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The Jacobite succession is the line through which the crown in pretence of England and Scotland and Ireland (France also claimed) has descended since the flight of James II & VII from London at the time of the "Glorious Revolution". James and his Jacobite successors were traditionally toasted as "The King over the Water".
Contents
House of Stuart
The Stuarts who claimed the thrones of England, Scotland, Ireland and France after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 were, with the dates of their claim:
Upon Henry's death, the succession passed to a different house, and none of the Jacobite heirs since has actually claimed the thrones of England and Scotland or incorporated the arms of England and Scotland in their coats-of-arms.
House of Savoy
Charles Emmanuel IV of Sardinia was a descendant of Charles I through his youngest daughter Henrietta Anne. Her daughter Anne Marie of Orléans married Victor Amadeus II of Sardinia, and Charles Emmanuel IV was great-grandson of Queen Anne Marie in the male line.
Future succession after the Duke of Bavaria
The heir presumptive of Franz, Duke of Bavaria, is his younger brother
Family tree
This is a family tree of the Jacobite lineage. The boldface names are successors, and the italic names are in line of succession.
Alternative successions
While Franz of Bavaria is recognized by Jacobites as the Stuart heir, in his book The Highland Clans, Iain Moncreiffe of that Ilk claimed that Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom "is the lawful Jacobite sovereign of this realm". Moncreiffe made the following argument:
... by the fourteenth century it had become common law (in both England and Scotland) that a person who was not born in the liegeance of the Sovereign, nor naturalised, could not have the capacity to succeed as an heir .... In Scotland, this law was modified in favour of the French from the sixteenth century, but was otherwise rigorously applied until the Whig Revolution of 1688, after which it was gradually done away with by the mid-nineteenth century. It was precisely because of this law that Queen Anne found it necessary to pass a special Act of Parliament naturalising all alien-born potential royal heirs under her Act of Settlement of the throne. But, of course, from the Jacobite point of view, no new statute could be passed after 1688 .... The nearest lawful heir of the Cardinal York in 1807 was, in fact, curiously enough, King George III himself, who had been born in England (and therefore in the technical liegance of James VIII).
Under Moncreiffe's theory, however, James VI of Scotland could never have succeeded as James I of England in 1603. This problem, recognized in 1603, had been circumvented at the time of James's accession by the ahistorical assertion that Scotland and England had been "anciently but one" kingdom, and that the succession of the Scottish monarch to the throne of England was a "reuniting" of two parts of a single kingdom, i.e., that Scotland was not really a foreign country – a concept emphasized by James's insistence on the use of the name Great Britain for the united realms of England and Scotland.
It was not common law but a 15th-century statute that restricted the English crown to those in the liegeance of the Sovereign, and that statute was supplanted by the Acts of Succession passed in Henry VIII's reign. Additionally, Jacobites believe that the royal succession is determined by God and by hereditary right, not by Parliament. For instance, most Jacobites recognise Mary, Queen of Scots as having been the rightful Queen of England – a clear violation of the aforementioned law, which in their view is overridden by Mary's hereditary rights (as granddaughter of Margaret Tudor), and the illegitimacy of Elizabeth I.