Imagine this: the House of Stuart somehow struggles to survive in the male line to the time of the late 20th century. as a Royal House with many ties to other royal houses in europe, they live a life or an aristocrat in either Austria, Germany, France, Italy or Spain, (or maybe even outside of Europe) but anyway they live a very comfortable life until the 1990's when an ambitious Charles Stuart, duke of (something) is met with a delegate from the SNP with the offer of being crowned King of the Scots after the SNP wins the referendum on Scottish Independence. and eventually the SNP wins the referendum and crowns Charles Stuart as King of the Scots.
WI a Stuart claims the throne of Scotland under the SNP leadership
- Thread starter Oren_neu_dag
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I doubt politically this would pass muster. The SNP and supporters of Scottish independence span the spectrum from left to far left, and likely only support the monarchy because its there already and will likely to be harder to remove than if they just ignored it. Supporting the Stuart's brings a weird anachronism into play which is pointless and just an added complication. (Whether or not their name is Stuart. The Jacobite claimant will be factually French or German, rather than Scottish. Probably upper class French or German, exactly the kinds of people who independence supporters would turn their nose up at).
Eliphas is right, it's very unlikely anything like our nationalists would go for that. You'd need to get the hypothetical Stuart(s) into play decades before the Scottish Assembly is created, so they have time to be embedded into Scottish nationalism and have the right accent.
If the Stuarts are hanging out in Germany, Austria, or Italy, you could kick in your second POD by having a sufficiently young & handsome Stuart return to Scotland on the eve of WW1/2. That ties them into a very patriotic time and means their children & grandchildren will grow up with upper-class Scottish accents. This could potentially butterfly the Scottish Assembly into being set up in the late 70s by swinging the Callaghan-era referendum towards Aye; that could get you Scottish independence by the early 90s, if the Thatcher era still takes place and is roughly the same. That's still a bit shaky but that seems to get you your outcome.
Now you just need to explain where this Stuart came from. The easiest seems to be that Charlotte Stuart, his illegitimate daughter, is either reconciled with her father earlier or never leaves and thus her children are publicly known potential heirs.
If the Stuarts are hanging out in Germany, Austria, or Italy, you could kick in your second POD by having a sufficiently young & handsome Stuart return to Scotland on the eve of WW1/2. That ties them into a very patriotic time and means their children & grandchildren will grow up with upper-class Scottish accents. This could potentially butterfly the Scottish Assembly into being set up in the late 70s by swinging the Callaghan-era referendum towards Aye; that could get you Scottish independence by the early 90s, if the Thatcher era still takes place and is roughly the same. That's still a bit shaky but that seems to get you your outcome.
Now you just need to explain where this Stuart came from. The easiest seems to be that Charlotte Stuart, his illegitimate daughter, is either reconciled with her father earlier or never leaves and thus her children are publicly known potential heirs.
The generally recognized Jacobite pretender is Franz Herzog von Bayern, the claimant of the Bavarian throne. While the Wittlesbachs have occasionally used the Royal Stuart tartan, they don't seem particularly interested in relocating.
Franz is childless, so the claim passes to his brother Max Herzog in Bayern, and thence to his brother's oldest daughter, Sophie, Herediary Princess of Liechtenstein.
Because of an unusual marriage in the accepted line of descent (Maria Beatrice di Savoia, the then pretender, married her uncle Francesco IV Duke of Modena) some support a different line of descent, in which the current pretender is the nonagenarian Princess Alicia di Bourbon-Parma.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobite_succession
(There was a hoax pretender in the nineties who claimed to be descended from a legitimate son of Bonnie Prince Charlie, produced by a second marriage that somehow did not get discussed in English-language records, but his claim was eventually proven to be based on forged documents and he left Scotland once he was stripped of British citizenship.)
Franz is childless, so the claim passes to his brother Max Herzog in Bayern, and thence to his brother's oldest daughter, Sophie, Herediary Princess of Liechtenstein.
Because of an unusual marriage in the accepted line of descent (Maria Beatrice di Savoia, the then pretender, married her uncle Francesco IV Duke of Modena) some support a different line of descent, in which the current pretender is the nonagenarian Princess Alicia di Bourbon-Parma.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobite_succession
(There was a hoax pretender in the nineties who claimed to be descended from a legitimate son of Bonnie Prince Charlie, produced by a second marriage that somehow did not get discussed in English-language records, but his claim was eventually proven to be based on forged documents and he left Scotland once he was stripped of British citizenship.)
They'd first have to survive a cage fight with a knife-wielding Princess Anne.
Agree that this would be very difficult to see taking place in a situation similar to the one we have now. SNP politicians are mainly left leaning, many of them likely have doubts about the British monarchy right now. Politicians in the rest of the UK who are just as left wing as many of them, such as Plaid, the Greens, or the left of the Labour party, are broadly republican. They wanted to keep the Queen after independence, but that was in part a political choice in order to avoid losing votes rather than based off of conviction.
The monarchy is popular in the UK, but that is mostly to do with the Queen herself rather than the popularity of the principle. Polls have shown that many British people would be less supportive of it if Charles were on the throne, who is less popular. The idea that offering someone from the continent who is clearly not Scottish or even British the crown would clearly be unpopular with the public. They would likely much rather they stuck with the current Queen instead.
