Should the Cambridges' daughter succeed if she's born first? ... Who cares?

Last Wednesday’s session of Prime Minister’s Question brought up one of those questions you do not hear every day but nevertheless still hear with tiresome regularity. The Rt Hon Keith Vaz MP (Lab, Leicester East) asked the Prime Minister, David Cameron, the following question:

“Both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition are on record as supporting gender equality for future royal successions. Will the Prime Minister update the House on the consultation that he and the Deputy Prime Minister are having with other Commonwealth leaders on this issue? Does he agree that it is better that we resolve this matter before rather than after any future royal children are born?”

Oh dear. That old chestnut.

Mr Vaz was no doubt thinking of any future children born to the royal newlyweds, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. Actually, Mr Vaz’s question has been made more prescient by the announcement from Buckingham Palace that the wife of Mr Peter Phillips, son of the Princess Royal, is pregnant with her second child. Mr and Mrs Phillips already have a daughter, Savannah, who is twelfth in the Line of Succession to the Throne (and the thrones of the fifteen other countries of which Her Majesty the Queen is Head of State). If Mrs Phillips is delivered of son, he will become the twelfth in line and displace his elder sister to thirteenth in line. This is because our laws of succession are based on the principle of cognatic, or ‘male-preference’, primogeniture.

Under male-preference primogeniture, while women may inherit, males take preference and a female can only inherit if she has no living brothers (and any deceased brothers have left no surviving legitimate descendants). This is how Queen Elizabeth II succeeded to the throne. Her father, King George VI, had only daughters. Critically, however, as Princess Elizabeth, she was always classified as the ‘Heir Presumptive’, rather than the ‘Heir Apparent’. The difference between the two terms is that the Heir Apparent is the first in line, who cannot be displaced in the succession, whereas the Heir Presumptive is ‘subject to divestiture’. For all the years Princess Elizabeth was her father’s heir, she could have been displaced at any time if her mother had given birth to a son.

In reply to Mr Vaz, the PM confirmed that he has written to the prime ministers of the Commonwealth realms and that the subject would be discussed at the upcoming Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting. While I find this topic fascinating, I cannot help finding it, at the same time, terrifically tedious. It comes up from time to time and produces a few headlines but nothing changes. This suits me down to the ground, as I have grave doubts about the wisdom of tinkering with our current successional rules.

Cognatic primogeniture also governs the successions to the thrones of the kingdoms of Spain and Thailand and also the Principality of Monaco. It was also formerly practiced in the old Kingdom of Portugal before that country abolished its monarchy in 1910. What Mr Vaz is seeking is reform of the Act of Settlement (1701) to change the principle of our succession laws from cognatic primogeniture to one of lineal, or absolute, primogeniture (also known as full-cognatic primogeniture), whereby the oldest surviving heir inherits regardless of gender. The Kingdom of Sweden became the first monarchy in history to adopt this principle in 1980. In so doing, King Carl XVI Gustaf displaced his son and heir, Crown Prince Carl Philip (now known as the Duke of Värmland), in favour of the Crown Prince’s elder sister, Princess Victoria (now the Crown Princess). The kingdoms of the Netherlands, Norway, Belgium and Denmark all followed suit over the next thirty years. The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg was the most recent hereditary monarchy to make the change, earlier this year. The march of time seems to be against those ‘reactionaries’ like myself, who oppose these reforms.

The last time a change was attempted in the United Kingdom was when a Labour peer, Lord Dubs, introduced a Private Member’s Bill in the House of Lords in December 2004 (the Succession to the Crown Bill), drawing on the recommendations of a report by the Fabian Society published the previous year. Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare had made a similar attempt in 1998. As then, Lord Dubs withdrew his Bill in January 2005 when the then Labour government said it would block it, due to the complexity of the legislation and the constitutional questions it would raise. That was over six years ago and I really do not see what has changed since. The subject remains a constitutional minefield. In his letter to his Commonwealth counterparts, Mr Cameron wrote: “We espouse gender equality in all other aspects of life, and it is an anomaly that in the rules relating to the highest public office we continue to enshrine male superiority.” This I find deeply problematic.

