PANALBA

They Long to Reign Over Us

Roddy Martine 03/03/2010 10:01 AM

IT was never much of a picnic being on the throne of Scotland. Of the five Stewart occupants who preceded Mary Queen of Scots, two were murdered, one blown up, one killed in battle and the other died of a broken heart. None lived to be over forty three.

Mary herself was executed at the age of forty three. Only Mary's son, James VI, bucked the trend to die of natural causes aged sixty. How did he do it? Simple. The instant he inherited the throne of England, he jumped on his horse and headed south over the Border.

That was in 1603 and he was later to reflect from Whitehall: "This I may say of Scotland, and may truly vaunt it: here I sit and govern it with my pen. I write and it is done, and by a clerk of council I govern Scotland now, which others could not do by the sword."

No wonder his successors also chose to remain in the South, yet repeatedly looked to the Auld Country for support when the going got tough. Take Charles II, for instance. The Scots took him back a good nine years before England got rid of Cromwell's Commonwealth.

And it was to the Highlands that the Jacobite claimants turned for help. Why? Because for some nonsensical and sentimental reason, the clans - well, most of them - could always be counted upon in much the same way as Glasgow reliably votes Labour.

Way back they fought for Robert the Bruce. When Bruce's daughter married a Stewart and their son became king, the loyalty was passed on. They are like that in the Highlands. Decent folk, but a bit daft. Some call it " The Consanguinity."

And the consanguinity has a lot to answer for because the Stewarts were a raunchy, promiscuous lot. Take the first of the dynasty, Robert II, who not only fathered six legitimate sons and seven daughters, but eight known natural sons to boot. Twenty one in all. Not bad for a man whom early historians have made out to be rather feeble.

Nor did his successors let the side down. Every Scot, not to mention every noble house in Europe, has a Stewart bastard somewhere in the family tree. Successive Stewart monarchs knew they could be confident of Scottish support simply because they also knew that everybody in Scotland was related to them.

So when one of them snuffed it, there was no shortage of candidates to replace them, that is until John Knox's Reformation and religion threw a spanner in the works. When Queen Ann died childless in 1741, the establishment niftily side-stepped forty three Catholic Stewart relatives to nominate the nearest Protestant one.

Which is why would-be kings have been popping up here and there ever since. Be it misguided sentiment or genuine disaffection with the status quo, glasses are still raised to "The Kings over the Water" in the most surprising places.

But how serious a threat is this to our present Royal Family?

The late Sir Iain Moncreiffe of that Ilk, an unforgettable Albany Herald at the Court of the Lord Lyon King of Arms which adjudicates on such matters, was quick to point out that if it is pedigree that counts, Her Majesty the Queen is descended over twenty one times through cousin marriages from Mary Queen of Scots, and through her mother's Scottish ancestry directly from a daughter of Robert II. If you are a supporter of the hereditary system then that is a hard act to follow.

So while Scottish republicans posture for the Edinburgh-born, but obviously Irish American President Connery, the seed of the Stewarts through the German House of Hanover and the House of Windsor has proved remarkably resilient. The hereditary system may well have been upturned in the House of Lords, but now even the architects of its downfall are at a loss to come up with a workable alternative. They probably never will.

Which bodes well for the Royal House of Windsor, particularly while the Queen remains buoyant in the popularity polls. However, Scotland, we are told, is at yet another historic crossroads. With the reinstatement of the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh after 293 years and referendums in the wind, the prospect of full independence is no longer an unthinkable option. Anything is possible.

While nobody could possibly have served our nation better than Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her Other Territories Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, the day will surely come when through the way of all flesh or political pressure the post will become vacant.

The succession of the Prince of Wales, Duke of Rothesay, is not up for debate here, but it perhaps as well for him to be aware of what he is up against, particularly in Scotland. It was from Scotland that the Jacobites launched their challenge to William of Orange and subsequently to Charles's Hanovarian forebears. Should the people of Scotland decide that they want a monarch installed in Holyrood instead of a shuttle flight away at Buck House, where might they start looking?

Ensconsed in the Nymphenburg Palace near Munich is Duke Franz Bonaventura Adalbert Maria Herzog von Bayern of Bavaria, Head of the Wittelsbach Family and direct descendant of James VI of Scotland through his granddaughter Henrietta, Duchess of Orleans. His Jacobite credentials stem from the marriage of the Duchess's daughter into the Royal House of Sardinia (Savoy), then through marriage into the House of Modena (Hapsburg) from which the Archduchess Marie Theresa of Modena married Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, Franz's grandfather.

