Posh Spice’s unlikely revolutionary heritage revealed

It would be tough, you might think, to better the news that that George II was a forebear of Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, as reported in The First Post. So, for pure absurdity, how about Victoria Beckham, once known as Posh Spice, being a direct descendant of Karl Marx?

Surprisingly, it turns out to be true, almost. Genealogists in Germany have discovered that Mrs Beckham is the great-great-great granddaughter of the 19th-century German revolutionary Carl Heinrich Pfaender, a close friend of Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Pfaender, who lived from 1819 to 1876 and came from Heilbronn in south west Germany, took part in the failed revolution of 1848 and had to escape to London where he worked as a miniaturist and painter to earn a crust. (Continued below)

If his principles had allowed him, he might have envied Posh's money and blingy lifestyle. "He certainly didn't get rich (in London)", says Hans Mueller, the German historian who has just made the discovery. "His wife was buried in a pauper's grave."

Mueller has now contacted Mrs Beckham's mother, Jacqueline, who has promised to pass on the news to her daughter. She might, just, be a little more comfortable with the news that Pfaender's brother, Wilhelm, was a singer - a choral scholar no less - who was also active in the revolution and emigrated to America in 1848, later becoming state treasurer in Minnesota, according to Mueller.