A bit of a brouhaha happening with the British Royal Family at the moment, hey? A lot of goings on within the House of Windsor. An old fashioned donnybrook in Old Blighty. A slice of malice in Buckingham Palace.
With everything going on in and around the Royal Family at the moment, what with the Harry & Meghan interview and the almost-definitely-obviously racism that caused the couple to yeet themselves out of the fold, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the Monarchy might be a goose well cooked at present.
With Royal damage control in full swing – treating this whole shebang like a desperate ill that has cursed them so, despite the fact that Prince Andrew is literally right there and has been there the whole time – it’s probably worth noting that, with the flap of a couple of wings on a couple of butterflies a few hundred years back, the actual English monarch could well have been (and could still be) some bloke who lives in rural Victoria. Meaning all this pithy to-ing and fro-ing currently cramming up the press could’ve been somehow avoided.
The thing is, the history of the British throne – as is the case with virtually all monarchies – is complex, convoluted, owes a lot to baseless faith, and employs the occasional blind eye towards things like rampant extra-marital rooting and/or incestuous sex-having.
This, on a long enough timeline, leads to multiple claims to the throne of varying legitimacy. And it should shock none of you to learn that the British throne has a lot of those.
While most claims are muddied, somewhat far-fetched, or have long since died out, the most prominent alternative line of succession remains in place to this day. Remarkably enough, that claim states that England’s true monarch is a guy named Simon who lives in Wangaratta, Victoria.
The shortest possible version (it’s a long story), is that Edward IV – who ruled as King from 1471 until 1483 – was not the biological son of Richard Plantagenet, also known as Richard, Duke of York. Therefore when Richard was killed at the Battle of Wakefield in 1460, the House of York’s claim to the Crown passed to Richard’s “legitimate” son George Plantagenet, and then to his brother Edmund Plantagenet upon George’s death.
Following that bloodline and royal claim through the ages to today remarkably puts the Crown upon the head of Simon Abney-Hastings, the 15th Earl of Loudon, and a man who happens to reside in Wangaratta and Melbourne. Abney-Hastings acquired the unusual title of Alternate King upon the passing of his father, Michael Abney-Hastings, in 2012. Under this line of succession, Simon’s grandmother, Barbara Abney-Hastings, would have been monarch for the bulk of the 20th century instead of Queen Elizabeth II.
Michael, and the alternative line of succession, was thrust into the limelight thanks to the 2004 documentary Britain’s Real Monarch, which explored the theory in detail. Michael, for what it’s worth, was a staunch Australian republican and never publicly claimed the title, reportedly finding the whole scenario rather funny.
Of course, there are a handful of caveats to this alternative succession theory. The first being that this claim is merely for the Kingdom of England, which ceased to be in 1707, and not the Kingdom of Great Britain which took its place after England’s political unification with Scotland. Historians have also widely disputed the claims of Edward IV’s illegitimacy, but you can make of that what you will.
Regardless, in times of Royal turmoil it’s absolutely worth remembering that, by the grace of an errant King’s cum, we could well have had Simon from Wangaratta’s face on all our money. And honestly, that’s great.
