Royal Claimants October 11, 2011
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Modern , trackbackA brief post today as visits from Beachcombing’s parents and his girls’s grandparents are proving a distraction. There is just time though to share with his readers a couple of fabulous photographs that he has dug up. At the head of this page you will find Sigismund Otto Maria Josef Gottfried Henrich Erik Leopold Ferdinand von Habsburg-Lothringen. Sigismund lives in West Lothian (Scotland) with his wife and three children – Leopold, Tatyana and Maximillian – and claims to be the Archduke of Tuscany a hundred and fifty years after the birth of the Kingdom of Italy caused the Archduchy to fall into abeyance.
On reading this Beachcombing feels three strong emotions well up within him. One is admiration for a man who can keep up his family’s claim to the Arduchy a century and a half after it ceased to exist. The second is a curious desire to pay his taxes to the good Sigismund rather than the local Italian government as experienced by Beach in Tuscany today (aaaargh!): not least to fund the Archduke’s extraordinary website. And the third is the sincere hope that the three kids never have to answer for their names in the playgrounds of Scottish state schools.
Beach would love to hear of any other other heirs to thrones and royal lines that have managed to keep up their end of the prestige bargain for at least a century: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
One other promising candidate in the heroic fight against modernity was Michel Roger Lafosse who believed himself to be the last descendant of Bonny Prince Charlie, the eighteenth-century Stuart Pretender. Unfortunately MRL’s claims have been widely criticised, even ridiculed and he was forced to leave Scotland and return to his native Belgium after it was found that he had submitted a false birth certificate. There the ‘former gift shop worker and waiter’ went to live with his mother: one of the saddest sentences that Beachcombing has ever read.
It seems, incidentally, that there is also a potential Yorkist claimant to the English throne. Indeed, this excellent site on British pretenders explains: ‘The Yorkist King Michael is the 14th Earl of Loudoun, and is a scientist at a rice research institute in New South Wales, Australia. He is amused to learn that he has a claim to the English throne – but, alas, he is a republican.’
No pleasing some people…
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14 Oct 2011: Open Sesame: ‘You unaccountably forgot the ‘king’ of France and the Count of Anjou who has the blood of Hugh Capet AND Franco in his veins…’ Thanks OS!
