Will Ye No Come Back Again?

There has been a good deal of chatter in the media in the last few days that now the UK has three Kings in Waiting, Charles, Prince of Wales, William Duke of Cambridge and now Prince George, his new born son. You have to go back to the 1890's for the last example, Tum Tum Bertie of the Boulevards, his rather more prudent son, George, and his son Edward The Abdicator.

By then there were enough sundry members of the Royal Family around born of Saxe Coburg Gotha for us not to bother with other potential lines.  There were many and various around the aristocracy with one sort or claim or another and by this time a good many with Plantagenet descent.  At the time someone calculated that there were over 300 descendants known from the son of King Charles II and Nell Gwynn, so the numbers of others, more or less legitimate will be very large.

 

Those whose claim was Jacobite, that is from King James II by his second marriage to Mary of Modena and their son, James Francis Edward were regarded as an historical curiosity by most.  They still had a small following, principally in Scotland with a remnant groups largely among Catholic families in England and Ireland, attracted by institutions such as the Inquisition.

With the 2014 Referendum to come and the debate going on as to wording and content, many of the actual complexities are not being considered.  It is arguable that as well as voting or not for independence the electorate should be given a voice on other matters.  One is affiliation to the EU, the currency and if Scotland had a monarchy whether the Jacobite line should be reinstated in place of the London lot.

Because the Jacobites are still with us.  It has taken the German media to remind us, perhaps in retaliation for the determination of the present Government and Royals to ditch the memory of their Germanic inheritance in the respective male lines.  If the memories of WW2 are too much alive we might remember that some of the aristocracy in Germany had problems with the Nazi's, the National Socialist Workers Party.

This link gives the story of one of our other, Jacobite, Kings in Waiting:

http://www.thelocal.de/opinion/20130725-51057.html

This is Bavarian, which has a lot of lakes and mountains but unlike Scotland, no coastline. But the Duke in question does not have children to succeed him so the succession will go to his brother, Max, which takes us to Lichtenstein as well.  This tiny state tucked in between Austria and Switzerland is a tax haven through which a lot of world's wealth flows through the post box trusts, companies and quasi-banks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Max,_Duke_in_Bavaria

There could be a tidy little package here.  An independent Scotland, in Europe with a Jacobite King of Scots close to both the ECB and the German Bundesbank, backstopping the Euro with the oil revenues and working closely with the global network of tax havens. There must be some people in Edinburgh rubbing their hands at the thought.

Even David Cameron might think of returning to his ancestral croft, after all it was a Cameron of Locheil who greeted Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745 on his arrival to attempt a coup d'etat.