"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

[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.