"the king of scots, with all his power..."

[jazzfish]

Holy crap there are present-day Jacobites.

(I predict most responses to this will be either "what?" or "WHAT?")

The world is a very strange place.

Comments

[yomikoma]

Wow, that's kind of amazing. Reminds me a little of Varley's Steel Beach.

[jazzfish]

... which I still have not gotten around to reading. I should do that.

[lurkingcat]

Huh. I didn't realise that there were still descendants running around. That... may actually be relevant to a fanfic idea that I've got hanging around at the back of my brain. Maybe :)

[jazzfish]

Yeah, my second thought (after "wtf?") was "oh crap, i can use this in a Secret History plot..." :)

[(Anonymous)]

There are no descendants; there are at best heirs. The line of the Stuarts died out in 1807. After James II, the next in line was his son James III, then his grandsons Charles III and Henry IX, both of whom died without legitimate issue. The line would have next gone through James II's elder daughters, Mary (who took the throne with King William in 1688, but had no issue) and Anne (who took the throne after William in 1702).

In 1700 Anne's only surviving child (of 17 pregnancies!) died at age 11, forcing Parliament to consider the succession. The Catholic James III was out, and James II had no more heirs. Charles II had had no legitimate children (which is why his brother James took the throne), and of Charles I'st children, next in line would be long-dead Princess Mary, who's sole child William was (in 1700) sitting on the Throne of England already (and who's succession they were trying to solve) The next line descended from Charles I went through his youngest daughter Princess Henrietta to her daughter Anne Marie d'Orléans, who was Catholic.

(In 1700, the Jacobites recognizes the line as James II, James III, Anne, William, and then Anne Marie)

To get a non-Catholic, you have to go back another generation. Charles I was the youngest son of James I, so next in line would be his eldest sister, Elizabeth. Although Elizabeth had 12 children, by 1700 only one line had not either died out or converted to Catholicism, that of her fifth daughter, Sophia, Electoress of Hanover. So Parliament settled on her, and in the Act of Settlement of 1701, they specified that Sophia (and her non-Catholic heirs) would succeed Anne.

William died in 1702, Sophia, then Anne, died in 1714, making Sophia's son George I the King of England.

[blaisepascal]

I am (Anonymous) above.

[skreidle.livejournal.com]

I'll take the former of the responses, plus a "... huh!" upon reading. :]

[jazzfish]

Yeah, I don't really expect anyone else to be up on the English succession. :)

[skreidle.livejournal.com]

All the same, it's an impressively long-lived grudge, especially from the perspective of this young country down here. :)

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

I keep hearing from people that grudges of a few hundred years are "long-lived". Given the history of the Balkans, or Iceland, or Poland, or many many other countries, this always strikes me as somewhat... Pollyanna-ish, let's say.

Example: I was reading an essay on Iceland's part in the 2008 stock market bubble wherein the author was quoting a Danish expert as saying that he'd warned as many Icelandic financiers as he could that they were doing something irrational, and none of them had listened. And... of course they didn't listen. He was a Dane, and the Danes imposed draconian trade restrictions on Iceland from the 17th century onward, and kept the island mired in poverty and squalor to the point that baldness due to head-fungus was ubiquitous during the 19th century. Head fungus, for fuck's sake.

tl;dr - Given the kinds of things that went down during the English Civil War and in its aftermath, I'm not even remotely surprised that there are still Jacobites hanging around.

[skreidle.livejournal.com]

And one could look to some major religions of resentment stretching back a thousand or two thousand years..

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

True. Though people often seem to take that sort of thing for granted, while being surprised by the other sort of grudge. I guess we take that sort of resentment and indoctrination as a baseline?

(Edited for clarity and repetition.)

[blaisepascal]

Curiously enough, I was just checking the Wikipedias the other day to find out who the Jacobite monarch of England was.

It struck me as routine to expect that Wikipedia would have a page listing the Jacobite succession to the present day, that it would list multiple theories of Jacobite succession (including one theory which said that at one time the proper Jacobean heir was George III, so Liz II is the current legal Jacobite heir.

All the same, I'll lump present-day Jacobites in with flat-earthers: folks who are either deliberately taking a contrarian position for the fun of it or are delusional.

[jazzfish]

I'm willing to believe I got punk'd here... but if so, historians are more serious about it than just about anyone else I've met. (Which also shouldn't surprise me.)

one theory which said that at one time the proper Jacobean heir was George III

... how does that even work? He's a hated Hanover as much as Georg I.

[blaisepascal]

Wikipedia quotes the theory as:

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).

The Wikipedia article then goes on to poke holes in this theory (unbiased my ass), but at least one historian has made that argument.

[blaisepascal]

Now, now, English and Scottish succession. (If I recall, the Royal Mail was forced to concede that it's habits of marking the mail boxes "Q.E. II" was incorrect in Scotland)

[selki.livejournal.com]

Georgette Heyer's well-researched and well-written novels have taught me a lot about English history. I got the ref and was not surprised. There are Ricardians too, after all.

[blaisepascal]

They think Elizabeth should have taken the throne in 1485? I hadn't heard of that before.

To clarify, I mean Elizabeth of York, 1444-1503, eldest sister of Richard III, not Elizabeth of York, 1466-1503, eldest daughter of Edward IV, niece of Richard III, and (then-future) wife of Henry VII.

[jazzfish]

I imagine they view Henry VII as a filthy Welsh usurper, and go around with placards on their coaches reading "ABT: Anyone But Tydder!"

[selki.livejournal.com]

Oh, I just meant by Ricardians, folks trying to clear up the historical record, as an example of folks who still feel strongly about such things hundreds of years later.

[jazzfish]

Ricardians make sense to me. Rehabilitating the image of a long-dead king is a reasonable historical pastime. These modern-day Jacobites are something else entirely. They seem to actively support the Divine Right of Kings concept, which in 2012 utterly smacks my gob.

[uilos.livejournal.com]

I get all my knowledge of the Jacobites from Sir Walter Scott.

I'd like to get into Heyer, can you point me to a good place to start, or a website with a suggested reading order? I know she was prolific and that has kind of held me back even though tons od people who's opinion I respect have good things to say about Heyer.

Georgette Heyer

[selki.livejournal.com]

Oh, tough call. I know some of her books make some folks' Heyer-favorites list and (same books) worst-Heyer books, depending on their willingness to suspend disbelief (plot contrivances), or wanting books with adventure mixed in, or mystery/Gothic, or more conventional romances (she wrote some of each). Some of her heroines are too sharp-tongued for some readers, some are too passive. Smart heroine? Not so smart heroine? If you tell me more about your tastes I can try to recommend. Short of that, I'd say my favorites to re-read, for various reasons, are Frederica, The Masqueraders, The Talisman Ring, The Quiet Gentleman, A Civil Contract, Black Sheep (not The Black Moth).

Now I want to make a table chart of the Heyer books and their respective aspects!