Jacobite succession

The Jacobite succession is the line through which the "crown in pretence" has descended since the flight of James II & VII from London at the time of the Glorious Revolution. James and his Jacobite successors were traditionally toasted as The King over the Water.

Claimants

The Stuarts who claimed the thrones of England, Scotland, Ireland and France after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 were, with the dates of their claim:

*House of Wittelsbach

Victor Emmanuel

In the early twentieth century Frederick Rolfe claimed that King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy was the rightful King of England, as heir to the Kings of Sardinia. Rolfe seems not to have understood that Victor Emmanuel III was not descended from that part of the house of Savoy which was descended from the Stuarts.

Elizabeth

In his book "The Highland Clans", Iain Moncreiffe of that Ilk claimed that Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom "is the lawful Jacobite sovereign of this realm". Moncreiffe made the following argument:

:by the fourteenth century it had become common law (in both England and Scotland) that a person who was not born in the liegeance of the Sovereign, nor naturalised, could not have the capacity to succeed as an heir - he was in the strictest sense 'illegitimate', though not of course born out of wedlock. This legal incapacity of aliens to be heirs applied to all inheritances, whether honours or lands. The effect of the succession opening to a foreigner in Scotland was that, if he had not been naturalised or if his case was not covered by some special statute, the succession passed to the next heir 'of the blood', who thus became the only 'lawful' heir. It was of course always open to the Sovereign to confer an honour or an estate on a foreigner; the rule of law merely prevented aliens from being 'lawful heirs' to existing inheritances. In Scotland, this law was modified in favour of the French from the sixteenth century, but was otherwise rigorously applied until the Whig Revolution of 1688, after which it was gradually done away with by the mid-nineteenth century. It was precisely because of this law that Queen Anne found it necessary to pass a special Act of Parliament naturalising all alien-born potential royal heirs under her Act of Settlement of the throne. But, of course, from the Jacobite point of view, no new statute could be passed after 1688, and the old law remained static until the death of Cardinal York in 1807. At that time, his nearest heir in blood by the old (and therefore continuing Jacobite) law was not - as is sometimes supposed - the King of Sardinia, for the royal Sardine had not the legal capacity to be an heir in Scotland, unless naturalised (e.g. by marriage to the Sovereign) which he was not. The nearest lawful heir of the Cardinal York in 1807 was, in fact, curiously enough, King George III himself, who had been born in England (and therefore in the technical liegance of James VIII).

However, if Moncreiffe's theory that the "common law (in both England and Scotland) [was] that a person who was not born in the liegeance of the Sovereign, nor naturalised, could not have the capacity to succeed as an heir" were in fact correct, then James VI of Scotland could never have succeeded as James I of England in 1603. This problem, recognized in 1603, had been circumvented at the time of James's accession by the ahistorical assertion that Scotland and England had been "anciently but one" kingdom, and that the succession of the Scottish monarch to the throne of England was a "reuniting" of two parts of a single kingdom, i.e., that Scotland was not really a foreign country -- a concept emphasized by James's insistence on the use of the name Great Britain for the united realms of England and Scotland.

ee also

*Jacobite consorts
*

References

External links

* [http://jacobite.ca/index.htm The Jacobite Heritage]