At the most basic and fundamental level, this whole argument is just balderdash. Somebody please feel free to explain to me what the point is of these reforms. Firstly, this is not the chairman of a district council we are talking about here. This is the Sovereign. Comparing it to any other public office is feeble-minded. Also, are any of our other public offices hereditary? The UK is a constitutional monarchy. Let us assume, for the purpose of this debate, that we accept the principle of monarchism; namely, the separation of the functions of the Head of State from the Head of Government – a distinction Walter Bagehot termed in his seminal work The English Constitution, as between the ‘Dignified’ and the ‘Efficient’. The Crown is the dignified part, while Parliament and the Cabinet operate as the ‘efficient’ part (well, history has proved him half-right!). To ensure their ability to be ‘dignified’, the Sovereign must be above the hurly-burly of party politics and it is for this reason that the Crown is hereditary and, therefore, not subject to the need to curry favour with various interest groups during periodic elections. Now, I have no particular problem with women succeeding to the throne. We have been blessed in this country in that for the past sixty years we have had a female monarch and She has been an exemplary Head of State. My problem is that this change is unnecessary and illogical.

Herein lies the rub: The rules of succession are discriminatory. They do indeed discriminate against women, this is perfectly true. These same succession laws, however, also discriminate against men. That is, any man who is not a descendant of the House of Windsor. If the succession is restricted to members of a single family, then I really fail to see why anyone outside of that family should give a tinker’s cuss if the rules governing the succession operate male-preference, male exclusivity (i.e., Salic Law) or if it forbids gingers, specifies descendants must have blue eyes or be over 5″11′. Who cares? It is not going to affect you, me or anyone else who does not have the letters H.R.H. in front of their name. So why would our government seriously contemplate expending precious parliamentary time – not to mention all the diplomatic effort of securing the simultaneous agreement of all sixteen realms of which the Queen is Head of State – on making sure that theoretical future royal daughters are not leapfrogged by younger brothers? It seems entirely pointless to me.

As it seems pretty clear to me that if the Line of Succession already discriminates against everyone, picking out individual ‘groups’ that are discriminated against seems fairly redundant. Do Messrs Cameron and Vaz seriously propose that this change would represent some kind of hammer blow for women’s rights? No, of course not. It would be pure tokenism – as, indeed, it is in the six European monarchies I mentioned earlier. It pays lip-service to an egalitarian idea that, in the context of monarchy, is entirely anachronistic.

I am not simply a reactionary naysayer. There would be serious implications to all this. It is not just about the sheer tedious political correctness underpinning these proposals. Changing the succession laws for the Crown would almost certainly have serious repercussions for a range of laws relating to inheritance, including succession to peerages and various landed estates. Moreover, it stands a very real chance of destabilising the Crown itself. The Crown derives its legitimacy in the eyes of the people by the acknowledged place of the Sovereign in the royal lineage. Everything we understand about the genealogies of families is governed by the concept of patrilineal descent (i.e., through the male line). When a woman marries a man, she traditionally takes her husband’s surname and their children bear the same surname to form a new branch of a family tree. By marrying Prince William, Katherine Middleton was co-opted into the House of Windsor. Their children will be Windsors. If the gender roles had been reversed and Prince William had been the Prince of Wales’ daughter rather than his son, and this ‘princess’ had married a chap named Middleton then, in genealogical terms, she would be joining the Middleton family. Her children would be Middletons. If she then succeeded to the throne, we would see a new dynasty in the country – the ‘House of Middleton’.

These dynastic changes do happen. The Queen is, in point of fact, dynastically the last monarch of the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (changed in 1917 to ‘Windsor’ by Her grandfather, King George V, as part of a World War I re-branding exercise designed to appease the prevailing anti-German sentiment in the country). Upon his accession, the Prince of Wales will become the first Sovereign of his father’s dynasty, nominally the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg (quite a mouthful, so I dare say they will keep it as ‘Windsor’ or possibly ‘Mountbatten-Windsor’). The Coburgs were the family of Prince Albert, consort to Queen Victoria, the present Queen’s great-grandmother and immediate predecessor as a queen regnant (that is, a queen reigning in her own right, rather than a queen consort, who is queen purely by dint of being married to a king). Queen Victoria succeeded her uncle, King William IV, after he died without heirs and she was the only child of his younger brother, the Duke of Kent. So, there is precedent. It has happened. Daughters have succeeded when the male line has failed and a new dynasty has been ushered in on the death of the last female dynast of the ancien régime. It seems to me vital, however, that this only happen very infrequently if continuity is to be maintained. Queen Victoria died in 1901 and the Coburgs/Windsors have reigned ever since. Under a fully cognatic succession, this would inevitably happen far more often.

