Monarchy “under the pressure of well-fanned fanaticism”The original essay was recently published in a Jacobite Forum. The author was kind enough to give his permission to re-publish his thoughts and he “touch[ed] it up just a little bit”. I hope you will find his thoughts as inciting as I do.Stelios Rigopoulos, born in London in 1948, is of mixed Greek (Constantinopolitan - Byzantine?) and English parentage. A lifelong Monarchist and Legitimist, he speaks of the European Vocation or Destiny of the Royal House of Stuart, and a Europe of Legitimate Monarchies, quite different from the Europe of Tyrannical Bureaucracy of the European Union of reluctantly acquiescent Unitary States.What I suppose "N." is trying to say is that with the death of Cardinal KING HENRY IX and the extinction of the Royal House of Stuart in the direct male line, any pretence that the senior heirs of King James VI & I were the "native" legitimate Sovereigns and the very much junior usurping line issuing from Sofie Pfalzgräfin von Simmern, Herzogin von Braunschweig-Lüneburg in Hannover, were the foreign implants by the "grace", rather guile and iniquity, of an illegal assembly calling itself a "parliament", had come to an end and that after a hundred years or so of having been forced on the Three Realms, they had acquired the rights of domicile, so as to be considered "English", "Scottish" or "Irish", rather than German. To use a Greek proverb, "the comb had got to the nits in the hair" and stuck there! I'm very sorry but for a legitimist this sort of logic, or rather hyper-pragmatism of the most facile variety, is nothing more than a web, woven by a very poisonous spider.
Now, I have to confess, that I am truly astonished that a declared republican, like "N." could, in a moment of gullibility, repeat on this Jacobite forum, one of the most cynical ruses of Whig (NOT Hannoverian this time) chicanery. There are times, when the deceits of human invention surpass the temptations of the devil, who must be left with his mouth wide open and gaping at the sheer audacity of ... those who do his work for him! The question is not in fact if the Prince of Orange-Nassau or the four Electors Georg of Hannover could persuade the populace of the British Isles that - abracadabra! - the former were as "English", etc. as the latter (here the Anglican Princess Anne of Denmark made an immediate appeal to the patriotic emotions of the English), but that THEY WERE PROTESTANTS AND DEFENDERS OF THE PROTESTANT RELIGION. That, and that alone, is what mattered. All other criteria are superfluous to the argument.
It is very easy to understand the wrath of Prince Charles Edward Stuart upon learning that his brother Henry had, with the approval of their father, accepted a Cardinal's hat and Holy Orders from the Pope himself. "What would the English think?" (The problem was not the Scots - Presbyterians, Episcopalian Jurors and Non-Jurors and Catholics - nor the Irish, who were regarded by the Westminster regime as lesser mortals - and potential troublemakers -, like the "Colonials" would be later on). His temporary conversion to Anglicanism in September 1752 was motivated solely by the thought of overcoming the "impediment" of his Catholicism, and make himself acceptable to the snooty Protestant Whig establishment. Leading English Catholics, like the Dukes of Norfolk, had after 1715 rushed to conform to the new Hannoverian model and distanced themselves from the Stuarts, even if the latter then still enjoyed official Papal patronage and recognition as the Legitimate Sovereigns of Great Britain and Ireland (Pope Benedict XIV sent a large financial contribution to fund the Jacobite Rising of 1745). But Prince Charles Edward's Anglican conversion was too little, too late and nobody was impressed, least of all the doyen of Oxford Jacobites (and High Tories), Dr. William King. His return to the Church of Rome was motivated, above all, by the need to survive, on the pensions of the Pope and the Most Christian King of France. And yet, from the moment of his succession to the Thrones of his grandfather, KING JAMES II & VII, his staunchest ally was his brother, the Cardinal, who took care to place a crown on his coffin at least, and at last, at his funeral. The least sign of recognition...? So with the demise of the mythical "Bonnie Prince Charlie" and then the death on July 13, 1807 of the Cardinal King, the Stuarts come to an end and the last nail is put in to the history of the Jacobite Movement? This is the Whig version of things, but not the opinion of true Jacobites, whose attention is first and foremost on the person of the King - or Queen - in the legitimate line of succession. Thus, as long as there is a legitimate heir, according to the rules of primogeniture, to the successors of KING JAMES II and VII, deprived, as he was deprived, of his Thrones, in 1689, there is a Jacobite Movement and there are Jacobites.
