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From: Roy Stockdill <>
Subject: OT: Charles I, II (and III?)
Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2000 08:57:43 -0500


Patrick Wallace wrote.....

>>But what is a 'true' line of succession, and where do you start
counting from? Stuarts, Hanoverians and Orange claims only went back
as far as descent from Henry VIII. Before that the Crown went, often
enough, to whoever was strong enough to win it in battle, so what's
illegitimate about its being awarded by Parliament instead, as has
been the implicit rule since 1689?<<

IF you want to stick to a principle of strict legitimate hereditary
succession, then as the entire British monarchy since 1066 has been
descended from William the Bastard of Normandy anyway, isn't this whole
debate a bit irrelevant? The Anglo-Saxons had the right idea - if you must
have a king at all, form a committee (which they called the Witan) and pick
the best man for the job.

How many times have we been stuck with a monarch who was totally useless,
purely because by an accident of birth he happened to be first in line to
succeed his dad/brother/uncle/grandfather? And how many times have we
missed out on a younger brother or sister who would probably have done a
far better job, had they been given the chance? To give a couple of
examples - when poor old George III went doolally and started talking to
trees, wouldn't any one of his umpteen other children have made a far
better regent, and eventually monarch, than the gross and dissolute George
IV. And it has been long forgotten today, but in the 1890s the
heir-presumptive to the throne, after his father the Prince of Wales who
became Edward VII, was a near-mental defective known as Prince Eddy, Duke
of Clarence, who got himself involved in a homosexual brother scandal but
who did the country a favour by dying young (reputedly of syphilis) thus
enabling us eventually to have his younger brother, George V.

The institution of monarchy has been whittled away over the centuries from
the days when the monarch ruled absolutely by so-called divine right and
sheer force of arms, via interim periods in which the monarch became
increasingly answerable to parliament, to the civil war when the monarchy
was abolished altogether, the Restoration in which it was restored but with
much-reduced power, to the present day when the present incumbent is no
more than a rubber-stamper of laws, shaker of hands at garden parties and
waver-in-chief to tourists. The logical final step with any institution
that has long passed its sell-by date is to give it a decent Christian
burial and move on.

Roy Stockdill
Editor, The Journal of One-Name Studies
The Stockdill Family History Society
Web page:- http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/roystock
Web page of the Guild of One-Name Studies:- http://www.one-name.org
”Never ask a man if he comes from Yorkshire. If he does he will tell you.
If he does not, why humiliate him?" - Canon Sydney Smith (scholar and
humorist 1771-1845)

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