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I'm dipping in and out of watching the live coverage of the death of the Queen of England, currently the coverage of the procession of the queen's body to the cathedral in Edinburgh, and addressing Charles as King. Peace to the woman, she's dead now, and they are no longer claiming rights to my fealty, so let them rule their own lands and good luck to them.
Now, royal coverage brings out the professional royal watchers/specialists in royal affairs for such coverage, and you have to expect an amount of bootlicking and sycophancy. But what strikes me - and maybe this is because I'm born and reared in the Republic of Ireland - is how tilted all this is towards the English audience. Right now they may have a few Scots on, but the coverage by British media is London-based, and for instance - I've heard an English live commenter burbling on as Charles' plane arrives, in an unmistakably RP accent with a posh tinge, about the Royal Standard of Scotland that is flying on the car awaiting to transport him that is "an emphasis on the descent of the king, ultimately back to King Robert the Bruce and the ancient lines of the Picts and Scots".
To which the only possible answer is: my arse it is. The name of the present royal House is Mountbatten-Windsor, because they had to change it from Battenburg due to anti-German sentiment from the First and Second World Wars. But again, this is all slanted towards an English viewership, eliding over the history between Scotland and England, and trying to pretend that no, of course all the other constituent parts of the United Kingdom are every bit as important as England.
Tell me again where he will be conducting his reign from? It's not Edinburgh, that's for sure.
As with this announcement of William now taking on the titles Charles bore: Duke of Cornwall. Prince of Wales. Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles and Prince and Great Steward of Scotland. The titles of conquered nations, assumed and folded into the English rulership. A reminder as to who is the top dog in this "United" Kingdom.
Literally everything on TV is unbelievably London-biased. You've not caught onto anything new. Every other region of England feels this just as keenly as the Scots and Welsh. We are not represented by London either, and programming/advertising that uses its demographics feels just as alien to us. So don't try and divide this along those lines.
The act of the union invited a penniless and embarrassed Scotland, fresh off the back of their failed attempt at colonialism, to put a Scottish King on the throne of England. To the extent that you are moaning about the provenance of the royals, that you skate over this in such a cavalier way is very revealing of the intent of this post, and the particular basket of chips on your shoulder.
As an aside, I often notice this continual reference to the German origin of the royal family comes up a lot from people who would otherwise insist that second-generation immigrants are just as British as those who can trace their lines back hundreds of years. The exception, as ever, only seems to be made for targets of personal dislike.
If Scotland is a conquered nation, a notion that it completely and totally laughable, then we should all be so lucky as to be conquered, and become the beneficiaries of millions and millions of pounds of transfer from our supposed oppressors.
Back her up there, sunshine. It wasn't the Act of Union that put a Scottish king on the throne, that was the Tudors failure to have a male heir that lived long enough to have kids of his own. Due to Elizabeth finally dying without issue, the nearest heir was her first cousin twice removed, James VI of Scotland, who became James I of England, and ruled as James VI and I, uniting the crowns of Scotland and England.
England had often warred with Scotland and constantly tried encroaching on its territory. This was a peaceful annexation, since it was England that was now the seat of monarchy for both nations. A United Kingdom did not formally come into existence, however, until 1707 despite the union of the crowns: those Acts created the United Kingdom of Great Britain.
Ireland was not roped in until the Act of Union of 1801 which created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Your current state of "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" came about as a result of the partition of Ireland
As for the rest of it, I don't care if they're British, German, or Martians, just so long as they acknowledge they have no right (and never had any right, save that of conquest) of claiming sovereignty over my nation. My grandmother was born a subject of Queen Victoria. I was born a citizen of the Republic of Ireland. Let Charles be king of England, and indeed Scotland and Wales (that is up to the Scots and Welsh, if ever they do gain independence, if they want the monarch to be head of state as with the Commonwealth). But he's not king of Ireland, and he damn well is not a descendant of Pictish kings. He'd have better right to claim German territories via his great-great-great-grandfather Albert; after all, the English long maintained romantic claims to territories not theirs (such as France) because a distant ancestor had been a noble there.
King Charles III is actually one of the many descendants of Brian Boru. If we're going by descent, he may actually (I don't know much about royal lineages) have more of a claim to Ireland than he does the Pictish lands.
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