MONARCHY AND MARRIAGE. T HERE are thousands of readers probably to
whom the announcement of the Princess Stephanie's wedding was the most interesting piece of news which the papers of the day contained. It is not merely that marriage lends even to a telegram the touch of nature that makes us feel that Kings and Queens are of the same blood as ourselves. That source of interest has been a little overdone of late. A public which is assured afresh on the occasion of every Royal wedding that this time it is a union of hearts and not merely of hands, has perforce come to be somewhat sceptical on the point. But the Austrian marriage has a more real claim on our sympathies than this. It is no mere phrase suggested by the necessity of saying some- thing, and the consciousness that, so far as the knowledge of the journalist is concerned, there is nothing to be said. The voluntary character of the union is assured by the fact that the step is for the bride a social descent, that a dowager Crown Princess makes a real sacrifice when she consents to marry a Count of however ancient a family. The Princess Stephanie, we may be sure, has not found things made easy for her all along the matrimonial road. It is true that had a son been born to her by her first marriage the difficulties would have been very much greater, but though the heir to the Crown is not her child, she has been too near the throne to make her action a matter of no importance. When she chose as her second husband an Hungarian noble she must have known that she was bidding farewell to her former state, and have looked to find compensa- tion in the common human affections. In the first instance, the obstacles may well have seemed insur- mountable. Difference of rank and difference of religion promised to do their best to prevent the Princess from carrying out her wish. Difference of religion has disap- peared, for Count Lonyay became a Catholic last year. But difference of rank remained, and Vienna is not the Court in which this difference is most easily got over, though no doubt that Court remembered, as the world does not, a precedent of this century. Marie Louise, the widow of Napoleon, twice married subjects.
From the time, at all events, of the English Royal Marriage Act, opinions in this country have been divided as to the reasonableness of such restrictions as those which it imposes. The argument against them is easily put together. The happiness of two lives is too serious a matter, it is said, to be subjected to the risks which necessarily attend a .marriage dictated by policy and by policy alone. Even if we grant that the sacrifice is inevitable in the case of the heir to the throne, why should it be insisted on in the case of collateral relations ? The fact that a. Royal personage stands next in the suc- cession invests him or her with special responsibilities and special dude's. A Sovereign is not free to consult his own wishes when they clash with his obligations to his people ; and there is much to be said in support of the contention that one of these obligations ie to marry within the Royal caste. But where the succession is remote, and consequently doubtful, where it depends on the removal of more than one inter- vening life, why should not those who stand in that position be free to contract themselves out of it ? Why should the consent of the Sovereign be necessary to make a marriage legal when the parties are only his younger sons, or brothers, or nephews ? There may be very good reasons for compelling them to renounce the contingent right, which, if retained, might end in placing the son or daughter of a subject on the throne. But why should not this renunciation be held to give them the liberty they desire, as we were recently told it was held in Sweden ? They have weighed the sacrifice demanded of them, and they are willing to make it. They have compared the joys of possible sovereignty with the humbler satisfaction of marrying the man or woman they like best, and they have had the bad taste—if you like to call it so—to prefer the latter. Why should the nation deny them any liberty of choice, and insist on regarding them as heirs to a crown which will probably never be theirs, and of which they only ask to be alloWed to divest themselves in advance.
The answer, we imagine, is first that the evils of a dis- puted succession cannot always be avoided by an arrange- ment of this kind. The remote heir of to-day becomes by a series of unexpected deaths the immediate heir of to-morrow. He has, it is true, shut himself out from deriving any advantage from this change. He has exe- cuted the proper instruments, and has no better legal title to the throne of which he is the natural inheritor than any one of his fellow-subjects. Butsupposing that the man who had benefited by his renunciation were unknown or unpopular, while the man who had disclaimed his heritage was well known and well liked, might not the nation be disposed to make light of an arrangement entered into in different conditions and in necessary ignorance of the feelings with which the carrying out of this arrangement would be regarded when it unexpectedly came into operation ? Sup- posing that the heir passed over in this arrangement were without ambition, no great harm might come of this dis- content. But he might not be without ambition. He might have come in the interval to regret the sacrifice he had made, or to chafe against the absurd regulation which had made such a surrender necessary, and then the evils of a disputed succession might be nearer than at first seemed probable. If it is necessary or expedient to place any restrictions on Royal marriages, they cannot be im- posed only on heirs-apparent without constantly incurring dangers precisely similar from the marriages of those who have unexpectedly become heirs-apparent.
There is a second reason of a more general kind against a repeal of the law, whether written or unwritten, which compels marrying members of reigning houses, if not to please the head of their house, at least to confine them- selves to the class of partnere from which he would naturally make his choice. In the modern world monarchy, though it shows no sign of falling into discredit, where the com- mon and obvious precautions are taken to prevent it, stands in constantly increasing need of such precautions. There is no incompatibility between democracy and monarchy, but more and more care has to be taken to prevent any such incompatibility from being suspected. Hereditary suc- cession is accepted as natural and reasonable so long as the family to which the Sovereign belongs is regarded as something separate and apart. If this state of things came to an end, if the barriers which are interposed between Sovereign and subject were broken down and the hereditary King were no further removed from his fellows than an elected President, it would become a very difficult matter to keep the elective principle at a distance. It seems natural and reasonable that the Crown should remain from generation to generation in the same family, so long as that family has a descent and a character distinct from every other in the kingdom. But if this descent and character be taken away—if the Royal house becomes no more than one family among many, some of which may be not inferior in antiquity, while they stand higher in wealth or achievement—what are the chances that the hereditary principle will stand the levelling effect of such a change ? Yet it is only the law which virtually forbids the marriage of a member of the Royal house with a subject that stands in the way of such a result. If such marriages were common, and tended, as they inevitably would tend, to become the rule rather than the exception, there would no longer be any intel- ligible or permanent distinction between King and subject. The commingling of classes which is continually going on in all ranks below Royalty would be extended to Royalty, and the Sovereign would be nothing more than the first in a company of equals. It is scarcely possible that monarchy should safely sustain such a revolution as this, or that a democracy should consent to the perpetual aggrandisement of a. single family when it has been reduced by continual intermarriages to the level of a hundred others.
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