Revealed: Princess Mary's ancestor was a widowed pauper who lived in a ... trends now
As from today, home for the former Mary Donaldson, 51, will be the breathtaking Amalienborg Palace in Copenhagen with its huge retinue of guardsmen, servants and courtiers.
How very different from the life of her ancestor Marion Horne, newly widowed at 40 and living a hand-to-mouth existence in a shabby two-up, two-down fisherman's cottage on the east coast of Scotland.
Like almost no other queen in history, Mary's story is truly one of rags riches - for as we can now reveal, she descends from a pauper.
Princess Mary's family tree - with its roots in absolute poverty of live in a Scottish fishing village. Today she becomes Queen
An official portrait of the Crown Prince Couple, HRH Frederik, Crown Prince of Denmark and HRH Mary, Crown Princess of Denmark. Queen Margrethe announced in her New Year's speech to the nation on 31 December that she is to step down as Queen of Denmark
The future Crown Princess Mary of Denmark is pictured in the arms of her mother Henrietta Clark Donaldson in 1972 in Hobart, Tasmania
East Lothian, just to the east of Edinburgh
It's difficult to imagine a harder life for a mother of four with no plumbing, no heating - and absolutely no money.
Marion's entry in the 1861 national census lists her humiliatingly as a 'pauper' – someone who had to get by on handouts from friends and former shipmates of her late husband John, who'd died at sea the previous year.
In many respects Marion's life mirrors the history of the Princess of Wales's coal-miner ancestors, first revealed by me in a Daily Mail article in 2010.
In the 19th century, Kate's forbears were part of an exploited underclass in the coal-mining north-east of England, sent down the mines when still children, doomed to a life in the dark.
A short one, too, for life was cheap - the sea, and the coal-mines swallowed lives greedily with no regard for age.
And so it was for the fisherfolk of Tranent, Port Seton and Prestonpans, proud hardworking communities a handful of miles from the glories of Edinburgh but, in Victorian times, a lifetime away in terms of wealth and warmth.
Working fishermen could only guarantee themselves one day off a year, when they'd proudly parade around the town a box containing money they'd collected to be distributed to widows and those injured at sea.
The pauper Marion would be deeply grateful when that day came around each autumn.
But, like Kate Middleton's forbears, Mary Donaldson's ancestors had backbones of steel – and they realised that to get on, you had to get out.
When Marion's daughter Annie married fisherman Peter Donaldson in June 1871, the
