My Lords, in moving the amendment I return to a matter that troubled me both at Second Reading and in Committee, namely the provision in Clause 3 to replace the Royal Marriages Act 1772 with a new requirement that only the first six persons in the line of succession to the Throne will require the monarch’s consent to their marriages. In my view that number is too small, and my amendment would increase it to 12.
The provision to which the clause will apply is much wider than before. Until now only Catholic marriages were specifically barred. Henceforth, consent can be withheld in respect of any religion, or for any other reason that the monarch, in consultation with his or her Ministers, thinks fit. That is the first major, and largely unadvertised, change that the clause makes. The seeking of consent itself is sensible in principle for a host of reasons, but it is the partial relaxation of the bar on Catholics that makes it necessary. To allow those in the line of succession to the Throne to marry Catholics while at the same time leaving in place an absolute ban on Catholics from occupying the Throne sets a collision course that sooner or later could cause trouble for the monarchy.
Clause 3, by implication, acknowledges that and seeks to provide some protection. However, my contention is that it does not provide enough. I am trying to resist the temptation to delve back again into history again, having overindulged in Committee, but the more one considers this Bill and the 1772 Act, the more one realises what a minefield the Government are in danger of straying into. If the list of six now proposed had existed for the seven sons of George III, they would all have been members at some stage, but not all at once. Prince Augustus Frederick, sixth son of George III, and periodically sixth in line to the Throne, would have been in and out of the club three times in his life; yet he still managed to marry twice, both times without consent and both times during what would have been a period of membership of the six; and both marriages were declared void in terms of the 1772 Act. However, he did stay in the line of succession. Two other princes contracted marriages that were also voided by the Act. Three more princes stayed unmarried until middle age.
All of that suggests to me that the 1772 Act had a few unintended consequences, and it was not very effective on the marriage front. But it did serve a useful purpose, because although the royal dukes forfeited their unapproved marriages, they did not forfeit their places in the succession. Despite everything, that helped to maintain stability. The Bill before us does the direct opposite. It turns that around so that unapproved marriages will be allowed to remain in place—however unwise—but the right to the succession is lost. That loss is a substantial constitutional change, with potentially more unintended consequences, especially when linked to the relaxation on royal marriages.
At Second Reading, my noble and learned friend said:
“We retain the tradition of monarchical consent”.—[Official Report, 14/2/2013; col. 783.]
I respectfully suggest to him that he is not so much retaining it as turning it on its head. Before it was a measure confined to marriage to Catholics; now it is marriage to anyone of any religion or for any other unspecified reason. Before the penalty was the voiding of the marriage; now it is the loss of the right to ascend the Throne. These are constitutional changes of import. I do not believe that King George III, even in his angriest and most despairing moments at the behaviour of some of his sons, would have contemplated the extreme option of barring them from the succession. Yet it is done in this Bill, and not a word of explanation for such a change, so far as I could trace, has been offered either in this House or in another place.
Against that background my amendment seems impossibly modest. With these major changes, the future becomes harder to predict. However, what does seem clear is that just as a short list of six would not have been enough in the past, neither will it be enough in the future to protect the Crown from trouble. It is at the future that my amendment is directed.
I invite your Lordships to consider the potential case—a rather frivolous one, many years from now—of an imaginary granddaughter of the monarch, second in line to the Throne, who has a baby. Her first cousin, sixth in line, telephones her and says, “Thrilled about the baby. Do have another one soon so that I can marry that gorgeous Argentinean playboy I met last month in Ibiza”. It is frivolous but feasible. That would not happen if she were number six in a list of 12; and if something similar did happen with the 12th in line, it would be much further from the Throne and would have much less impact.
We tend to think of the succession in terms of Kings and Queens who have already reached the Throne, so for the most part it all looks relatively orderly and stable, looking back over the past couple of centuries. However, the line of succession is quite different. It can change rapidly and repeatedly. It can sometimes be unpredictable and even almost chaotic, as King George III’s experience demonstrated. He and Queen Victoria both exemplified the view that large families secured the succession, but there were certainly downsides to that. Now, and perhaps in the future, we tend to see smaller families but with longer life expectancy—several
generations of them in the line of succession, a point made perceptively by the noble Earl, Lord Erroll, in Committee.
In that situation it is not difficult to demonstrate that all six places requiring marital consent can be filled by the heir apparent and his or her own children and grandchildren. That leaves all of the heir apparent’s siblings and their children outwith the ambit of marital consent. Can it be right that by the time they reach marrying age some of the reigning sovereign’s own children might not be covered by the terms of this Bill?
My noble and learned friend also said at Second Reading that he wanted to limit the monarchical consent,
“to the people who could feasibly assume the Throne”.—[Official Report, 14/2/2013; col. 783.]
So do I, but I ask him: is it not feasible that the siblings of the heir apparent might also, in some circumstances, assume the Throne? Should we not provide for that?
If some tragedy should befall the heir apparent’s family—and here I am giving a far from frivolous example —attention would turn to the monarch’s other children. Who could say how many of them or their children, beyond the reach of this Bill, may by then be married to Catholics and raising Catholic children or married to people of any other religion that is deemed unacceptable? That is when the line of succession would start jumping further out, and the further out it goes, the bumpier it gets and the more difficult it may become, after possible en bloc disqualifications, to find potential heirs who could meet the terms and obligations of a potential heir to the Throne.
My noble and learned friend accused me in Committee of positing a “catastrophic but remote hypothetical” event. However, I simply do not accept that. Nor do I accept that it is necessary or appropriate for me to spell out all the myriad risks and dangers that can and might arise in this day and age. We must be realistic, and not just hope for the best.
For all its faults, the 1772 Act brought certainty, if not to marriage at least to the succession. Now, with the repeal of that Act and its replacement by the Bill before us, it is the other way round: the marriages are okay but the line of succession is not.
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I believe that when this Bill comes into force we will have much less certainty about the future of the line of succession to the Crown and more of the ingredients for instability. We have a moral duty to provide for that with as much protection as we can contrive. Why take the risk of not doing so?
I set great store by my noble and learned friend’s letter of 7 March to my noble friend Lord Trefgarne concerning the position of the other realms, of which I have procured a copy. On page 4 of the letter he says:
“We have, of course, always been clear that the agreed legislation as introduced into Parliament could be amended as the Bill progresses through its Parliamentary stages, just like any other Bill”.
That, to me, sounds like a step in the right direction. Later on, he says:
“An amendment to the procedure in clause 3 surrounding consent to marriages … would not alter the law of succession and would not concern the Realms”.
I hope that that indicates a chink of light and a willingness to consider amendments with more sympathy than has been apparent thus far during the course of the debates at Second Reading and in Committee. I assume that the relevant procedure in respect of my amendment, to which the letter refers, would be the seeking and obtaining of the consent of the sovereign to a marriage, which would be unaffected by this amendment. Changing six to 12 is a small but practical change. It is a change of degree, not a change of principle. It would leave the Bill not “significantly different”—to quote the Canadian yardstick—from its present form. In that spirit, I beg to move.