by The Laird o’Thistle
January 15 2010

For all true Scots, there is a grand occasion coming up, the annual celebration of the poet Robbie Burns whose 251st birthday is 25 January. Burns Nicht is a rather bizarre national occasion where we recite a poem to a liver pudding boiled in a sheep’s stomach (i.e. “The Haggis!”), take a dram or two of single malt whiskey, listen to bagpipe bands indoors, take another dram or two, and toast “The Immortal Memory” of a womanizing rascal whose Ayrshire dialect many of us can no longer quite bend our tongues around. We end the evening with arms intertwined chanting about taking (yet another) “right good willie-waught for auld lang syne!” It’s all great fun, actually. Where else will you see so many men’s men proudly decked out in skirts? (And before too many of you send me the vehement protests that the kilt is NOT really a skirt… please know that I own two, which I wear quite proudly, and I fully realize the difference!)

Robert Burns was himself a bundle of contradictions, and none more so than the fact that he was both a great champion of liberty and the common folk and also a great romantic when it came to the heritage of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobites. In fact, it is an odd facet of the Scottish character that many of us share Rob’s eccentricity in this regard. “A man’s a man for a’ that!” we proudly declaim, but still we sing of Charlie, who’s gone awa’, “… better loe’d ye cannae be, will ye no come back again?” (My great-great-great-grandfather, John Anderson the “auld” blacksmith of Fenwick in Ayrshire, was noted for exactly this odd mental aberration. A staunch ultra-Presbyterian of Covenanter heritage, he was noted for pulling out a rusty old two-handed claymore when things were slow at the smiddy, and dramatically telling of the exploits of Prince Charlie – a “Papist” no less – to all who would listen. It is a condition that seems to have proved somewhat genetic, at least in my case.) And so, having intended to get around to it for some time, and with the senior royals still gone to ground at Sandringham and their other seasonal haunts, I thought I’d take a look this month at the Jacobite succession from the days of the “Bonnie Prince” down to the present.

The Jacobite saga begins in 1688 when King James VII & II had what turned out to be the misfortune of having a legitimate son born to his second wife. James had turned Catholic some years previously, but his heirs up until then had been his two Protestant daughters by his first marriage, Mary and Anne. The birth of Prince James Francis Edward, who was to be raised Roman Catholic in Protestant Britain, set off the chain of events known ever since as “The Glorious Revolution.” William of Orange, the Dutch Stadtholder, was married to James VII’s daughter Mary, and it was William and Mary who ended up chasing her dad into exile in France, along with the infant half-brother, and – at Parliament’s invitation – taking the throne for themselves. (William, by the way, was Mary’s first cousin, the son of James VII’s sister, also named Mary.)

James Francis Edward, the “Old Pretender” to the British throne lived from 1688 to 1766. According to those whose loyalties lay with the kings “over the water”, he succeeded his father as James VIII & III in 1701. Meanwhile, William III continued to reign in Britain proper (Mary having died in 1694) until 1702, when he was succeeded by Mary’s sister, Queen Anne. James Francis Edward essentially bided his time until the death of his half-sister, Anne. But after her death in 1714 he undertook his first attempt to reclaim the throne of the now “United Kingdom” (from 1707) for himself and his heirs from the newly arrived Hanoverians. The 1715 “Rising” failed, with a variety of noble Scots families finding themselves with their chiefs also “over the water” in exile with the Pretender.

James Francis Edward had two sons, Charles Edward (1720-1788) and Henry (1725-1807). In 1745 Charles Edward, the “Young Pretender” (eventually the Jacobite Charles III), led the second rising, done in his father’s name, and started out with surprising success. He actually took Edinburgh and briefly held court at the Palace of Holyroodhouse. Marching southward he spent one night in the house of a distant relative of mine, a most unexpected and rather unwelcome guest. The Jacobite Army came within a day or so of London before things began to fall apart and the retreat began which ended up in the bloody defeat of the clans at Culloden, overseen by the “Bloody” Hanoverian Duke of Cumberland. Charles Edward fled, dressed in one instance as brave Flora MacDonald’s lady’s maid. The clans were quashed, and both the pipes and the wearing of the kilt were banned for a time. Back on the continent, Prince Charlie kept plotting, even flirting a bit with the idea of becoming King in America during that revolution, but he eventually drank himself to death. He had no legitimate children, but he did leave an illegitimate daughter, Charlotte, who he designated as the Countess of Albany. His heir was his brother Henry, a Catholic clergyman.

