The Royal marriage machine
Jillian Robertson
Spare a thought for Prince Charles. Already in his late twenties and living in an age when teenagers are almost expected to ignore their parents' wishes as to marriage, he is legally obliged to obtain his mother's permission to marry if he has, in fact, fallen for any of the fresh-faced young ladies with Which he is currently being photographed in the public prints. And legally obliged means legally obliged; should he go ahead without the Queen's permission, the marriage ceremony would be of no effect and would be assumed not to have taken place; any Children would be bastards.
Yet it could be held, in this jubilee year When the House of Windsor seems so visibly to occupy a pinnacle of popularity, that one Of the important forces to shape this family Which the Queen heads with such a sure touch was the very Royal Marriages Act Which holds the Prince of Wales in what Others might consider a cruel and unusual strait-jacket. It was intended, and has acted, as an exercise in monarch-breeding. True, the Queen has a non-Royal mother, but What may have been intended as an attempt to impose a system of what scientists would Fall a system of eugenics has ended, rather, in producing a strong Royal subculture. The Act came about because George III was profoundly disturbed about the general tendency of Princes of the Blood Royal to Mix with non-royal, at times even with quite Plebeian, stock. He accordingly decided. to make the marriages of the Royal Family explicitly a matter-of State rather than of private inclinations. On 17 February, 1772, a Bill was brought into Parliament entitled: .An Act for the better regulating of the future Marriages of the Royal Family.' The Bill was strongly opposed in all stages as despotic and un-English. Although Charles James Fox resigned from the government to attack the Bill, it was forced through. Intended to guarantee the continued purity of the superior caste of royalty and the dignity of the British monarch, the Act made any marriage of a descendant of George II null and void if it took place Without the sovereign's consent. Princesses who married into foreign royal families were exempt. If the sovereign refused consent any royalty over twenty-five could give
a Year's notice to the Privy Council and marry if Parliament made no objection. There was much opposition to the Bill. It '‘'as. criticised for being inhumane, an ■ nfringement of human rights, the embodiment of `German pride' ('The daughters of °that noble families . . . being at present b °ughf only good enough for their whores Nut not for their wives!' wrote the Evening e"); but, most of all — in Lord Holland's
words when he tried to get the Act repealed in 1820 — as `a law hostile to morality.'
The Act also threatened any person assisting in any marriage ceremony or contract with a descendant of George II who had not had royal consent, with the Penalties of Premunire — a punishment involving total 'forfeiture of all goods and estates, imprisonment at the will of the King, and not to be relieved, even if starving.'
The King defended his action by saying that the Wars of the Roses were caused by marriages with the nobility. He wrote to the Duke of Gloucester: 'In any country a prince marrying a subject islooked upon as dishonourable, nay in Germany the children of such a marriage cannot succeed to any territories; but here, where the Crown is but too little respected, it must be big with the greatest mischiefs. Civil wars would by such measures be again coming in this country, those of the Yorks and Lancasters were caused by intermarriages with the nobility . I have children who must know what they have to expect if they could follow so infamous an example.'
The Marriages Act was not the first restriction to be placed on princely matrimony. Already under the 1701 Act of Settlement and the 1689 Bill of Rights, any heir who married a Roman Catholic was automatically disqualified from ever becoming
Sovereign. George of Hanover had become George I of England, not because he was. next in succession alter the death of Queen, Ann but because he was the next in succession who was not a Roman Catholic,
George III's eldest son, the Prince of' Wales, always boasted that he would repeal. his father's Royal Marriages Act when he came to power. He failed to do so because he had the problem of his own secret marriage. The Fitzherbert/Prince of Wales wedding certificate of 1785, now in the Royal Archives, would have made it impossible for the Prince to succeed if it had been valid, as she was a Roman Catholic; and it was only irregular because of the unpopular Royal Marriages Act.
The position remains the same today with the Act of Settlement and the Royal Marriages Act. If Prince Charles were to marry without the Queen's permission not only would the marriage be null and void and any issue illegitimate, but the clergyman or registrar who performed the marriage could have all his possessions confiscated and be thrown into prison. The Act still covers all descendants of George II. The public were reminded of this when Lord Harewood — only a second cousin of the Queen — had to get the Queen's permission when he remarried after a divorce.
George III's thirteen children who reached adulthood resisted the restrictions by having affairs or entering into illegal liaisons instead of marriages. In 1817, when George 11I's only grandchild died, only four of his offspring were married legally although they were all over forty. The British throne was left without a direct heir at a time when the Royal Family, owing to their enormous debts and debauchery, occupied a deplorably low place in public esteem. There were eighteen people in succession to the throne until there was one married with a child.
One newspaper predicted: `In the next twenty-two years there will be nine reigns, two of them female; and that, after the first there will be no reign longer than twentyone months, and two as short as five months . . .' A matrimonial race started. The dukes who had previously only produced one single legitimate child between them, rushed to marry Protestant princesses believing that the first to provide an heir to the throne would have his gambling and other debts paid off by Parliament. And indeed Parliament even offered them increased allowances on a dynastic marriage. In four months there were four marriages. The Duke of Kent, a forty-, one-year-old bachelor who had lived in sin with Madame St Laurent for twenty-seven • years, married the widowed Princess Victoire of Saxe-Coburg.
Twelve months later the future Queen Victoria was born — a direct result of the Royal Marriages Act. So George III's determination succeeded; six marriagemanacled generations and two centuries later, the Queen dominates the caste of world royalty.
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