Keep it in the family. (We don't want your grossness.)

I'll give you one guess as to what this post is about. 


If you guessed incest, you're right. I present to you a list of famous related couples. Some you're probably aware of, others will come as a surprise.


Queen Victoria, Wernher von Braun, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Jesse James, Thomas Jefferson, Franklin Roosevelt, Catherine the Great, Johann Sebastian Bach, Edgar Allan Poe, Jerry Lee Lewis, Rudy Giuliani, Elizabeth II, and Marie Antoinette all married cousins.


Leonidas of Sparta, Voltaire, Alois Hitler, and Adolf Hitler all married their nieces. Well, actually, Voltaire just shacked up with his niece. And Hitler hired her as a housekeeper, and then kept her prisoner until she committed suicide. But still, you get the point.


And of course, Cleopatra VII was famous not only for her relationships with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. She was also married to her younger brother, Ptolemy XIII. But then she had him killed, so maybe that cancels it out.

So, what does all this inbreeding get you?

This guy:

Don't stare too long, you'll go blind.

This poor SOB is Charles II of Spain. He was born 06 November 1661 and died 01 November 1700. He was the last Hapsburg king of Spain. And if you think he looks a little off, you're right. You see, his family decided to stop marrying people they weren't related to back around 1550. If you're interested in what more than a century of hardcore inbreeding looks like, it looks like Charles II. 

Charles's parents were also uncle and niece. His grandmother was also his aunt. His other grandmother was also a great-grandmother. All eight of his great-grandparents were related.

Remember Joanna the Mad who I mentioned in my last post? Well, she was two of his sixteen great-great-great-grandmothers. And six of his 32 great-great-great-great-grandmothers. And six of his 64 great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers. Poor kid never had a chance.

In fact, Charles would've been in better genetic shape if his parents had just been brother and sister.

He was born with the famous Hapsburg lip. Just look at him and you'll figure out what that is. His tongue was so huge his speech was unintelligible. He couldn't chew. He drooled constantly. He was mentally disabled. He couldn't talk until he was four. He couldn't walk until he was eight. He never went to school. Afraid to put too much strain on the young heir, he was not even required to observe basic rules of hygiene. It wasn't until his half-brother exiled the queen mum and seized power that he was even required to brush his hair.

When Charles was 18, he married Marie Louise d'Orleans, a young lady to whom he was actually not related. Charles was smitten. The rest of Spain was less so. When years of matrimony failed to produce an heir, the court naturally blamed the woman. They accused her and her ovaries of plotting against Spain, and even went so far as torturing one of her maidservants to find evidence of treachery. She was generally miserable, and in the last few years she turned to food for comfort. She died in 1689 at age 26, most likely of appendicitis. By the time she died, she was as much in love with Charles as he with her.

He then married Princess Maria Anna of Neuberg, but still no children. And Charles started to go off the deep end. He had the corpses of his dead loved ones exhumed just so he could look at them. He had a total nervous breakdown, and officially retired. He just sort of hung out for the rest of his life, playing games and shooting at stuff.

He died five days before his 39th birthday, in 1700. The coroner reported he had almost no blood in his body, his heart was tiny and resembled a peppercorn, his lungs were corroded, his intestines had gangrene and were putrefied, he only had one testicle, which he described as being "black as carbon." Now I don't know much about testicles, but I'm pretty sure they're not supposed to look like that. And to top it all off, his brain was full of water.

20th century historians Will and Ariel Durant described him as being "short, lame, epileptic, senile, and completely bald by 35. He was always on the verge of death, but repeatedly baffled Christendom by continuing to live."

Not a bad epitaph for a king who drooled a lot and had only one ball.