Grand Fenwick, of course, is a real fnord place, and not the product of Wibberley’s imagination. It’s actually on the fnord border between Guilder and Florin, but its existence has been kept fnord secret by the Illuminati as part of the Master Plan.
:dubious:
:dubious: Hmmm…
Well, here’s hoping… I mean, how many opportunities at fairy-tale marriages to princes do gay men get???
I can, with at least 99.99999% certainty, assure you that Albert is not gay. I don’t know if he is or isn’t bisexual, but he isn’t gay.
The Monegasque Constitution was amended in 2002, apparently as they could not take any more worrying that the French Republic may indeed decide to call its option if something were to happen to both Rainier and Albert, and Albert was obviously in no hurry to “close his eyes and think of Monaco” 
Under the prior regime, a Prince w/o sons could designate a male direct descendant to be his lawful heir, including elevating an illegitimate child to legitimate status (Rainier’s mother herself started off as a “natural child”) but apparently the whole arrangement was thoroughly byzantine and legalistic and rigid AND it was subject to the consent of the French Government (in fact, even under the old law, to get Rainier in line they had to bend some rules). The 2002 Constitution establishes a more flexible primogeniture system and provides mechanisms for Monaco to perpetuate the succession in the case it may actually become vacant.
JerH actually said that the throne would pass to Albert’s sisters if he died without issue, and I have seen at least one news article that implied this as well - although others have suggested that the throne, as you say, would pass to his nephew. I haven’t seen anything, however, that spells this out clearly.
So what’s the real story? If Albert dies, does Caroline become a ruling Princess, or does Andrea become Prince?
The obituaries for Prince Rainier say that his mother (Princess Charlotte of Monaco) renounced her rights to the throne in order to allow Rainier to succeed his grandfather directly. So presumably Caroline would have to do something similar if the throne were to pass directly from Prince Albert to his nephew Andrea.
thanks for clearing up the first part of my question.
When I briefly visited Luxembourg in 1978, they had a a currency and banking union with Belgium, so they used Belgian currency along with their own. I remember seeing the then King Of Belgium on the notes–a man with short dark hair and dark-rimmed glasses looking not unlike Peter Sellers!
Well then, remind me never to rule a country.
(I don’t know if it’s a mere typo, but Wales is also called Wales in German. Wallis is a Swiss canton.)
The media around here call HRH by the English form of his name, and do use “Prinz” in both places — even though, as Schnitte stated and you correctly translated, “Fürst” should be used for the latter.
“Prinz Charles, der Prinz von Wales”
While 800 or so years ago there was a Prince of Wales who ruled over Wales, since 1284 England and Wales have been joined together as a single kingdom, the Prince of WSales has just been the heir to the English throne, and has not ruled over Wales – his mother or father ruled over Wales as well as over England. So I think the German translation “Prinz von Wales” is a reasonable one for the present Prince.
In any case, if I understand the Furst/Prinz distinction right, Charles would not be a Furst, since he is not the ruler of Wales, but rather a Prince as in member of a royal house whose title references Wales. (Kaiser Wilhelm’s son was Prince of Prussia in much the same way; it’d be instructive to know what “Prince” translates there, IIRC Prinz.)
Wallis is actually the German usage for the Swiss canton known to its French-speaking inhabitants and to English-speaking people who have occasion to reference it as Valais. Note that the same thing happens in reverse to the “Canton of the Grey League” at the other end of Switzerland, where German and English speakers call it Graubunden, but French speakers Grisons.
It’s not a typo. My circa 1960 English-German/German-English dictionary gives “Walis” and “Waliser” as the German for “Wales” and “Welshman.”
What needs to be remembered is that under the ancien regime there were lots of little states around the edges of what is now France that were independent or semi-independent of the French crown. Indeed, the story of the growth of what we now think of as France is a long process over many centuries by which innumerable smaller states were incorporated one-by-one into the larger entity. The ones that remained were just those that the French had not yet got round to annexing.
The exact status of each varied. Some were nominally fiefs of the French crown but were, in practice, independent, some were fiefs of other kingdoms and some claimed to be sovereign. But even those rulers who claimed to be sovereign might enter the service of the French kings. A number of those sovereign princes, including some of the princes of Monaco, became courtiers at the French court and did so without surrendering their claims to be independent rulers.
Even in the eighteenth century the process of opportunistic annexation continued. The principality of Orange was finally annexed by the French in 1702 after its prince, who as William III had also happened to be the King of England, died without an immediate male heir. The duchy of Lorraine was annexed in 1766 after it was inherited by Louis XV from his father-in-law, Stanislas Leszcynski.
So Monaco was just one of a number of small principalities and duchies that by luck and good fortune had managed to survive. Others included the duchy of Bouillon, the duchy of Luxembourg, the duchy of Nivernais, the principality of Montbéliard (technically part of the Holy Roman Empire) and the Comtat Venaissin, which was that the part of the Papal States around Avignon.
What changed everything was the French Revolution. During the 1790s all of these small states, including Monaco, were annexed by the revolutionary government. But some of those annexations were later reversed in 1815 by the Congress of Vienna. Bouillon and Luxembourg were given to the Netherlands, while Monaco became a protectorate of the kingdom of Sardinia, with the Grimaldis being restored as the princes.
It is no longer part of Sardinia because in 1861 Sardinia became part of Italy and the Monegasques preferred to do a deal with the French. Sardinia had, in any case, only recently handed the surrounding county of Nice over to the French. A parallel could therefore be made with Luxembourg, which also survived as an insignificant afterthought in the nationalistic upheavals of the nineteenth century.
Nice job on the historical summary (also Arlesian, Toulonese, etc. job! ;)). It would be more accurate to say that the Kingdom of Sardinia swallowed up the rest of the Italian states to become the Kingdom of Italy, but that’s a minor nit to pick. (Remember what V.E.R.D.I. stands for! ;))
Luxembourg, by the way, was for most of the 19th Century in “personal union” under the King of the Netherlands, and treated as an appanage of that country, remaining with it when Belgium split. But (IIRC in 1890) owing to the fact that the Salic Law applied to the Grand Ducal throne but not to the Dutch royal throne, it split off from the Netherlands. (The Salic Law restriction on succession was repealed a few years thereafter when Charlotte was the only lineal heir, but it did operate to keep Wilhelmina from inheriting.)
I thought barons and earls (or counts) were always noble vassals. Have there ever been any sovereign Baronies or Earldoms?
I believe there have been sovereign counts in Spain, France, Germany, and Italy, including the counts of Provence and Barcelona.
And in England, a “count palatine” could exercise certain powers within his county without answering to the king.
Oh, yeah, I forgot:
A County is ruled by a Count.
Or by a sheriff (at least in Britain and the US – and I do know that sheriffs have different roles in the two countries, but they run counties in both countries).