Pretenders: British Isles

Here is a compilation of Pretenders lists associated with the British Isles. I'm not entirely certain why this archipelago has engendered such a wide range of possible thrones-of-pretence, but the fact remains that I have accumulated enough of them to warrant a separate file.

Contains:
England (Mortimer-York), England (Lancastrian), England (Yorkist), England (Legalist), England (Richard III), England (Anglo-Saxon), Great Britain, Isle of Man, Scotland, Wales.

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ENGLAND The following list details the Yorkist succession in the era known today as the "War of the Roses". The Lancastrians usurped the throne in deposing Richard II; his legitimate successor would have been the great-grandson of his uncle Lionel, Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March. Edmund (who spent most of his luckless life fleeing the Lancastrians) left a sister who married back into the Plantagenets before dying in 1412.

ENGLAND - A Lancastrian view The first English list above details seniority within the House of Plantagenet and, guided by English succession laws current at the time, ignores the Lancasterian Branch who actually held the throne 1399-1461, 1470-1471 for the usurpers that they, in fact, were. But, what if they had held on to power in spite of the Yorkists. The study of thrones of pretence can regard this as a perfectly reasonable question, so let us see where it leads...

ENGLAND - A Yorkist rejoinder Much of the muddle in the English succession in the 1480's stems from the problematic nature of Edward IV's abrupt marriage to Elizabeth Woodville. His brother, Richard III, based his claim to the throne on the idea that the marriage was bigamous and thus his nephew "King" Edward V was illegitimate. The Tudors who wrested the Kingdom from Richard needed to see the marriage as legal, since their claims were noticeably bolstered by the wedding of Henry VII to Princess Elizabeth, Edward's older daughter by the Woodville alliance (and how terribly convenient for Henry that Richard had disposed of his two nephews... um, he DID dispose of them, didn't he...?). For Yorkists unreconciled to Tudor rule, regarding the Woodville connection as invalid was a way of denying the Tudors a line through Elizabeth, and creating a line of succession of their own not dependent upon Edward IV's romantic adventurism. These Yorkists could look to Edward, Earl of Warwick, the son of Edward IV's brother George, Duke of Clarence, as a Yorkist claimant. If one follows his line, the Yorkist succession runs:


ENGLAND - A legalist view Study of thrones of pretence normally involve tracing genealogical lines of descent. Even so, acts of law have much to say on the matter as well, as the following list will show. In Henry VIII's Will, which was sanctioned by parliament, Henry directed that if his descendants were to die out, the crown was to pass to the heirs of his younger sister Mary, ignoring the Scottish royal family who descended from Henry's elder sister Margaret. By 1603, all Henry's children were dead, without having managed to produce a single heir between them, and so, in Law (if not in strict passage of genealogic inheritence), the English Crown should have passed to Mary's senior legitimate heir, Lady Anne Stanley, who had married the Baron Chandos of Sudeley. In the event, Elizabeth I suppressed her father's Will and, after a lifetime of alternately dithering or remaining completely silent on the subject of the Succession, gave on her deathbed a shrug which was interpreted by increasingly desperate courtiers in attendence as an assent when asked if King James VI of Scotland, Margaret's heir, ought to succeed her. But if Henry's Will had prevailed... The above list can be regarded as controversial. While under ordinary circumstances, our William III would be regarded as his grandfather's  (George VI) heir, there is a slight stickiness... the 9th Earl - our George VI - divorced his first wife and remarried during her lifetime, and the 10th Earl is descended from the said subsequent marriage. For legitimist Stanleyites, because the above 'rightful monarchs' were not in possession of the throne, no English law passed since 1603 is valid, as the parliaments were not called, and the laws not given the Royal Assent, by the legitimate sovereigns. Under the laws in force in 1603, the 9th Earl's divorce is invalid, and his remarriage during his first wife's lifetime thus null and void. Therefore the legitimist heir to Lady Anne Stanley is Lady Caroline Ogilvy, the daughter of the 9th Earl's first marriage. As it happens, Lady Caroline has a connection to the current Royal Family - she is married to the Hon. James Ogilvy, brother of the late Angus Ogilvy - husband of the Windsor Princess Alexandra.


ENGLAND - The Richard III Society enters the fray... The article just above demonstrates that questions of Pretence reflect not only on lines of genealogical descent, but can also depend on legal interpretation. Here is another potential line, which commences on the assumption that Richard III's claim to the throne was a valid one (i.e. that the children of his brother Edward IV were the products of a bigamous marriage and thus illegitimate). A corollary assumption then is that Richard's brother George, Duke of Clarence, and his offspring, are ineligible owing to George's attainder for treason. The question then becomes, are there any descendents of the York Plantagenets left? It turns out there are - Richard and Edward had several sisters; the second one, Anne (d. 1476) married into the St. Leger family and had a daughter...

