A charateristic of the royal family of Habsburgs, one of the most famous cases of hereditary physical deformity, said to have been derived through marriage with a daughter of a Polish princely house of Jagellon. Motley (The Rise of the Dutch Republic) describing Emperor Charles V, at the age of fifty-five, says, 'the lower jaw protruding so far beyond the upper,that it was impossible for him to bring together the few fragmants of teeth which still remained., or to speak a whole sentence in an intelligible voice. Of Phillip II of Spain, he says, " he has the same heavy , hanging lip, with a vast mouth and monstrously producing lower jaw.". Macaulay, (History of England) says of Charles II, the last of the Spanish Habsburgs, "the malformation of the jaw , characteristic of his family,was so serious that he could not masticate his food.
~Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable |
