The third way pines for regeneration, not wholesale replacement. It wants a monarch kind to Muslims and Buddhists, not a soulless republic. The crown should support a given dispensation of authority, not become a lever of possible alteration. The Scottish parliament's appeal on the 1701 act was intended reasonably, as a gesture of atonement. Formal renunciation of this part of the symbol-heritage might encourage a more thorough formalism, and a lettered constitutionalism, the antithesis of royal magic.
Republicanism thrives on precisely that tendency.
It was recently reiterated in the Scotland Act 1998, an element of the New Labour dispensation, therefore, and meant to stabilise it. Decidedly, children should not be allowed to play with matches in this cellar. But play they will. By 2007, the third centenary of union, the SNP will quite probably control the executive, and be seeking to repeal the old treaty. And there will be a growing number of English republicans who agree with them.