From this union, and in the absence of anyone being able to conclusively prove legitimate descent from either Bonny Prince Charlie or his brother Henry Benedict, a Cardinal of the Church of Rome, the bachelor Duke is regarded as the number one Jacobite claimant. On Franz's death, his dukedom will go to his brother Prince Max but because Max has no sons, the Bavarian titles will eventually pass to his first cousin Prince Luitpold, while the position of heir of the House of Stuart will be inherited by Max's daughter, Sophie, Princess of Liechtenstein.

The Wittelsbach Family, of which the Duke is the senior representative, ruled Bavaria for over eight centuries until Germany's defeat in the First World War put an end to the state's monarchy. Overthrown by a short-lived communist revolution in 1918, the family spent three years in exile in Austria only to discover on their return that the incoming Weimar Republic was as hostile to a Kingdom of Bavaria as the communists had been. The Wittelsbach estates were accordingly confiscated but they did manage to hang on to a couple of of castles and a palace which makes Holyrood look like a Hebridean croft.

So is there a chance that Franz or his niece might respond to a call from the people of Scotland? It seems unlikely. Why give up a chauffeur driven BMW in the Alpine foothills for a bicycle in the Canongate?

Nearer home, of course, there is a splendid line-up of blue blooded aristocrats in the running. All have ancestries steeped in the heritage of all Scots, but there is little chance that any of them would seriously contemplate such a prospect.

For example. The ancestor of the twentieth Earl of Moray, who lives at Doune, was half-brother to Mary Queen of Scots, which gives him a foot under the table, but little else. The fifteenth Duke of Hamilton & twelfth Duke of Brandon, Hereditary Keeper of Holyroodhouse, through his Arran earldom is descended from James II's eldest daughter, and the eleventh Earl of Elgin & fifteenth Earl of Kincardine has the distinction of Robert the Bruce's family being descended from his.

Then there is the tenth Duke of Buccleuch & twelfth Duke of Queensberry, President of the National Trust for Scotland. His direct ancestor was the first and last Duke of Monmouth, son of Charles II by his Welsh-born mistress Lucy Walter.

Monmouth certainly wanted to be king, but if you believe in the hereditary system you also have to go along with the dictates of wedlock and he, poor chap, went and got his head chopped off in an attempt to de-throne his uncle. Royals nowadays have it easy by comparison, but at least his wife held on to the Buccleuch dukedom, a wedding present from his father.

And that was that so far as the Scotts of Buccleuch were concerned, although there is an apocryphal story that during the reign of Queen Victoria, an ancient deed signed by Charles turned up in a trunk in one of the Buccleuch homes legitimising Monmouth and confirming his dynasty as heirs to the British throne. Supposedly the sixth Duke was so horrified at the prospect he had it destroyed on the spot.

But all of that is nothing compared to the trail of mystery and intrigue surrounding the exploits of Monmouth's first cousin once removed, Prince Charles Edward Stuart, otherwise known as Bonnie Prince Charlie. A six foot two, blond buck of a chap, he was twenty six when he marched his Jacobite army south to Derby to claim his exiled father's rightful crown. Even after his catastrophic defeat at Culloden and in exile in Europe , the pulling power of his Stewart libido was impressive. He may have been on his uppers. But the ladies, according to the latest claimant to his bloodline, were falling over in their palazzos for him.

The self-styled HRH Prince Michael of Albany, a diminutive Belgian born Michael Lafosse, son of a Belgian trader, arrived in Edinburgh aged eighteen back in the 1970s and thereafter held various jobs working in a kilt shop and for local charities while writing a monumental tome entitled The Forgotten Monarchy of Scotland. In a breathtaking 502 pages, he sought to establish his credentials as heir apparent if not to the English, Irish and French thrones, then certainly to the Scottish one. Not only did he blind the reader with references to virtually every Royal House in Christendom, he even claimed kinship with Napoleon Bonaparte and Robert Burns.

Charles, he insisted, fathered at least three sons and three daughters. With the exception of Charlotte, Duchess of Albany, born from Charles's liaison with Clementina Walkinshaw whom he met in Scotland in 1745, the others were kept a secret for fear of their being assassinated by the Hanovarian secret police, a his squad of such efficiency, we are informed, that they made the Stasi look like boy scouts.

What makes this assertion even more spectacular is that the descendants of these natural sons and daughters seem to have proliferated all over the place, marrying into the Austro-Hungarian Von Platt family, surfacing as English barristers and clerics, cropping up in the Czech Army during the First World War, and building American railroads.