ENGLAND - An Anglo-Saxon final word I've been asked a number of times some variant on the question: "Who would be the real heir to the Anglo-Saxons?" I've researched this carefully, and the probable answer is fairly startling. To begin with, no definitive answer is likely to be known - in the more than one thousand years from the time of Anglo-Saxon England to the present day, the various families descended from the Wessex monarchy spawned dozens of lines, many of which mouldered away in obscure settings and may very well have produced heirs and descendents that have gone unnoticed and unrecorded by heralds and genealogists. What follows, then, are the lines I have been able to trace given the records that are available; a due caveat is therefore to be understood. The assumptions this list operates under are also artificial to one degree otr another - one is that I base the list on Egbert of Wessex, the man who revived Wessex in the beginning of the 9th century and laid the very real basis for the Kingdom of England - that proves to be a realistic assumption, however, as you shall see. A far less tenable one is that I base the inheritance of rights on modern English rules of inheritence, which is not particularly Salic at all. But rules of who inherits what change over the centuries, and to apply such rules across the board is probably unwarranted. Still, the journey is an interesting one and, if one can cavil at some of the assumptions made, I will still maintain that what follows is one of the best, if not the best of all, putative claimancies on the legacy of Anglo-Saxon England...

GREAT BRITAIN Here is a list of the Jacobite succession. In 1688, James II was deposed  for attempting to establish Roman Catholicism in Great Britain; he and his heirs maintained a rival court on the continent until the latter half of the 18th century. The Jacobite pretention has been nearly forgotten by now - the current inheritors are also the heirs to Bavaria and, oddly enough, also have a potential claim to the old Crusader state of Jerusalem. It should be pointed out that the details above are not quite the end of the story. Mary III married her uncle, Duke Francis of Modena. All Jacobites accept this marriage as valid, as it was valid within the laws of Sardinia where it was contracted and is therefore recognised in British law. However, it can be insisted that the marriage is invalid in Britain and thereby consider the Jacobite succession from the demise of a putatively incestuous Mary III to be:

GREAT BRITAIN: A Post-Modern monarchy Recently, the British Parliament has, in it's ever-vigilant quest for a newer and more politically correct State, inaugurated drastic and far-reaching changes to the structure of the monarchy. No longer will there be a dynastic succession - instead, the eldest surviving child of the Sovereign shall succeed regardless of gender, religious affiliation, or other potentially impeding attribute. Fair enough, but that immediately invites the question: who is the most senior representative of the most senior line of the descendents of William the Conqueror? (I would have liked to follow this from the beginnings of England, but Saxon genealogical records of the 9th, 10th, and 11th centuries are too fragmentary). It turns out that his eldest child was a daughter who, although she died within his lifetime, left offspring...


ISLE of MAN An island in the Irish Sea, with a complex political and cultural background, being influenced by British, Irish, Norse, Anglo-Normans, and Scots. An independent and then semi-autonomous petty kingdom until almost recent times, the succession here is quite straightforward, and provides an example of what might be thought of as a dormant throne-of-pretence, inasmuch as John III was pressured into renouncing his rights by the British government, and his heirs do not now claim the island. Still, they hold the inheritence, should the question ever arise again...
ISLE of WIGHTAn island lying in front of Southampton Water, the River Test estuary, along the south coast of Britain opposite the Cotentin Peninsula in Normandy.
SCOTLAND The core of this kingdom in the north of Britain emerged in the 9th century, but full unification eluded the Scots until 1034, with the amalgamation of Strathclyde with Scotland proper. In it's origins, the Scottish succession was, like all Celtic nations, an extraordinarily complex and cumbersome system of tanistry involving the weaving of a line of succession back and forth between separate branches of the royal clan, a method which virtually guarenteed chronic civil war and feuding. However, by the end of the 11th century, the idea of primogeniture had taken hold, and thereafter the succession proceeded on a somewhat more regular basis. Which isn't to say there weren't problems along the way... What of the other lines? In the event that my presumption of Cecily Baliol's seniority is not, in fact, accurate, let me here append the descendents of the other two sisters, for completeness sake...

WALES The mountains of Wales have nourished a large number of small states within the Mediaeval era, and never has the region been absolutely unified under a single ruler in that time. Still, Gwynedd, in the north, has usually been the most powerful among them, and it was the last significant state to be annexed by England, in 1283. Here then, is the passing of the Gwynedd inheritence..

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