Jacobite succession

The Jacobite succession is the line through which the crown in pretence of England and Scotland 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".

House of Stuart

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:

Upon Henry's death, the succession passed to a different house, and none of the Jacobite heirs since has actually claimed the thrones of England and Scotland or incorporated the arms of England and Scotland in their coats-of-arms.

House of Savoy

• House of Savoy

Charles Emmanuel IV of Sardinia was a descendant of Charles I through his youngest daughter Henrietta Anne. Her daughter Anne Marie of Orléans married Victor Amadeus II of Sardinia, and Charles IV was great-grandson of Queen Anne Marie in the male line.

House of Austria-Este

House of Wittelsbach

Future descent after the Duke of Bavaria

The heir presumptive of Franz, Duke of Bavaria, is his younger brother

• Prince Max, Duke in Bavaria. Then his daughter
  • Sophie, Hereditary Princess of Liechtenstein, and then her eldest son
    • Prince Joseph Wenzel of Liechtenstein, born 24 May 1995 in London. The first heir in the Jacobite line born in the British Isles since James III and VIII, The Old Pretender in 1688.

Alternative successions

While Franz of Bavaria is recognized by most Jacobites as the Stuart heir, arguments have been made for several other candidates.

Alicia

Maria Beatrice of Savoy married her uncle Francis IV, Duke of Modena. This marriage was concluded validly in Sardinia. However, it would have been illegal for them to marry in Britain, and therefore the Jacobite succession is considered by some to have passed from Maria Beatrice to her younger sister Maria Teresa, who married the Duke of Parma. Her representative today is HRH The Infanta Alicia (b. 1917), dowager Duchess of Calabria and mother of the heir of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.^[6]

The succession from Maria Teresa is as follows.

• House of Savoy

• House of Bourbon-Parma

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.

In 1831 the male descendants of Victor Amadeus II of Sardinia and his wife Anne Marie d'Orléans, a niece of James II, died out and the Savoy succession – but not the Jacobite succession – passed to a distant cousin, because the succession in the Kingdom of Sardinia was governed by the Salic Law, which does not recognize claims by or through a female. England and Scotland have never been subject to the Salic Law (if they were, the succession could not have passed to the house of Savoy, nor in fact could the House of Stuart have inherited the thrones of either Scotland or England, as their claims in the two kingdoms derived, respectively, from Marjorie Bruce and Margaret Tudor). Rolfe may not have understood this.

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 .... 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 .... 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).

Under Moncreiffe's theory, however, 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.

It was not common law but a 15th century statute that restricted the English crown to those in the liegeance of the Sovereign, and that statute was supplanted by the Acts of Succession passed in Henry VIII's reign. Additionally, Jacobites believe that the royal succession is determined by God and by hereditary right, not by Parliament. For instance, most Jacobites recognise Mary, Queen of Scots as having been the rightful Queen of England - a clear violation of the aforementioned law, which in their view is overridden by Mary's hereditary rights (as granddaughter of Margaret Tudor), and the claimed illegitimacy^[7] of Elizabeth I.^[8][9][10]

Another interesting question raised by Moncreiffe's theory is that had the Act of Settlement not been passed, then George III would probably not have been born in Britain and so the House of Hanover as well as the House of Savoy would have had to be bypassed on Cardinal York's death, which would mean that he would have had different heirs to Scotland and England as all post-Union of the Crowns lines (i.e. Stuart, Savoy and Hanover) would either be extinct (Stuart) or barred from the succession on the grounds of being foreign (Savoy and Hanover). The logical thing to happen in this instance would have been for parliament to introduce legislation allowing the closest relatives (i.e. The House of Savoy, specifically Charles Emmanuel IV and his family) to be in the line of succession, as was actually done for the closest protestant relatives of Queen Anne (The House of Hanover; Princess Sophia and her family) via the Sophia Naturalisation Act which ensured the succession as laid down by the Act of Settlement, and confirmed in the Treaty of Union.

Royal Family Tree

See also

• Alternative successions of the English crown
• Jacobite consorts

References

External links

• The Jacobite Heritage