House of Bonnecelli

The House of Bonnecelli is the royal house of the United Kingdom of Cattala. It's status as a royal house was established by Lord Chancellor Harrison by parliamentary proclamation on the 15 July 1949, when the temporary government declared the restoration of the monarchy under House of Bonnecelli after the 1949 Cattalian Referendum confirmed that the public wished for the country to return to being a kingdom. King Marco VI ascended to the throne on the 11 May 1951 and became the first native monarch from outside of the House of Celestine since the country unified more than 700 years earlier. Currently, the most prominent member of the House of Bonnecelli is Queen Alexandra V, the reigning monarch of Cattala.

Ancestry and Foundation
The House of Bonnecelli claims the crown of Cattala through its maternal lineage to the deceased House of Celestine. Princess Cornelia Celestine married the highborn Lord Mortimer Bonnecelli, a wealthy landowner, industrialist and Lord of Cape Point, in 1838. Cornelia was the third child of King Harold, who was ousted from the throne by the British navy in 1814, and her grandson Marco Bonnecelli was the only direct heir to the crown of Cattala after World War Two, as the descendants of Cornelia's brother had been killed by the Italian fascists in 1940 and her sister's lineage ended with her unmarried son in 1847.

The Bonnecelli lineage can be traced back to an old family of lords on the wave-battered island of Oriastone, off the coast of Cape Point, who grew in strength and wealth due to shipping and quickly became important land owners across the northern coast of Cattala and in Hellas. A cadet branch of the main house, the Bonnecelli's of Oriastone, continue to live in the ancestral lands and are prominent members of the local councils. The family has been pledged to the House of Celestine for nearly 700 years, having supported the Celestinian attack against southern rebels. By 1838 the Bonnecelli's owned industrial sites across the country and were one of the wealthiest aristocratic families in the realm. The union of the two houses strengthened the deposed King Harold's hand financially and was a leading factor in the monarchy's return to power after the revolution of 1917, instead of a communist or republican takeover such as the ones occurring in Russia and Germany. The wealth of the Bonnecelli's, gave the monarchy the financial strength to restore order and a government to the newly-independent island kingdom.

Following the executions of King Charles III, his queen consort and their two children Princess Annabel and Crown Prince Bruno Celestine in 1940, and the subsequent deposition of the crown, Cattala's monarchists had no leader to look up to and struggled to find a successor to the last Celestine. Only after the war, and with the assistance of the British government, could a successor be found and Marco Bonnecelli, who was born and raised in Cattala but left in the 1930s, was found to be the closest heir to the House of Celestine and was crowned King after the reconstruction of Celeste's royal city was completed in 1951.

Members
The 1949 declaration of the formation of the Royal House of Bonnecelli stated that all male and female heirs to Princess Cornelia Celestine and Lord Mortimer Bonnecelli were heirs to the throne and the titles and honours of House Celestine, including the deceased parents of the new King and the founders of the house, also deceased.

Lesser members of the Bonnecelli family, including the descendants of Marco Bonnecelli's brothers and sister, are heirs after Princess Maria but are not direct heirs to the crown of Cattala and therefore are not styled as Princes or Princesses. There are numerous cadet lines and female lines from the Oriastone-based House of Bonnecelli, but only the descendants of Cornelia Celestine and Lord Mortimer Bonnecelli can claim a place in the royal lineage.