Why does the British monarchy trace its history to William..

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Francified Vikings.
I’m imagining Vikings in lace with powdered wigs.

Sadly they were a few hundred years away from the Sun King.

Just for Chuckles.Charles is my twelfth cousin but I never received my invitation.
I omitted the closest relatives for privacy.

Every transition between branches of the family - whether by conquest, usurpation, disinheritance, or simply running out of heirs in a particular line - has ultimately involved the transfer of power from one descendant of William the Conqueror to another. This has not always meant parent-to-child primogeniture succession, and has involved changes of paternal 'house' name whenever inheritance occurs via a female heir who's married into another dynasty.

However, no matter what surname they carry, the individuals involved have always had a personal dynastic link back into the established royal line. (The sole exception I can think of is the short solo reign of William III after the death of his Stuart wife.) There have been five such changes of dynasty, with the latest undergoing a politically-motivated "rebrand" in the 20th century. I've spelled out all five major changes below, including how they connected into the previous dynasty and how their branch came to supply a successor.

1. From the Conqueror to the Plantagenets - 1154

William the Conqueror was initially succeeded by his two sons (William II and Henry I.) A brief civil war saw Henry's daughter Matilda passed over in favour of her cousin Stephen, the grandson of William the Conqueror through his daughter Adela. Upon Stephen's death the crown passed back to Henry I's line: Matilda's son became Henry II, inheriting the nickname 'Plantagenet' from his father Geoffrey of Anjou. This soubriquet would apply to the English royal house for the next three centuries.

Connection of Henry II Plantagenet to William the Conqueror: Henry II was the son of Matilda, the daughter of Henry I, the son of William the Conqueror.

2. From the Plantagenets to the Tudors - 1485

From Henry II to Edward III, the crown passed father-to-son through five generations. Here, it gets complicated. A number of succession disputes arose involving descendants of four of Edward III's children: Edward the Black Prince, Lionel of Antwerp, John of Gaunt (founder of the House of Lancaster), and Edmund (founder of the House of York.)

On Edward III's death, Prince Edward's son Richard II became king. He was later deposed by a son of John of Gaunt, Henry Bolingbroke. Reigning as Henry IV, he was the first of three kings of the Plantagenet Lancastrians: father to son to grandson. The latter, Henry VI, was succeeded by a cousin from the Yorkist branch of the Plantagenets, Edward IV. Both Henry VI and Edward IV were great-grandsons of Edward III.

The prolific John of Gaunt was the progenitor not only of the Lancastrians, but of another branch of the family through his third wife: the Beauforts. They were close cousins to the Lancastrian kings and took that side in the war. The Beaufort heiress Margaret married Welsh courtier Edmund Tudor, and championed their son Henry as a potential Lancastrian successor. Henry's marriage to Richard III's niece Elizabeth meant their children would also inherit the Yorkist claim to the throne.

Connection to Henry VII Tudor to Edward III Plantagenet: Henry VII Tudor was the son of Margaret Beaufort, the daughter of John Beaufort, the grandson of John of Gaunt, the son of Edward III.

3. From Tudor to Stuart - 1603

The throne passed from Henry VII to his son Henry VIII. Each of Henry VIII's three children ruled but died without issue. Next in line were the offspring on Henry VII's daughters, starting with Margaret Tudor who'd married into the Scottish royal house. At the death of Elizabeth I, the next in line was James VI of Scotland, both of whose parents were grandchildren of Margaret Tudor.

Connection to James I Stuart to Henry VII Tudor: James was the son of Mary Queen of Scots, the daughter of James V of Scotland, the son of Margaret Tudor, the daughter of Henry VII.

4. From Stuart to Hanover - 1714

In spite of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and Williamite War during the Stuart era, in dynastic terms the throne passed father-to-child (with a couple of transmissions between siblings) for four generations from James I to Anne. Anne died childless, and her brother had been disinherited. The nearest heir with a connection to the royal line was therefore Anne's second-cousin George, whose grandmother had been a sister of Charles I and married a German prince.

Connection of George I to James I: George I was the son of Sophia of Hanover, the daughter of Elizabeth Stuart, the daughter of James I.

5. From Hanover to Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, later Windsor - 1901

Despite two changes of name along the way, since 1714 the British crown has passed to an immediate relative through nine generations of the same family, usually parent to child (at different points to a grandchild, a brother, or a niece.) Victoria reigned as a Hanoverian, but her son Edward VII and grandson George V bore the dynastic name of Victoria's husband, Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. This was changed during WWI to Windsor, the name of their English residence, and continued to be used by George's sons Edward VIII and George VI, the latter's daughter Elizabeth II, and her son Charles III.

Due to familial intermarriages along the way, there are a number of routes one can take through the English and British royal family tree to get from William the Conqueror to Charles III, but he's a direct descendant separated through 35 generations of parents and children.

The European royals are as inbred as that strange looking hillbilly kid who plays the banjo in Deliverence.

So you could trace them all back to...any individual one of them you choose. And indeed trace anyone of them back to any individual you choose in multiple ways...through multiple lines of descent.

The European royals are as inbred as that strange looking hillbilly kid who plays the banjo in Deliverence.

So you could trace them all back to...any individual one of them you choose. And indeed trace any one of them back to any individual you choose in multiple ways...through multiple lines of descent.

According to British geneticist Adam Rutherford, it is "virtually impossible" that a person with a predominantly British ancestry is not descended from Edward III. He has calculated that "almost every Briton" is "descended between 21 and 24 generations from Edward III"