But they reserved the right to throw him out "and make some other man who was well able to defend us our King".Contracts should appeal to politicians, especially with the millennium approaching. So why not a contract for Prince Franz? He does a good job, he stays. He does a bad job, and on the power of the Arbroath declaration, the Scots simply get someone else.A German Roman Catholic on the throne of Scotland? Surely the resident Protestant population of Scotland, especially the more militant members of the Orange Order, would object I'm sure they would. But if you have thrown out the Hanoverian impostors, and you want the real royal McCoy (or at least the real Stuart), Franz the First it will have to be.After James II's failed attempt, beginning in 1689, to regain the crown, he died in 1701 His son was James Edward Stuart, the Old Pretender. And his son, Charles Edward Stuart, became the Young Pretender, fondly known as Bonnie Prince Charlie. After his failures to regain the thrones (the 1745 clan rising), the Young Pretender went back to France and later to Italy.He died childless in Rome in 1788, and his younger brother Henry (called Henry IX by faithful Jacobites) succeeded him. Henry, a Roman Catholic cardinal, died in 1807.In his will, the cardinal passed the Stuart claim to the former king of Sardinia, Charles Emmanuel IV.
The right derives from Charles's great- great-grandfather, who was married to Henrietta Stuart, James II's sister.From Charles Emmanuel, a member of the Italian House of Savoy, the Stuart claim passed to his brother Victor, through his daughter Mary Beatrice, to the House of Habsburg-Lorraine. Mary Beatrice's granddaughter married a prince of the Wittelsbach family, then rulers of Bavaria. Although all royal power ended when Bavaria became a republic at the end of World War One, the title is still used by the family.According to Count Christophe Preysing, president of the Administration of the Dukes of Bavaria, "the family does not like talking about this matter of the Jacobite title. The prince does not want to mix himself into British royal problems." Here is clear evidence for the nationalists that this is a sensible man.But if Bonnie Prince Franz is frightened off, deciding (sensibly) to remain in Munich, there is still no royal crisis. If the majority of Scots want to be "citizens, not subjects", the Republic of Scotland it will have to be. And the race for the presidency will be on.Favourites? Surely, only one man stands out.
He has already been a king, and a leader of men - at least on film. He has shown the true nature of his Scottish genes by spending plenty of time abroad playing golf I give you President Sean Connery Arise, King Sean I.. One day - when I was a teenager - I decided to have my personality tested. For weeks I had passed the odd-looking bookshop near Goodge Street Tube station, on London's Tottenham Court Road, which advertised on-the- spot analysis. Perhaps it was the luridly illustrated science-fiction paperbacks in the window, or the insistent manner with which the man in the doorway invited youngsters (always youngsters) to come inside, that put me off. And then, in a fit of self-confidence, I went inside and filled in the interminable questionnaire about holes in my life (none, unfortunately), spiritual emptiness (also absent) and my longing for completeness (incomplete). Someone in the shop took a quick shufti, looked me up and down and bade me farewell.
And thus ended my only brush with the Church of Scientology. Had I been slightly more promising material, I would have been slowly drawn into sessions of self-exploration. Gradually truths (as witnessed by Scientology's founder, L Ron Hubbard, sci-fi author and honorary Venusian) would have been revealed to me. I would have come to know how evil Lord Xenu filled the world with alien Engrams some 75 million years ago, how these can be measured by a machine passing 1.5 volts through your body, how they can then be purged through a mixture of psychobabble and mumbo-jumbo called dianetics. And how giving vast amounts of your time and money to the Church of Scientology can assist the process of becoming a Thetan - one of the elect. I might have been one of the several millions worldwide who subscribe to this nonsense.According to a group of Hollywood writers and actors - including heroes of mine such as Gore Vidal and Dustin Hoffman - I have had a fortunate escape. For had I become an aspirant Thetan, I might then have faced a similar persecution at the hands of the modern German government to that which was experienced by many of my (never-met) Jewish relatives in the Nazi Germany of the Thirties.This alarming charge was to be found in a full-page advertisement, "an open letter to Helmut Kohl", the German Chancellor, in Thursday's edition of the International Herald Tribune "In the 1930s it was the Jews," says the ad. "Today it is the Scientologists." Then, "the world stood by in silence" as "Jews were marginalised, then excluded, then vilified and ultimately subjected to unspeakable horrors" Not any more.