The "post-Jacobite heresy", which posits an end to Jacobitism, with the end of the direct male line of Royal Stuarts, is not just post-Jacobite but anti-Jacobite. One of my friends in this Jacobite Yahoo! group, a distant cousin of the last two Stuart Kings, has the honesty to say that he is NOT a Jacobite, because he staunchly supports the de facto monarchy of the "House of Windsor". I infinitely prefer such sincerity to the line of argument, which subordinates Jacobitism to other political agendas, as a property of Scottish or Irish or Welsh Nationalism, or English ("Anglo-British") High Toryism. Jacobitism, say the "post-Jacobites", is a historical phenomenon, which no longer has any actual potential or dynamic or validity. It is as dead as the dodo, nor will it be revived like a Jurassic monster. The idea of a Jacobite restoration (and is an actual "restoration" really necessary?) in the person of a Stuart heir, who does not identify primarily with England, or Scotland or Ireland is so unrealistic, or surrealistic, - they say - as to be irrelevant. And so "post-Jacobitism", in order to avoid being overtly "anti-Jacobite", rejecting what it once embraced, falls into the trap of concluding that the inevitable alternatives are to recognise the Hannoverian fait accompli ... or to embrace republicanism.
For "post-Jacobites" of the Hannoverian (I am a "royalist") or semi-Hannoverian (I am a "monarchist") persuasion, the most important factor is that the Sovereign is the symbol of the people or the personification of the Nation, over and above all the volatility of party politics, but especially that the Sovereign is the Defender of the Faith (ah, but which "faith"?) and Supreme Head of the Church of England, as by law established. Thus Anglicanism is in England, what Catholicism is in Spain, Calvinism in the Netherlands, Lutheranism in the Scandinavian Monarchies and Eastern Orthodoxy in the erstwhile Kingdom of the Hellenes. Constitutionally, it is the religion of the majority to which their Constitutional Monarch naturally adheres and must adhere, an application of the doctrine "Cuius regio, eius religio", but in reverse. If the Sovereign or a member of the Royal Family in any of these countries wished to profess a different form of Christianity, immediately a "constitutional problem" arises, which may lead to the royal personage in question being excluded from (the succession to) the Throne, often under the pressure of well-fanned fanaticism, or quite simply the moral indignation of vocal parliamentarians. It is partly to obviate such crises, that marriages with commoners, subjects indeed of the Sovereign, have become increasingly common, and indeed judged by the media in the aforementioned countries, as being preferable, and more in accord with the "democratic" principles, to which "royalty" is now expected to subscribe, with the implicit, and even explicit, threat of the media, "Do what we want, or we'll get rid of you". Clearly, under such conditions, a Monarchy will find itself marginalised, or "virtualised", reduced to an impotent ornamental accessory of a state machine run on precisely the same lines as a republic. The Royal Family will enjoy the status of "celebrities", but nothing more, except for the exorbitant cost of providing them with round-the-clock security, while they dance the night away in the same clubs, that are patronised by the rich and famous of humbler origins, all under the vigilant gaze of the paparazzi.
For "post-Jacobites" who have opted for a republic, their ideal will be a "Social Democracy" of spartan frugality, where the presumed "have nots" will have more than the "haves", because the latter are deemed to have had their fill of privileges and must now learn to do without. The same standards are applied in the religious sphere, and if they are Catholics, then they will tick the little boxes by (their version of) the Schemata of the Second Vatican Council, to see whether the Pope is as infallible as they are, in all their liberal glory. How bothersome that, with the present Holy Father, whom they still call Ratzinger, the Papacy retains all the allure of an absolute monarchy, a Sacra Potestas, reverberating with the centuries of European Christian civilization, unimpeded by the changes of the times. Hopefully, all that will change in the next papacy... Republican "post-Jacobites" outside the sphere of Roman Catholicism are indeed free-wheelers, for whom anything is possible. Was not Prince Charles Edward Stuart the Grand Master of Scottish Masonry, the hereditary chief of the Knights Templar, the mystical Guardian of the Holy Graal, the new Defender of renaiscent Celtic Christianity, purified from Romish excrescences, the last Gaelic Tanist ...? How can any "legitimate heir" fill the void, where so many hopes are placed for the re-establishment of lost ancestral kingdoms?
