And instead of Prince Charles waiting to take over from his mother, the daughter of a German homeopath Friederike Thyra Marion Wilhelmine Dorethea von Osten would be in his place.
It shows just how bizarre, how ridiculous, how totally unbelievable it is that in contemporary Australia we cling to a method so mad, so out of touch, and so insulting, that a modern country has to rely on the birth right of a foreigner to determine our head of state.
Some explanation is needed here.
Queen Victoria’s first born child was a girl, Princess Victoria, who married Frederick III of Germany and Prussia and who were the parents of Kaiser William — who was the warmonger responsible for World War 1. The old Queen’s second child became King Edward VII and his son George V, who abandoned his cousin, the Tsar of Russia, his wife and their five children and so was indirectly responsible for their violent murders by Soviet revolutionaries.
Now, it’s debatable if a Princess Victoria in line to succeed her mother as queen would have been permitted to marry a German cousin, but it’s possible the world might have been a different place had she not.
The First World War was presided over by three cousins: William, George and Nicholas. William and George were Victoria’s grandsons, Nicholas was married to her granddaughter.
In Miranda Carter’s brilliant “Three Royal Cousins And the Road to World War I”, she describes the cousins as totally unsuitable to make rational decisions; they destroyed forever the illusions that the royals have close family ties — they had no sense of peace and whatever harmony may have been present was shattered by murder, betrayal and abdication.
It can’t be ignored that the grandparents of our head of state were totally unsuitable to have and rear children; this couple, George and Mary may have suited the Poms, but they had no relevance to Australia. They came here in 1901 as a duke and duchess to name Canberra and quickly got back home. George’s great uncle, Victoria’s son, the first Duke of Edinburgh, was almost assassinated while here and George and Mary’s eldest son, Edward VIII came here as the Prince of Wales and left a string of bastards in his wake.
Frau van Osten’s name appears on a long list of legitimate Protestant heirs, all of whom are eligible to take up residence, in strict succession, in Yarralumla in the event of some royal holocaust — and there’s not a single Australian among them.
Although she has never met the Queen, Frau van Osten and the monarch have a lot in common — not the least of which being one is the head of state of a country foreign to her and the other is (albeit distantly) in line to head a country of which she knows next to nothing.
If all that isn’t mad, inconsistent, unbelievable and insulting I’m yet to know what is.
