THE DYNASTY.
IT is a curious thing that, living under a Monarchy, Englishmen should feel any doubt as to the descent of the Throne; but there can be no question that the genealogist who in the St. James's Gazette of Wednesday published a list of the first seventy-two persons in the succession, is right, and that even among the educated there exists upon the subject a widely diffused error. We ourselves heard it committed at least half-a-dozen times in conversation upon the funeral of the Duke of Clarence, men and women alike asking why, during that ceremonial, the Duke of Fife, who is not Royal, took precedence of the Duke of Edinburgh, who is. The notion seems to be that the Crown descends like a peerage, counting from Queen Victoria ; and that consequently, if Prince George refused to marry, or died childless, the Duke of Edinburgh, as her eldest male descendant after the Prince of Wales, would be the nearest heir. Under that rale, had
it existed, Queen Victoria herself would never have reigned, but the Duke of Cumberland, who did, as it was, carry away the sovereignty in Hanover from its connection of more than a century with the Crown of Great Britain, a change which, strangely enough, considering its immense results, never created among the people even a passing regret, and is now as completely forgotten as if for a century it had not been a governing factor in the politics both of this country and of Europe. The British Crown does not descend to the eldest male survivor of the dynasty, but to the nearest male heir of the last Sovereign, and failing him, to the nearest female heir. That is to say, after the Prince of Wales the heir is Prince George, who will, it is said, be almost immediately created Duke of Kent; and failing him, the heiress is his sister, Princess Louise of Fife, whose representative, her husband, therefore, walked during the funeral procession upon the Prince of Wales's left hand. Next after her comes her daughter, Lady Alexandra Duff, or Princess Alexandra of Fife, whichever she is to be called, the little baby whose birth was hardly noticed by the community, but whose chance of the Throne would now be reckoned by any actuary at a very high price indeed. She may be superseded by any son born to the Duchess of Fife; but at present, failing a single life, that of Prince George, who is just as liable to influenza as any one of the thousands whom that mysterious epidemic is killing every week, she is the heiress of the Throne, the inevitable future Queen of Great Britain and Ireland.
The situation is a singular one, and, as we said a fortnight ago, would amply justify any apparent haste in marrying Prince George ; for though the dynasty does not depend upon his life, there being seventy-two persona alive who descend from Queen Victoria, and therefore from every House which ever occupied the thrones of England and Scotland—for the Queen represents the Bruce as well as the Tudor—his refusal to marry, or death if married without children, would involve a change that would greatly interest not only heralds but historians, and those who believe that every family, like every individual, has a special and definable character of its own. The dynasty would be unchanged, for descent through the mother is as good as descent through the father, and ought, from its greater certainty, to be reckoned better, and Queen Alexandra would still be the direct descendant of Egbert and of the conquering Norman line ; but the House would be changed, and would be, on the side counted by Euro- pean prejudice most important, non-Royal. The Duffs may be as old as the hills, or as British history, but they were nobodies in the sixteenth century, never ennobled by the Scottish Kings, and in the seventeenth century, though they had become great landlords, possessed only an Irish earldom, named not from the Scottish " kingdom " or county, but from some place in Ireland. They have risen as fast as if they had descended from Mrs. Oliphant's " Warlock Lord," and must have possessed a rare and hereditary capacity for accumulation ; but they have done nothing in politics, and would be accounted by heralds such as those who are great in the Court of the Austrian " Caesar," not only not Royal, but scarcely within the limits of the undoubtedly noble. We do not suppose the English people would care one straw about those facts, for it is one of their many peculiarities that they do not care about genealogy at all, that they held the ancient House of Hanover to be German boors, that they do not know where the Guelphs came from, and that the name of Saxe-Coburg is to them as meaningless as if it were Indian or Chinese. The historic continuity which is really important to any dynasty, as linking it with the continuity of the State, would be quite unbroken ; and as for precedent, the ablest and proudest of the British Royal families was in precisely the same position as in the con- tingency supposed the Duffs would be. The Tudors were the heirs of the Plantagenets, and therefore of Egbert and Cerdie ; but they were by the father's side the descendants of a simple gentleman, who never did anything except marry a Queen, and beget one of the strongest races in Christendom, and whose genealogy, though much pains has been spent upon it, remains an obscure problem. The people might even like the change, as getting rid of all the Serenities, always esteemed here like barnacles on some good ship, and making the dynasty really British ; but the Continent would have other thoughts, and the place of the British family for a generation or two, would, in the eyes of governing classes and reigning houses,
