WI English Pretender

What if a pretender to the English crown was found and proven?

Say if Edgar the Outlaw did actually manage to have a male-line to the present day that we do not know of. What would happen? I know I for one would immediately declare allegiance to the atheling because of my views as would a number of people. Where would the law stand on such a hypothetical issue?

I know the pod is some 900 years ago however I am just playing on the hypothetical that say someone was discovered and proven to be such. If a moderator want's to move this please do go ahead as I am unaware of the precedent of such.
 
I don't think that anyone would care. And if this guy begin claim crown, British royal family doesn't accept his claims and probably anybody doesn't support him. Or perhaps Nazis can try support him but it wouldn't help anything.

And if male lineage has been exist 900 years before anyone haven't claim crown hardly even current "claimant" would.
 
Anything post either Charles II or William & Mary stumbles on the hurdle that both of those were theoretically invited to assume the Crown by Parliament, so invalidating any previous claims to the throne.
In any case, realistically nowadays the monarch serves at the pleasure of Parliament - if you want to replace the house of Mountbatten-Windsor with somebody else then you need a majority in Parliament for it. Showing a genetic link to a previous monarch isn't going to get you that.
 
What if a pretender to the English crown was found and proven?

Say if Edgar the Outlaw did actually manage to have a male-line to the present day that we do not know of. What would happen? I know I for one would immediately declare allegiance to the atheling because of my views as would a number of people. Where would the law stand on such a hypothetical issue?

I know the pod is some 900 years ago however I am just playing on the hypothetical that say someone was discovered and proven to be such. If a moderator want's to move this please do go ahead as I am unaware of the precedent of such.
1) Well, this is OTL. The Jacobite heir (Duke of Bavaria) would be a pretender to the Kingdom of England if he actually wanted to do that, and there are half a dozen or more branches of the Yorks and Lancasters and Tudors who could theoretically lay a claim to the English Crown. If someone extra came forward, or if one of the current ones said "I'm the rightful King of England, piss off Betty" nobody would give a solitary toss, because of the fact that our throne is in the gift of Parliament; the fact that the Windsors aren't fundamentally bad at their job; the fact that they've been in charge for centuries and are symbolic of our nation and the Queen fixed trucks during WWII and all that; and the fact that nobody has really cared about which King we have since 1936, and even then, Stanley Baldwin didn't go "If you want to marry Wallis we're going to look for a descendant of King Canute, so there". So nothing really changes except for Romantics having an extra totem to worship.

2) Virtually nobody apart from SNP and Plaid Cymru voters want an Independent England. The English Democrats won 0.1% of the vote last time, FYI, and they're the only party which has English Devolution in its manifesto. This "number of people" you mention is probably "about 20" if you take into account how un-English it is to flock to the flag of a Revolution without queueing first.
 
If someone extra came forward, or if one of the current ones said "I'm the rightful King of England, piss off Betty" nobody would give a solitary toss.

I think that you could get people to care, but you'd probably have to turn the process into a Reality TV Show - I'm a Commoner - Get Me Out Of Here!. Get a dozen claimants into one of the colder palaces with a leaky roof and have them face a number of different challenges - visiting a cheese factory and looking interested, riding in a carriage and waving to the crowd, doing a State Opening of Parliament (with Dennis Skinner playing the part of PM). Then you'd have a phone vote to eliminate the candidates - "Who's going to Abdicate Tonight ? You decide !".


Cheers,
Nigel.
 
I think that you could get people to care, but you'd probably have to turn the process into a Reality TV Show - I'm a Commoner - Get Me Out Of Here!. Get a dozen claimants into one of the colder palaces with a leaky roof and have them face a number of different challenges - visiting a cheese factory and looking interested, riding in a carriage and waving to the crowd, doing a State Opening of Parliament (with Dennis Skinner playing the part of PM). Then you'd have a phone vote to eliminate the candidates - "Who's going to Abdicate Tonight ? You decide !".


Cheers,
Nigel.

Nice! :D

As regards the "Where would the law stand?" question which I meant to cover in my last post, the Tudor settlement established that Right of Conquest is a valid way of succeeding to the throne (that is, "possession is nine tenths of the law") so essentially there's no 'pretenders' with a legal right, however well-bred they are, unless they've got a massive army and a bigger sword than the other guy. So in this case, Liz is the only person with a legal right to the throne.

