by Wang Mang. He eventually joined a rebellion against Mang and restored the Han dynasty, becoming the first emperor of what history calls the Eastern Han.^note So named because in the restored dynasty, the capital was moved east from Chang'an (now Xi'an) to Luoyang.
• Qutb al-Din Aibak, founder of the Malmuk Dynasty that started the Delhi Sultanate in Northern India, was sold into slavery as a child. He eventually came into the possession of Mu'izz ad-Din Muhammad, Sultan of the larger Ghurid Empire. Quṭb was initially put in charge of royal stables or Amir-i-Akhur. Eventually, Quṭb was appointed to military command and became a general to his owner, Muʿizz al-Dīn Muḥammad. When Muʿizz al-Dīn was assassinated in 1206, Quṭb al-Dīn was his logical successor. He was still technically a slave, but he quickly obtained manumission. He married the daughter of Tāj al-Dīn Yildiz of Ghazna, one of the other principal claimants to succeed Muʿizz al-Dīn, and, by other judiciously arranged marriages, consolidated his rule.
  • The dynasty he founded was eventually called a Dynasty of Slaves (Mamluk literally means Slave, and the dynasty was known as the Ghulam Garh - The House of Slaves) as every ruler who came after him was either a slave, or the child of one.
• A lower-class woman named Martha was born ca. 1684, became the maid of a Protestant cleric in Livonia, before marrying a Swedish dragoon. When the town she lived in was conquered by the Russians, she first lived with the Czar's friend Menshikov before becoming Peter the Great's mistress. Peter persuaded her to join the Orthodox church under the name Yekaterina (Catherine) and, after she had given birth to three daughters, she married him in 1712. When Peter died, she became Russia's first reigning empress, Catherine I.
• Some Sultans and other Muslim kings elevated their favorite concubine to a de-facto Queen status. One of the most prominent examples was Roxelana. Born in what's now Ukraine in the family of the ordinary priest, she was taken captive during one of the slave raids by the Crimean Tatars (yes, the slave raids against Slavic population were pretty common in Ukraine at the time) and sold into the sultan's harem. What resulted from this was the first instance in the Ottoman history when the sultan - none other than Suleiman the Magnificent - actually legally married his harem concubine. She was his love - and close adviser - up until her death.
• Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Born a normal peasant Kinoshita Tokichiro and eventually got drafted as a sandal-bearer for Oda Nobunaga, he proves himself to be crafty and resourceful enough that Nobunaga promotes him to general, and eventually he avenges his lord's death, unifies Japan and becomes the most powerful and richest man in there. Of course, this is usually played with, because of his commoner origin, he could only apply for 'royalty' position as high as kampaku, not Shogun, since actual ancestry from past royal family was required. Tokugawa Ieyasu did that particular Shogun part better.
• The Bonaparte family, including Joachim Murat, Napoleon's brother-in-law. The Bonapartes were impoverished Corsican aristocrats (making them foreigners in the eyes of the traditional French aristocracy^note  Strictly speaking, Corsica was Genoese territory mortgaged to France pending the repayment of Genoa's debts to France - not that there was a realistic chance of Genoa ever raising the necessary cash - and only legally became part of France through a decree of the National Assembly during the French Revolution.) before Napoleon rose to the throne of France, while Murat was the son of an innkeeper - and mostly got his crown (as King of Naples) because he married Caroline, the second youngest of the Bonaparte siblings.
• After the death of her first husband, the elderly Earl of Gloucester, Edward I's daughter Joan of Acre secretly married a household squire (who may also have been illegitimate), Ralph de Monthermer. Edward threw Ralph in jail once he found out (when Joan had to explain why the new marriage he'd arranged for her couldn't go through), but after he was released he was made the Earl of Gloucester for Joan's lifetime.
• Similiar to Kate Middleton is Michiko Shoda, now known as Empress Emerita Michiko of Japan. Born into a wealthy but common family, she met the then Crown Prince Akihito at a tennis match and they soon fell in love. The media even portrayed their meeting as a "real fairy tale" and a "romance on the tennis court". Michiko became the first woman from outside of the traditional aristocracy to marry a future emperor. Their marriage wasn't a complete fairy tale, however; traditionalists, including Akihito's mother opposed their marriage, both because of her common status and the fact that her family was Roman Catholic, to the point she was temporarily Put on a Bus to Brussels, in hopes the relationship would dissolve and her family received death threats. Despite this, they also had plenty of support by the public and the marriage was seen as a sign of Japan's modernization and democratization.
