All Hail Kate, The Pirate Queen

Express reveals that ‘vagabond’ smuggler was her ancestor... which makes son George the Pirate King-to-be

- Christopher Wilson

Shiver me timbers, Jim lad – our future Queen’s got buccaneering blood in her veins! The Daily Express can reveal that the Duchess of Cambridge descends from one of the scurviest knaves ever to roam our shores.

Kate has an ancestor who was a convicted 19th-century pirate, which means young Prince George, currently third in line to the throne, will be Britain’s first Pirate King.

And no, this isn’t the script for the latest Pirates Of The Caribbean blockbuster, but the ho-ho-honest truth.

Follow back George’s family tree on his father William’s side for a few generations, and you come to the daunting figure of Queen Victoria, mighty Empress of India and ruler of half the world.

But dig deep on the Middleton family side, and you’ll discover the swashbuckling figure of Tom Webster, a man so rascally he’d dispatch Cap’n Blood to Davy Jones’s locker before you could say pieces of eight.

I came across this exciting royal ancestor recently, when revisiting my research on the Duchess of Cambridge’s astonishing family. Back in 2010, I revealed that far from the bland upper-middle-class Home Counties girl most people took her for, Kate Middleton turned out to have a dazzling array of forebears – from coal miners, bakers, and charwomen to joiners and hatters, as well as the more upmarket writers and lawyers.

One person who escaped my attention at the time was the man who is the future King’s five times great-grandfather.

Born in poverty in County Durham at the end of the 18th century, Thomas Hay Webster started life as a grocer’s boy, but soon took to sea and to a life of crime.