If you want a Stuart restoration, you would likely have to go far back with a PoD which makes Jacobitism deeply instilled within Scottish nationalism, and either makes independence happen far earlier, in the first half of the twentieth century max, in order for it to be an acceptable move to the public. That, or you would need to find a way to rejig the political identity of Scotland so that it becomes particularly rightwing in comparison to the rest of the UK rather than leftwing. And, as others have noted, you would likely need a Stuart who is visibly Scottish, especially in a later independence TL.
The monarchy is popular in the UK, but that is mostly to do with the Queen herself rather than the popularity of the principle. Polls have shown that many British people would be less supportive of it if Charles were on the throne, who is less popular. The idea that offering someone from the continent who is clearly not Scottish or even British the crown would clearly be unpopular with the public. They would likely much rather they stuck with the current Queen instead.
If you want a Stuart restoration, you would likely have to go far back with a PoD which makes Jacobitism deeply instilled within Scottish nationalism, and either makes independence happen far earlier, in the first half of the twentieth century max, in order for it to be an acceptable move to the public. That, or you would need to find a way to rejig the political identity of Scotland so that it becomes particularly rightwing in comparison to the rest of the UK rather than leftwing. And, as others have noted, you would likely need a Stuart who is visibly Scottish, especially in a later independence TL.
And, after Sophie of Liechtenstein, the claim passes to Joseph Wenzel of Liechtenstein.
Joseph Wenzel was born and raised in the United Kingdom. So, in the unlikely event that the SNP did want their own monarchy, Wenzel would be the obvious person to have as the King. (rather than bringing in some elderly German who probably doesn't even speak English)
did i forgot to mention that i'm talking about a descendant in the male line of the House of Stuart. all this talk about jacobitism is meaningless when you have a living and breathing male line descendant of the house of stuart somewhere in europe! just think of this in SNP terms: We don't fucking need an English Queen to rule Scotland, when we can restore a REAL scottish prince to his rightful place in Scotland!
There's just one slight snag with this. By now this putative Stuart claimant will not be Scottish he'll be French, Italian or German. If one of the latter then how much the family were connected to either Mussolini and his Fascists or Hitler and the Nazis will have an effect on how supported he would be in this situation.
Except the SNP membership is at best apathetic to monarchy at all, and even with the name, there's hundreds of years of franco-Italian-German exile in there preventing them from being seen as actually Scottish by your average bloke from Glasgow who judges it by the markers he's accumulated for his whole life in the form of accent, bearing, and football teams of preference.
Well, the OTL Jacobite claimants (Franz Von Bayern/ Wittelsbacher) were internated because of his resistance against the Nazis.
I imagine it more likely for the SNP's message to be "we don't need a fucking monarch. period."
As was mentioned before, it doesn't really matter if the person had some legitimate right to the Scottish throne, he/she would still be perceived as a foreigner and the time of declaring independence and finding some foreigner to fill the throne would just scream anachronism to most people. If you look at monarchy in europe these, they are those that just managed to become part of the culture and not piss off their subjects too much, countries that have gained sovereignty in the past 30 years or changed regime don't really have a tendency to go monarchist.
I guess the hereditary power cliques in some post-Soviet republics like Azerbaijan do not really count.
There have been some post-colonial stabs at monarchy however - all ended poorly AFAIK (not entirely sure about the current status of the former monarchy in Cambodia, to be fair).
Well, there's always the Duke of Buccleuch. You know . . . the descendant of Monmouth.
That's why I mentioned europe. In the case of cambodia, I think the fact you have people alive that still remember the monarchy meant its return after communism was seen as a return to normalcy considering the political void under the UN stewardship.
You do bring up a good point with "hereditary regimes". I think they manage to be palatable in some countries because they have a veneer of democracy that can be sold internally and externally regardless of the truth.
That being said, I can't see this working in scotland mind you.
Why not the Earl of Elgin? He's a descendant of Robert the Bruce.
Buccleuch is a male-line Stuart. Monmouth was the son of Charles and his probably-mistress, supposed wife Lucy Walter.
When Monmouth tried to take the throne, he claimed that Charles and Lucy had been married. Supposedly, during Victoria's reign, the then Duke of Buccleuch presented the marriage certificate to Victoria, then burned it.
Buccleuch has DNA proof that he is a male-line Stuart, having matched Y-chromosome
My favourite Jacobite claimant to the throne is Rupprecht of Bavaria. You know, him. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupprecht,_Crown_Prince_of_Bavaria.
The man who commanded the bit of the German army opposite the BEF for the last half of the first world war. If you want a real AH challenge, try getting him On the throne.
The man who commanded the bit of the German army opposite the BEF for the last half of the first world war. If you want a real AH challenge, try getting him On the throne.
Richard Montagu Douglas Scott is the legitimate Stuart, but his dad was leader of the Scottish Conservative Party, so don't think he'd be popular with the SNP.
here's what i get about the SNP: their disdain to for everything English and London-based, could possibly trump everything else. So, the possibility of a legitimate male-line descendant of the House of Stuart, that moves back to Scotland in the 1920's (right after his benefactors where deposed after ww1), and his great-grandson is now living in Scotland, becomes the SNP's flag bearer for complete separation from england – including its London-based Queen.