The story of the two colourful Sobieski-Stuart brothers who turned up in Scotland claiming to be great-grandsons of Prince Charlie around the time of George IV's visit in 1822 is already well known, albeit debunked by Sir Walter Scott among others. It is singularly curious, however, that both the Earl of Moray and the Lord Lovat of the day were not only prepared to welcome them, but also to house them, latterly on the island of Eilean Aigus in the Beauly River. It rather suggests that somebody must have known something about them others did not.

But unlike Prince Michael of Albany, neither of the Soibieski brothers at any time expressed a desire to supplant the reigning monarch. Of course, had they done so in those days it would have been considered high treason. Perhaps it is as well they settled for inventing tartans instead, although there are some folk who will undoubtedly never forgive them for that.

In 1771, Charles Edward Stuart married Louise of Stolberg-Guedern, a princess of German extraction. No children were born of this union so far as we know, and after nine years she bagged off with an Italian poet.

Now Michael of Albany's claim to be the rightful heir to the throne of Scotland hangs on the premise that three years before he died at the age of sixty eight, Charles took as his second wife Margueritte O'Dea D'Audibert de Lussan, Comtess de Massilan. The following year a son was born to them, and, seven generations later, the interim two hundred years having been spent ignominiously in Rome, Paris, and Brussels, up popped Bonnie Prince Michael.

All of this has to be considered in the context of everybody concerned subscribing to the Catholic Faith. Now His Holiness the Pope might dish out the occasional annulment to a Monagasque princess nowadays but in the eighteenth century, divorce was not exactly encouraged by the Vatican even if your brother was a Cardinal.

So despite the separation of Charles and Louise, there is no authenticated proof that either of them divorced or re-married. Michael Stewart claims the dissolution of the marriage is recorded in the Vatican archives, but provides no reference number. His book fudges a lot, understandably claiming that the relevant papers were deliberately suppressed by successive British monarchs in league with successive British governments.

And then again you have to bear in mind that this was all taking place against a backdrop of the Napeoleonic Wars. What we do know for sure is that when Charles died his Cardinal brother, styling himself de jure Henry IX, reached an agreement with his cousin George III to renounce all of his claims to the British throne in exchange for a pension of £5,000 a year, generous by any standards. However, his Will, made in 1789, identifies Charles Emmanuel, ex-King of Sardinia (Savoy) as next in line to the Stuart succession.

The HRH Prince Michael of Albany roadshow certainly won its following while it lasted. Describing himself as Prince de jure of Scotland, Head of the Royal House of Stewart, 7th Count of Albany, Count Stuarton, Duke of Kendal and Kintyre, 26th Lord High Steward of Scotland, Duke of Normandy and Aquitane, Comte de Blois, Baron Lafosse de Chatry, Titular Prince of France and Poland, Head of the Celtic Church and President of the European Council of Princes among myriad of other offices, he says he returned to Scotland specifically to champion the Scottish nation in its struggle for justice and rightly deserved recognition on the world stage.

Alas, despite his immense charm and undoubted charisma, he failed to convince. In 2006, after almost twenty eight years in the UK, based in Edinburgh, he returned to Belgium to live with his mother. Since then he has retained a remarkably low profile which is a shame as if nothing else, he was a colourful addition to our increasingly neurotic heritage.

Of course, what did provide pause for thought was the discovery that the introduction to his website, which appears no longer to exist, was signed by Sir Laurence Gardner, whose name and knighthood is nowhere to be found in the pages of Debrett's. Presumably this is the same Laurence Gardner who in 1996 published a book entitled Blood Line of the Holy Grail (Harper Collins) in which he suggests that Jesus survived the Cross, married Mary Magdalene, fathered three children by her and that their bloodline has been carried through the Celtic kings of first century Britain directly to Michael of Albany. If Gardner is to be taken seriously, then Michael's inheritance can be traced back to David of Bethlehem, thus standing him in line to become King of the Jews. Now that really would be something to think about.

THE THRONE OF SCOTLAND

THE PERKS:

• Divine Right.
• Town House in Edinburgh.
• Nice clothes.
• Privy Purse.
• Loads of flunkies.
• You will not be head of the Church of Scotland, which at least is something to be thankful for.

THE DOWNSIDE:

• You must never express an opinion.
• You must be nice to everybody even when they are completely naff.
• You will be constantly criticised for your bad dress sense.
• Scottish monarchs are expected to cure scrofula by sticking their fingers into open sores. Just think what a boon you would be to the NHS if it worked.