Boring as it may seem, present-day Jacobites have no political agenda, no programme with which to entice the masses in electoral confrontations. Bearing in mind, that the Legitimate King today is the citizen of a Federal Republic, while tomorrow he may be the Head of State - again after nearly two centuries - of a Sovereign Principality, the political concurrences of the rightful claimant to the Thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland are not so pertinent to the question of his recognition. It is hardly surprising, that not only the present King de jure, but almost all those, male and female, in the entire line of succession to the Thrones, are members of the Catholic Church, discerned also for their fidelity (for example as Knights or Dames of the Sovereign Order of Malta), such exceptions being those born of a mixed Catholic-Orthodox marriage, like the Tsar Simeon II of the Bulgarians, who is Orthodox, though his wife and younger children are Catholics.
Do Jacobites then eschew all participation in politics, in the hope and expectation of a kind of eschatological "second coming"? By no means. Inasmuch as his or her Jacobite conscience permits, since some sort of partial recognition of a de facto situation is perforce implied, it is possible and indeed desirable that individual Jacobites take part in some kind of political involvement or activity within the existing party structures. It is no secret that members of the wider Royal Family in Bavaria are actively involved in the Christian Social Union, the largest party in the (German Republican) State of Bavaria. Members of this Jacobite Yahoo! group, who recognise HIS MAJESTY KING FRANCIS II as their Sovereign, have been candidates in Parliamentary Elections in the "United Kingdom", not, I believe, withholding from their personal profile, their Jacobite convictions. Historically, after 1688, there were Members of both "Houses of Parliament", Tories and anti-Walpole Whigs, who were, in varying degrees, supporters of the exile Stuart Kings.
So beware of the specious argument about the emerging "Englishness" of the Hannoverian usurpers and the diminished appeal of an Italian or German Prince, whose legitimate credentials could not possibly pass the barrier of "British" public opinion. Under the "constitutional" system of the post-1688 pro-mercantilist and anti-bourbonophile inglorious Revolution, the former were retained on the basis of their Protestant identity and the latter excluded, because, quite simply, they were members of a proscribed religion, supposed agents of Papal world domination. From the time of the Hannoverian - i.e. Protestant - imposition (1701) until the end of the Stuart dynasty (1807), approximately a hundred years passed. After a little more than the next hundred years, the Hannoverian usurpers, in whose name the sun was never supposed to set over the "British Empire", confronted a crisis of identity and in the thick of the 1914-1918 War, "self-windsorised" themselves (My God, that must have been painful!) in a doleful attempt to persuade their "subjects" of their pure and unadulterated Englishness, trembling lest their German accent betray their origins and spark off a revolution from which neither the mephistophelean Arthur Bigge (aka "Lord Stamfordham") nor the Archbishop of Canterbury - or the Black and Tans - would be able to save them.
We all know what happened, in 1936, when the brief reign of "Edward Windsor", hitherto the object of popular adulation, the ideal of a very modern prince, so close to the people, came to an abrupt end when he chose to marry an American divorcee (the former, in fact, being more objectionable than the latter). Following the known path into exile in France, he found himself in bonds of mutual admiration with Adolf Hitler. What a paradox then, that certain English and Scottish Monarchists suddenly remembered, when the de facto "British Monarchy" was going through a crisis of institutional morality, that there was still a Jacobite claimant, Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, KING ROBERT I & IV to Jacobites, who had first-hand experience of little Schicklgruber's tyrannical Aryanist theatricality, and was not in the least impressed. Emotions started to rise to English throats, as they recalled Prince Rupert of the Rhine, the quintessential dashing ENGLISH Cavalier and patron of the Hudson Bay Company. So perhaps the Wittelsbachs are not so very foreign after all ...
Stelios Rigopoulos
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