Congrats on the new Archbishop, Poly, BTW.
Couldn’t they just post an opening on “monster.com” ?
I’d just like to say that a bloke that I, on occasion, have downed a couple of beers with once remarked that his ancestors were kings of England long before William arrived.
I worked with a young man who said that his people were descended from Mary Queen of Scots. He said that if he came forward, he would be in the succession for he had a slight webbing between his toes. This webbing was known as “the royal sign” and was a mark of a true king, a sure sign that he had the blood royal.
I just didn’t have the heart to pursue this.
No no no no no!!!
They did NOT “send out” for Victoria! They “sent out” for George I of Hanover, her great-great-great grandfather.
Victoria became Queen upon the death of her uncle, William IV. She was the next in line-because her the children of her father’s older brothers hadn’t survived, and because her own father, the Duke of Kent, died when she was a baby.
Excellent summary, Polycarp!
Of course, Henry VII’s claim was somewhat specious, particularly since his ancestor who descended from John of Gaunt was illegitimate. His claim really came by right of conquest when he defeated (and killed) Richard III at Bosworth Field.
He cemented the claim for his son, Henry VIII, by marrying Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV.
I’d bet dollars to doghnuts that the same could be said of a significant fraction of the population in England. We are, after all, talking about 50+ generations.
Actually, I shouldn’t have narrowed the my comment only to England, especially since I now see that Floater is from Sweden.
For one thing, many of the pre-conquest Kings in the English isles were Scandinavian. For another, 50+ generations can get the ancestry of a LOT of people involved.
I had to go hunt for him after hearing that … The list linked by APB shows Philip as 558th in line for the crown.
The farthest individual listed there is Karin Vogel, 4,583rd in line for the crown. She 29 or 30 years old and (as far as the compiler of the list knows) still single …
My new plan for world conquest:
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Woo and marry Karin.
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Arrange for 4,582 untraceable murders …
Um, I’ll work on step 3 later. Those first two are doozies.
So suppose the IRA bombs Sandringham at Christmas, and a couple of other improbable accidents occur, and Harald of Norway becomes the heir of line to the U.K. throne. What would be the consequences? Would the two countries merge as England and Scotland (and later Ireland, for a while) did? Would he be King of separate thrones the way William III and the Hanoverians were, and more or less the way Elizabeth is Queen of Canada, Australia, and the rest?
Doesn’t the Act of Settlement preclude anyone not descended from Sophia (including her ancestors, I would presume) from ascending the throne? If all of her eligible descendants were to disappear tomorrow, wouldn’t Parliament have to draft new legislation before anyone could legally ascend the throne?
Zev Steinhardt
Yep, it does, Zev. The thing is, “all her descendants” would populate a fair-sized city at this point. Although I vaguely remember that there’s a supplement to the original Act of Settlement that restricts those eligible to the throne to descendants of George II, though why it was adopted or even when, escapes me.
Polycarp, I think you’re thinking of the Royal Marriages Act 1772, which requires that any descendant of George II who is under the age of 25 and wishes to marry requires the consent of the Crown for the marriage to be valid under British law. A descendant who is over 25 years old may marry without the Crown’s permission, provided he/she gives a year’s notice and neither House of Parliament disapproves. (The Act’s requirements don’t apply to the descendants of British princesses who marry into foreign houses.)
The Act doesn’t directly regulate the law of succession, but if someone to whom it applied went ahead and married without complying with the Act, then there would be a question whether any children of the marriage would be legitimate. If they were illegitimate, then they wouldn’t be in the line of succession.
There were 49 people rejected before (i.e. who would of ascended to the throne under previous conditions) George I of Hanover ascended to the British throne.
Polycarp I highly doubt that the UK and Norway would merge just because they had the same successors (it is possible that parliment would exclude him from becoming King of Britain).
Also remember that James I (James VI of Scotland) ascended to the English throne in 1603, the Act of Union where Scotland and England were merged into one kingdom/state didn’t take place until 1707 and James I (VI) himself ruled Scotland and England separately with two courts.
Plus, the Hanover thrones never merged with England-and eventually separated, because Hanover held to the Salic laws and Victoria could not become sovereign.
Er, you’re entirely right about George of Hanover. Of course. Remembered about him about thirty seconds after pushing post in the thread title. Victoria, somehow, simply came to mind first. Thank you all for answering.
Since the title’s mainly honorary, surely there’d be little more practical difficulty if we had a king who didn’t do anything in Norway instead of in england. Like Australia.
Of course, we’d lose a lot of tourist revenue, presumably, so someone’d arrange another successor.
A couple of minor errors in my descent-of-monarchs shopping list above:
James I and VI was the son of Mary I of Scotland (Mary Queen of Scots), who was the daughter of James V and Margaret.
Mary II and William III are referred to by their English numerals, but IIRC they coincidentally had the same numbers in the Scottish sequence – Mary certainly did. I don’t have the Scottish monarch list at hand to doublecheck; I knew the two Jameses’ numberings, and Charles I and II were the first two Charleses in either line.
The “Beaufort” line from whom Henry VII was descended was illegitimate at birth, to be sure – but when John married their mother after their births, they were made legitimate by act of Parliament. Originally this was passed as “saving the right to the Crown,” but Henry VII had that clause dropped after taking the throne, giving him dynastic as well as conquest rights to the throne.
William of Orange was III of England, II of Scotland.
Thanks, Piper. William the Lion was the only previous Scots William, then?
It’s worth noting that not only does the U.K. Parliament have to agree on the succession if they go contrary to the Act of Succession list (the hypotheses to skip over Charles and go straight to William, for example), but they also have to get the consent of Ottawa, Canberra, Wellington, and Secretary-of-State-for-the-Commonwealth-knows-who-else, because the British monarch is also, and separately, the head of state of all “dominion-style” Commonwealth governments.