There is also the slightly snobby problem of ‘pedigree’ as well. The Coburgs are the senior branch of the Wettin dynasty, an ancient European line, and the Royal Family of Belgium is also of the House of Coburg (though they too changed their name a few years ago). So are the deposed Royal Family of Bulgaria. When our own Queen’s reign comes to an end, we will have a new Royal House. As his father, the Duke of Edinburgh, was born a Prince of Greece and Denmark, the Prince of Wales is a dynast of the aforementioned House of Glücksburg, part of the Oldenburg dynasty. We will, therefore, share our royal dynasty with the Danes, the Norwegians and the Greeks (though Greece deposed her King in 1973). If the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge do have a daughter and she goes on to succeed as queen regnant and she marries, then her offspring will also form a new dynasty. The House of Bloggs, maybe? This will certainly be the case when Crown Princess Victoria succeeds King Carl Gustaf as Queen of Sweden. She will be the last Swedish monarch of the House of Bernadotte, who has reigned in Sweden for nearly 200 years. Her children will be of the ‘House of Westling’ (the family of her husband, the Duke of Västergötland – a commoner).

We should also be very wary of handing Parliament a precedent that says they can tinker with the succession to amend anything they see as an “anomaly”. Must we concede the point that it is wrong to discriminate against women? Okay, fine. But, if we accept that logic, then we must ask ourselves why is it legitimate that a girl succeeds just because she is ‘older’ than her younger brother. Surely age is an equally subjective criterion? Do we not frown upon ‘ageism’ in our society? Maybe, if we are going to start down this road, we should cut out a lineal succession as well. Why not let the smartest heir succeed? We could get them to sit a test to determine which one was the most suitable. Perhaps a beauty contest might be preferable. We should pick the best looking one. After all, we want our Sovereign to be photogenic, don’t we? Don’t want an ugly person on all those stamps, coins and banknotes. Maybe we are not particularly impressed with any of the children. Why not let a cousin succeed? Why not look outside the Royal Family altogether? Uh oh! Hang on a sec’. What’s happened? Oh dear, we’ve acquired a republic by stealth. Reforms like this are – to use that tired old cliché of ‘Sir Humphrey’ in Yes, Minister! - the “thin-end of the wedge”.

Mr Cameron’s proposals also include a plan to lift the bar on the Sovereign being married to a Roman Catholic (though the Sovereign is still barred from actually being Roman Catholic themselves because of the Sovereign’s role as Supreme Governor of the Church of England) and also to relax the provisions of the Royal Marriages Act (1772), which stipulates that any descendant of King George II must seek the permission of the British monarch before they may legally marriage. This last measure I would support. The 1772 Act was a fractious piece of legislation, borne exclusively out of the frustrations of King George III at what he felt were his brother’s unsuitable marriages (specifically the Duke of Cumberland and the Duke of Gloucester, who has both married commoners). It has become an absurd piece of legislation, not only because royals marrying commoners has now become the norm but because with the passage of time ‘descendants of King George II’ becomes an increasingly ludicrous criterion (including people like Ian Liddell-Grainger MP, a distant member of the Royal Family who appears hundreds of places down the Line of Succession). Mr Cameron is seeking to limit the number of people who have to apply to the Palace for permission to wed. Typical! Rushes in when he ought to hold back and holds back when he to just go the whole hog. I would just repeal the whole Act and be done with it.

The Roman Catholic bit is not so easy. It would be a classic example of short-term thinking. Sure, there is no reason why the Sovereign should not be married to a Catholic. It would not interfere with their duty to the Church of England, assuming they retain their own Anglican faith). I would almost certainly create difficulties later though. While a member of the Royal Family who marries a Catholic could serve as Supreme Governor, the rules of the Roman Catholic Church are very clear that any children of inter-faith marriages must be raised Catholic, unless a special papal dispensation is granted. This happened in the case of the Queen’s cousin, Prince Michael of Kent, who married a Catholic. His children have been raised Anglicans and so retain their place in the Line of Succession. It would be folly to count on the Vatican to dispense such dispensation in every case and, potentially, could lead to a situation where a member of the Royal Family marries a Catholic, either does not receive or fails to request papal dispensation and then all the children resulting from that union would be raised Catholic and barred from the succession. One can only shudder at the prospect of all the children of the monarch being denied the throne. I think the present system, while admittedly discriminatory against Catholics, is ‘cleaner’ in that sense.

To conclude, the Line of Succession is inherently discriminatory. That is how hereditary monarchy works. That is how it is supposed to work. The monarchy has sometimes been described as “the golden thread running through the history of Britain”. The minute we start tugging at the threads of arbitrariness, the entire tapestry is going to unravel before our eyes. It is not as though women cannot be trusted with the throne. We have had many exalted female monarchs. But the British monarchy exists in a unique place in the British consciousness; a curious fuzzy space in our psyche that exists between the modernity and progress we see all around us and those curious notions we remember from yesteryear – continuity and tradition. We should leave this institution alone and not, to use Mr Bagehot’s warning, “let in daylight upon the magic”.