McCain’s royal lineage claims rubbished

Poor old John McCain. He travels all the way to London to meet the PM and push his new book, Hard Call, only to be dumped on from a great height by a bunch of British academics.

The trouble began when his London publishers, Gibson Square, claimed that the Republican presidential candidate's family was descended from the 14th century Scottish king, Robert the Bruce. But genealogists and a medieval historian contacted by the Guardian said the claim was "wonderful fiction" and "baloney".

McCain's wishful thinking appears not in Hard Call, but in a 1999 family memoir, Faith of My Fathers, in which the Arizona senator said his great-uncle Wild Bill "joined the McCain name to an even more distinguished warrior family. His wife, Mary Louise Earle, was descended from royalty. She claimed as ancestors Scottish kings back to Robert the Bruce."

In the same passage, McCain wrote that Mary Louise Earle was also "in direct descent" from Emperor Charlemagne.

Dr Katie Stevenson, a lecturer in medieval studies at St Andrews University, said: "What wonderful fiction. Mary Louise Earle's claims to descent from Robert the Bruce are likely to be fantasy. Earle is not a Scottish name. I think it is incredibly unlikely that name would be related to Robert the Bruce. Charlemagne and Robert the Bruce were not connected - that's ludicrous."

Ken Nisbet, secretary of the Scottish Genealogy Society, after searching archive records of known descendants of Robert I for the Guardian, concluded: "This is speculation and it doesn't prove anything." Some of the claims made in the family memoir, he said, read like "some historical novel... It's a load of baloney."

Dr Bruce Durie, a genealogist at Strathclyde University, said after initial research into Mary Louise Earle's ancestry that there was "no existing documented link" to Robert the Bruce in terms of traced lineage.

Durie wondered why McCain would want to be associated with such "an absolute scoundrel" as Robert the Bruce. "The first thing he did after taking power was destroy Stirling castle and he was a self-serving, vainglorious opportunist who was determined to be king at any cost."