younger branch of the House of Wettin than the Grand Dukes of Saxe-Weimar. A still more junior branch of the Wettins, headed by the rulers of the small Duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, would, through diplomacy or marriage in the 19th and 20th centuries, obtain or consort and sire the royal crowns of, successively, Belgium, Portugal, Bulgaria and the Commonwealth realms. Also, marriage to cadet males of the Houses of Oldenburg (Holstein-Gottorp), Polignac, and Bourbon-Parma brought those dynasties patrilineally to the thrones of Russia, Monaco, and Luxembourg, respectively. The Dutch royal house has, at different times, been a cadet branch of Mecklenburg and Lippe(-Biesterfeld). In the Commonwealth realms, the male-line descendants of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh are cadet members of the House of Glücksburg. It was a risk that cadet branches maintaining legal heirs could sink in status. This could be due to shrunken wealth too meagre to survive shifting political upheavals (e.g. legal mechanisms in factionalism or revolution of attainder, capital offences and show trials) as much as unpopularity or distance from the reigning line. The Capetian branch of the princes de Courtenay's last 'prince' died in 1733 without recognition by the crown as dynastic princes du sang despite undisputed but remote male-line descent from Louis VI of France. The principi di Ottajano (of the House of Medici) were heirs to the grand duchy of Tuscany when last male of that more senior branch died in 1737, yet were bypassed by intervention of Europe's major powers, which allocated the title to Francesco II Stefano, of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine. The Romanovs, which dominated Russia's throne (owed to kinship-by-marriage to tsar Ivan the Terrible) from 1613 to the end of monarchy, became reluctant to stress they descended from the 9th century founding ruler Rurik after 1880, when Tsar Alexander II wed Catherine Dolgorukov, a Rurikid princess. In part so that later cadet children could be sidelined, and part because the marriage was deemed morganatic for Alexander having long been involved with Catherine as his mistress. Notable cadet branches House of York: descendants of the fourth son of Edward III Plantagenet, King of England, who, in the course of the Wars of the Roses (1455–1485), displaced the agnatically senior line of Plantagenets, the Lancaster branch, on the English throne (1461), only to be finally displaced themselves by a Lancastrian cognatic descendant, Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, who obtained the crown