Sprague de Camp's New Anthology

"Yeah."

"Well, either you shall go through the ceremony in a civilized manner, or we will have Kaalund stand beside you as best man, with his handcuff on your wrist, so that should you balk he can apply the necessary stimulation. Would you like a cigar?"

"Thanks," said Godwin and took the proffered smoke; then wished too late that he had spurned the offer in righteous wrath.

"You see," said Gram, puffing, "you Americans take a very cavalier attitude towards sex, like the Eskimos from whom we Greenlanders are partly descended. We, however, look upon things differently. We therefore cannot have our princesses running around and—ah—mating with all and sundry."

"I tell you I never—" began Godwin, but Gram continued:

"I was opposed to Karen's going to California alone for just that reason; but she is an unusually sensible girl and persuaded her father to her way of thinking, so I weakly gave in. And now we must—how do you express it?—pay the devil."

"Even if you make me do this, I won't—I'll—I'll run away and get a divorce at the first chance. You can't keep me locked up the rest of my life."

"I do not believe that will be necessary. There is another possibility that will, I think, reconcile you to your—ah—fate."

"Yeah? It better be good."

"It is. It transpires that you are the beneficiary of the most amazing coincidence in history."

"Well?"

"You are the legitimate heir to the throne of Great Britain."

"Huh? Ga wan, you're loopy!"

"It has been proved, I assure you."

"What's the matter with George XII?"

"He is merely the descendant of the usurping Duke of Normandy, William Fitz-Robert, while you are the heir of Harold Godwinson, otherwise Harold II, the last Saxon king of England."

"You mean the guy who got bumped off at the Battle of—uh—Hastings?"

"The very one. Harold Godwinson's children by his mistress Edith Swanneck being ineligible, you are the oldest legitimate descendant in the male line of his posthumous son by Aldyth, Harold Haroldson."

"Ulp. And you mean you're gonna talk the Limies into kicking out George and putting me in his place?"

"That is the idea."

Godwin tugged at his hair with his free hand. "I never heard of such a crazy idea in my life! I must be in a booby-hatch and you're one of the inmates!"

Gram relighted his cigar. "You shall see. Your accession to the British throne will not be so difficult as you suppose. For one thing the British, like most people, have made a fetish of legitimacy in recent decades. For another, George XII is unpopular for his vices—a thoroughly maladjusted type."

"Wait! Last winter I played a supporting role in Bonnie Prince Charlie. I dunno much about the real history—you know how the script-writers always hash it up—but it was something about a guy who claimed to be the rightful King of England and invaded Scotland to prove it, but got chased out again. They had us running around in kilts and wigs and talking with Scottish accents. Well, why couldn't the descendants of this Charlie guy have something to say about your project?"

"Oh, you mean the Jacobites. The answer is no, for several reasons. The English Parliament decreed that James II, having become a Roman Catholic (this being a time of religious controversies) was ineligible to be king, and the succession was therefore vested in his daughter Mary and her husband Prince William of Orange, a grandson of King Charles I who lost his head. Then when William and Mary died sine prole—"

"What did they die of?"

"Without issue. The crown went to Mary's sister, Anne. In the meantime Parliament had passed the Act of Settlement in 1701, which named as Anne's successor a granddaughter of James I whose husband was Elector of Hanover, and when Anne died in 1714 this woman's son became King George I. The Jacobites claim the line should have gone to James II's son, James Stuart, and then to this man's oldest son, Charles—the fellow in the cinema—and then to Charles's younger brother, Henry of York. Then when Henry died, leaving no more descendants of James II, they should have gone back to the descendants of Charles I through his daughter, Henrietta, who married Duke Philip of Orleans—"

"Stop! You got me dizzy with all these Jameses and Charleses. What happened to the Jacobite claim finally?"

"Oh, nobody has taken it seriously for centuries. It got into the royal house of Sardinia for a while and then into the royal house of Bavaria. Just now the pretender is a young man named Werner von Wittelsbach, a German living here in Greenland."

"Why does he live here?" asked Godwin.

"I arranged that our leading magnate, Thor Thomsen, should offer him a job here he could not afford to refuse, so we could keep an eye on him. And where should he live? The Germans do not want him because he is also the Bavarian pretender, and Bavaria is now under the Austrian crown, and the British will not have him because Jacobitism is high treason by their Act of 1707."