Henry Stuart, the Cardinal Duke of York, lived for many years in Rome at the Papal Court and in his later years accepted a pension from George III, to whom he, in turn, willed some of the Scottish Crown Jewels now kept in Edinburgh Castle. Styled by himself and some stalwart followers as “King Henry IX” he posed no real threat to the now well established House of Hanover. He rests, along with his brother and their father, in a grand tomb in the Vatican itself.

Although any realistic Jacobite hopes of the Stuarts regaining the British throne effectively died in 1745, and surely ended “full stop” in 1807, the legitimist succession lived on. Upon the death of the Cardinal Duke of York, the Stuart claim passed to the descendants of Henriette Anne (1644-1670), the daughter of Charles I and sister of James VII / II who married the French Duke of Orleans. From her, the line passed via her daughter Anne Marie (1667-1728), the consort of Victor Amadeus II of Savoy, the first King of Sardinia, through a son and grandson to Charles Emmanuel II of Sardinia (1751-1819). Charles Emmanuel abdicated in 1801 to become a Jesuit and was succeeded by his son Victor Emmanuel I, who would thus have succeeded the Cardinal of York in 1807.

Victor Emmanuel’s rights to the British throne were passed on via his daughter, Mary, the wife of the Duke of Modena, through Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria-Este, to Maria Theresa (1849-1919) the consort of Ludwig III, King of Bavaria. They were the couple who succeeded to the Bavarian throne in the wake of the removal and suicide (or murder) of poor “mad” Ludwig II, Ludwig III being the uncle of the deposed king. After losing their throne at the conclusion of WWI, Maria Theresa died in 1919 and was succeeded as the Jacobite heir by her son Crown Prince Rupprecht (1869-1955). Rupprecht had served as a general in WWI, but was among Hitler’s opponents in WWII. Under his leadership, the Bavarian royals maintained significant property rights and a prominent position in Bavarian culture. He was also very proud of his royal Stuart ancestry and was known to wear the kilt on appropriate occasions… Royal Stuart tartan, of course.

After Rupprecht’s death, the Stuart claim passed to his elder son, Prince Franz (born 1933), who had no children. After Prince Franz comes his brother Max Emmanuel (born 1937), and then Max Emmanuel’s five daughters. The eldest of those five is Princess Sophie (born 1967) who married Prince Alois of Liechtenstein in 1993. Alois officially succeeded his father, Prince Hans Adam, in 2003. Sophie’s eldest son, Joseph Wenzel, was born in 1995, and she has several more children.

Barring some exceedingly bizarre turn of events, the chances of Sophie von Bayern or her Hapsburg kinder ever being more than a quirky dynastic footnote in British history is virtually nil. On the other hand, like the various other claimants to vanished thrones such as the Holy Roman Empire and the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, the romance of the Stuarts at least has living representatives to help keep the legend alive. Supposedly at the time of his succession in 1714, there were some fifty-six claimants senior to George I in descent from King James VI & I, but George was the first one to be a Protestant not barred by the Act of Succession. The count since then has to have grown exponentially as to the number of people senior to the Windsors in a strictly genealogical accounting. The Windsor claim, in succession to that of their Hanoverian ancestors, rests on the action of the British Parliament at the time of the Glorious Revolution. And at present, even if old Scotland were to regain its full place among the family of nations, the leadership of the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) seems inclined to hold on to the current Queen of Scots, and her heirs.

Having begun with a tip of the bonnet to Robbie Burns, it seems only fitting to end with a verse from the 20th century Scots poet Hugh MacDiarmid, first published circa 1934. It evokes both the traditional Stuart symbol, the white rose, and the poignancy of the Stuart saga.

The rose of all the world is not for me.
I want for my part
Only the little white rose of Scotland
That smells sharp and sweet – and breaks the heart.

Yours aye,
Ken Cuthbertson