  • Her daughters-in-law, Masako, The Empress of Japan and Kiko, Princess Akishino, are also examples of this trope. The former met her husband through Infanta Elena, Duchess of Lugo during a tea session while she was still a student at the University of Tokyo and the latter met her husband while both were students at Gakushuin University, with him proposing to her three times before she accepted. Likewise, neither are from a noble background and both have faced media and Imperial House Agency strife over Masako not producing a male heir to succeed the throne and Kiko living in an apartment on campus with her family before her marriage.
• Actress A.J. Langer of My So-Called Life fame was born a young woman in a working class family to an audiologist and a salesman at a department store. She met Lord Courtenay in a California bar where he didn't know that she was an actress and she didn't know that he was royalty. They hit it off immediately and eventually married in 2004, had two children together and she is now known as Allison Joy Courtenay, Countess of Devon.
• Queen Rania of Jordan was born an ordinary Kuwaiti woman and was once forced to flee her home during the Gulf War. By chance, she was invited to a banquet hosted by Princess Aisha of Jordan, where she met Aisha's brother, the then Prince Abdullah, who fell in love with her at first sight and they married six months later, becoming king and queen eight years later when Abdullah's father died.
• By the 1300s the kingdom of Goryeo was little more than a vassal state of Yuan-dynasty China. They regained their independence in the 1350s, but by then the kingdom was disintegrating. King U made matters infinitely worse by deciding what they really needed was to go to war with China. I Seong-gye, the half-Chinese son of a Korean official working for the Yuan dynasty, had already gained fame and respect as a military leader. King U thought he was the obvious choice to lead the invasion of China. I Seong-gye himself disagreed. Emphatically. He turned his army back and attacked Goryeo's capital, deposing King U and replacing him first with his son then with a distant cousin. Eventually I Seong-gye decided to depose the current king and take the throne himself. He became known as King Taejo, founded The House of I, ended the kingdom of Goryeo, and created the kingdom of Joseon in its place. Taejo himself only reigned from 1392 to 1398, but the kingdom he established lasted until 1897, and his descendants stayed on the Korean throne until 1910.
  • Later in Joseon's history a Succession Crisis prompted two Unexpected Successors from among Seong-gye's descendants. King Cheoljong started out as an illiterate peasant and was so far down the line of succession that he never expected to become king, but the previous king died childless and Cheoljong, his second cousin once removed, was chosen as successor. Cheoljong also died childless, and was succeeded by an even more distant cousin.
• When he was born sometime before 145 B.C.^note history doesn't record the year of his birth, Zheng Qing was the illegitimate child of an unimportant (and already-married) official and a servant who had four other children. His mother sent him to live with his father, step-mother, and half-siblings, who hated him and forced him to work as a shepherd. As a teenager Zheng Qing ran away, took his mother's surname and became known as Wei Qing, and started working as a groom for his mother's employer, Princess Pingyang — who was also the emperor's older sister. In 139 B.C. Pingyang offered her brother a new concubine: Wei Zifu, Wei Qing's half-sister. Wei Qing accompanied Wei Zifu to the palace, where he was almost killed by his sister's rival. As an apology for that incident Emperor Wu made Wei Qing first a lieutenant, then a general. After that Wei Qing won multiple victories against the Xiongnu, became one of Emperor Wu's most trusted advisors, and eventually married his former employer, Princess Pingyang.
  • The aforementioned Wei Zifu didn't have nearly as happy a life as her half-brother. She first met Emperor Wu under circumstances we would now consider sexual assault; Princess Pingyang ordered her to follow the emperor, and he took advantage of Wei Zifu as soon as they were alone. Empress Chen, Wu's official wife, was furious when she heard he intended to make Wei Zifu a concubine and forced him to make her a palace maid instead. Wei Zifu attempted to escape, but Wu caught her and forced her to stay. He deposed Chen and promoted Wei Zifu to empress after their first son was born. She remained empress for thirty-eight years. Towards the end of his life Emperor Wu became convinced people were using witchcraft against him. Enemies of Wei Zifu and her son Liu Ju jumped at the chance to plant evidence against them. Liu Ju fled for his life, but was hunted down and killed. Wei Zifu committed suicide. Most of her family were killed in the chaos that followed. Her great-grandson was one of the few survivors; he later became Emperor Xuan and officially cleared Wei Zifu's name.
• Princess Angela of Lichtenstein was born Angela Brown, a Panamanian fashion designer when she met Prince Maximilian and hit it off with him in spite of him being 11 years her junior. They have been Happily Married since 2000, making her the first woman of African descent to marry into European royalty.

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