However, some rabid Jacobites claim that this isn't true, and any action of a King or government taken after 1688 are illegitimate and all of the law is as it was because it was signed by he wrong person. If you apply that to Edgar AEtheling, pretty much every law becomes illegitimate, and you have to go by precedent. So in this case, you go back to the system of election by the Witenagemot. Since that body doesn't exist, you'd have to set a new one up, and that would be set up by a law which wasn't signed by the Rightful King With The Sword In The Stone, so would be invalid. So it doesn't really work. And most importantly, under this system of election, there's no legal basis for a hereditary throne (there would have been a clear precedent if it wasn't for the fact that Harold Godwinsson and Cnut and William the Conqueror were all elected by the Witenagemot under various amounts of duress, but as it is, there isn't) and therefore, this heir to the throne would have no actual, legal right to the throne.

Thus making it all just an exercise in Romanticism - not that there's anything wrong with idle Romanticism.
 
Bloodline broken at many points.

Henry VII's claim to the throne was almost non-existent on bloodline alone.
There were lots of better claimants - he married one of them, and cut the heads off a few more.

William IIIs claim was based on being married to a protestant princess, and not much else apart from having a big army.

The Georges were invited in by parliament, on the grounds of being neither catholic nor French.

There was a television programme a while ago that made a good case for Edward IV not being genetically related to his father, and then traced the alternate bloodline to Australia. It was interesting for an hours entertainment, then vanished without trace.
 
Pedantically one could point to the line of Wilgelm le Batard as the legitimate line in that the sole requirement for an English King to be King was to be proclaimed by the Witangemot and they ditched Edgar II in favour of William I and proclaimed him king. Slightly spoiled by a large Norman army outside Westminster and by them rushing in and killing various English doing the proclaiming as they were frightened by the roar of approval and though he was being attacked.

However, despite the assumption by those outside Britain, there are no actual rules for succession these days, nor for many generations. The job goes to whomsoever Parliament wants and continues, by Parliamentary choice, through the direct make line (being changed to be gender free) but if Parliament doesn't want them, it goes to whoever they prefer. There can be no Pretender as it is Parliament, not lineage, that determines the postholder.

BTW, I too want a referendum on English independence. But then I want a European Union that allows for nations to become states within the European Union. The EU has numerous faults but my family has fought in european wars for every generation since the 18th century. Neither I nor my son has had to. The EU makes that normal. Reform it yes (with others, not as a separate whinge) but leave it , no.
 
A counter claim would be that they did that at sword point and that the English crown is stolen property that should be returned to its rightful owner.
 
A counter claim would be that they did that at sword point and that the English crown is stolen property that should be returned to its rightful owner.

Not quite as crude as having an army outside Westminster but that was how Harold Godwinson operated. It was always bad news to cross the Godwinsons.
 
There are a whole list of Candidates on Wikipedia...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_successions_of_the_English_crown
I think the best shot( post 1900) would be for a longer World War I/Great War with George V standing up for his German relations. Which leads to support for a claim by the Duke of Beufort as heir of the House Plantagenet. This could even put them on the throne if Britain wish to dump the "Germans" without becoming a Republic (and likely lead to the Windsor/Sax-Coba-Gothas perhaps still claiming the Crown).
 
I think any claimant to the English crown based on events before the union of the crowns has a serious problem. They may well have a claim on the English (and therefore Welsh and Irish) crown but not on the Scottish Crown.
 

Stolengood

Banned
William IIIs claim was based on being married to a protestant princess, and not much else apart from having a big army.
William III was the son of Mary, Princess Royal, the eldest daughter of Charles I. With James II and his descendants discounted, William was directly in line to the British throne by blood -- even with the Jacobites put in, Billy was still fourth in line.
 
I think any claimant to the English crown based on events before the union of the crowns has a serious problem. They may well have a claim on the English (and therefore Welsh and Irish) crown but not on the Scottish Crown.
Perhaps we need a descendant of king Arthur then, or of someone else who ruled the whole isle. :)
 
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