sink just a little. No superstition, perhaps, can be more absurd; certainly we know of no argument in its favour; but the nnbrokenness of the French line of Bourbons has sus- tained their rank though not their fortunes, and the great House of Austria became greater in men's eyes when, through the Lorraine marriage, its heirs became the best- known representatives of the great Emperor of the West. Nothing but defeat can alter the real rank of an English Sovereign in the world ; but prejudices die very hard, and we suspect that our own Royal family, if they told the truth, would sympathise with Bourbon and Lorrainer, rather than with the "sensible folk," and that Prince George, as the only man who can keep the Throne of Great Britain within the Saxe-Coburg line, will be married as quickly as etiquettes or his own will may allow.
Would such a change in the dynasty have any effect on the fortunes of the Monarchy ? Very possibly not, for Britain is a veiled Republic, and the character of its standard-bearer should make as little difference to the statesmen who really govern, as the character of the Doge made to the Council of Nobles which for ages governed Venice. One King may cost a little more than another, or give a little more or less trouble than another; but the elected committee which we call the Cabinet, and which, though it monopolises power, has never been named in any Act, always in the last resort controls the Administration and guides the action of the country. But there are two considerations which prevent a reflective man from answering the question with the perfect cocksureness of Macaulay or a modern Radical. One is, that constitutional monarchy seems to require in. Kings a certain contentment with mere rank, a placid readiness to be satisfied with the top place, and the appearance of a grand authority ; and it is a little doubtful if any race but a Royal one will accept any position of the kind. Commoner folk, especially if they have strong heads, have usually ambitions, and powerful as are the withes which our statesmen have twisted for genera- tions, keeping a Tudor bound in them would have more than taxed their skill. The lion would have been seen to spring now and then under the net, until it would have been a preoccupation of the people to calculate if the meshes would permanently hold. Lord Brougham, a shrewd man of the world, thought they would not ; while the late Mr. Bagehot, a much keener brain, thought it quite within the bounds of possibility that an English King, if he only knew how to use his position in silence, and had the necessary ability, might actually rule the State. A Duff dynasty would in all probability be a hard-beaded dynasty, a good deal like the Hohenzollern, and might be a little difficult to keep in golden chains, the pivot of a vast comedy worked for the national good. And then, one can hardly read English history and not see that each House, as it has mounted the Throne, has kept a distinctive character. There is no mistaking a Tudor for a Stuart, or either for a King of the House of Hanover. Each has made, for good or for evil, a separate impression upon English history; and though that impression may in future genera- tions be of a different kind, it is the direct power, not the indirect influence of the Throne, which has passed away. While the Constitution lasts, the man or woman to whom everything must be explained will always have serious weight. There is a force in the kingship, exercised mainly over the imagination, which never entirely wanes ; there are crises when the Sovereign can produce a deadlock, such as the one under which reluctant statesmen abolished the separate Indian Army ; and the character of the Sovereign always affects, and will affect, the distribution of the higher patronage. A Duff dynasty, if it arrives, will, we may be certain, leave its mark on British annals ; and the fact that there should be an appreciable chance—indeed, until Prince George marries a certainty of its arrival—is one of political moment as well as of curious historic interest. We do not know what the Cobnrg dynasty would have been like, for as yet it has never reigned ; but its possible supersession by an insular one cannot be unimportant.
Previous page
