Tuesday, February 15
James II and VII Stuart, who started this whole mess.
Cardinal O'Brien calls for the end of the pro-Protestant Act of Settlement, which bans Catholics from the British throne. As a Jacobite, I can't help agreeing. As we legitimists all know, the true English king of England descends from the line of Stuart, who were thrown out by a bunch of foreign usurping Germans at the turn of the eighteenth century.
(Checks geneological trees, rustling of paper) Which means that the present ruler of England...mmmmm...take a left through the Savoy family...is...Franz, Duke of Bavaria.
A very old and very foreign German guy.
Never mind.
If you want to get nitpicky, very few of the rulers of that delightfully weird little island have been really English. Prince Charles is half Greek through his father (who was really Danish-cum-German, anyway, don't ask); the Stuarts were Scotsmen, the Tudors were Welsh, the Plantagenets (Peter O'Toole and Katharine Hepburn) were from Hollywood, and I'll let you connect the dots on where William of Normandy was from.
Incidentally, if Franz was king, that would mean his successor would be his niece Sophie, who is married to the hereditary prince of Liechtenstein, the heir apparent to supposedly one of the most Catholic dynasties of Europe. Here's a pic of the happy and handsome couple. As you can see, the Wittelsbach family from which she derives has been very lucky avoiding any apparent visible side-effects of centuries of inbreeding (see, for example, Charles II of Spain, the Bewitched, who couldn't chew his own food). They just tend to go, very romantically, and very tragically, crazy, which makes for much more interesting reading. Considering hubby Prince Alois used to be an accountant, I think the Liechtensteins could use a little romantic insanity in the family.
![[SMMMHDH]](http://www.mgilleland.com/music/smmmhdh.png){kind=small}
