Royal Kinship
She is the youngest of five children of Lt.-Col. Harold Pedro Joseph Phillips (1909–1980) and his wife, Georgina Wernher (1919–2011). Her eldest sister is Alexandra Hamilton, Duchess of Abercorn and another sister is Marita Crawley, who wrote the libretto for the opera “The Poet and the Tsar” about their great-great-great-grandfathers, Alexander Pushkin and Emperor Nicholas I of Russia. Natalia is one of three godmothers to Prince William, Duke of Cambridge. Her family have long been close to the British Royal Family, being distantly related to both Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. They are also descendants, through non-Catholic marriages, of Sophia, Electress of Hanover, in whose Protestant descendants is vested the right of succession to the British throne according to the Act of Settlement 1701.
They also descend from Pushkin, Russia's most renowned author and nobleman, as well as from his African great-grandfather, Abram Petrovich Gannibal, the youth believed to have belonged to a family of tribal chieftains who became a protégé of Peter the Great.
The sisters' maternal grandmother was born Countess Anastasia de Torby (later Lady "Zia" Wernher), younger morganatic daughter of Grand Duke Michael Mihailovich of Russia (a grandson of Tsar Nicholas I) by his wife Countess Sophie von Merenberg, morganatic daughter of Prince Nikolaus of Nassau (himself brother of Adolphe, Grand Duke of Luxembourg) by his wife Natalya Aleksandrovna, Pushkin's younger daughter.
Lady Zia's sister Countess Nadezhda de Torby (or "Nada") was the wife of Prince George of Battenberg (later George Mountbatten, 2nd Marquess of Milford Haven), elder maternal uncle of the Duke of Edinburgh. The Torby sisters were third cousins of the prince through their common ancestor, Tsar Nicholas I. Natalia's paternal grandparents were Joseph Harold John Phillips and his wife Mary Mercedes Bryce, whose niece Janet Mercedes Bryce (daughter of Major Francis Bryce of Hamilton, Bermuda) married David Mountbatten, 3rd Marquess of Milford Haven, Nada Mountbatten's son.
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Read more about this topic: Natalia Grosvenor, Duchess Of Westminster
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