LITMIR.BIZ

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Majesty's dissatisfaction was, perhaps, heightened by the recollection that he himself, in early manhood, had also been strongly attracted by the charms of another subject, and had sacrificed his own inclinations to the combined considerations of pride of birth and the interests of his kingdom. And, though there was a manifest difference between the importance of the marriage of the sovereign himself and that of princes who were never likely to become sovereigns, he thought it not unreasonable that he should be empowered to exercise such a general guardianship over the entire family, of which he was the head, as might enable him to control its members in such arrangements, by making his formal sanction indispensable to the validity of any matrimonial alliances which they might desire to contract. A somewhat similar question had been raised in 1717, when George I., having quarrelled with the Prince of Wales (afterward George II.), asserted a claim to control and direct the education of all the Prince's children, and, when they should be of marriageable age, to arrange their marriages. The Prince, on the other hand, insisted on his natural and inalienable right, as their father, to have the entire government of his own offspring, a right which, as he contended, no royal prerogative could be enabled or permitted to override. That question was not, however, brought before Parliament, to which, at that time, the King could, probably, not have trusted for any leanings in his favor; but he referred it, in an informal way, to the Lord Chancellor (Lord Cowper) and the Common-law Judges. They investigated it with great minuteness. A number of precedents were adduced for the marriage and education of the members of the royal family being regulated by the sovereign, beginning with Henry III., who gave his daughter Joan, without her own consent, in marriage to the King of Scotland, and coming down to the preceding century, at the commencement of which the Council of James I. committed the Lady Arabella Stuart and Mr. Seymour to the Tower for contracting a secret marriage without the King's permission, and at the end of which King William exercised the right of selecting a tutor for the Duke of Gloucester, the son of the Princess Anne, without any consultation with the Princess herself; and finally the judges, with only two dissenting voices, expressed their conviction that the King was entitled to the prerogative which he claimed. The case does not, however, seem to have been regularly argued before them; there is no trace of their having been assisted in their deliberations by counsel on either side, and their extra-judicial opinion was clearly destitute of any formal authority;[25] so that it came before Parliament in some degree as a new question.

      But George III. was not of a disposition to allow such matters to remain in doubt, and, in compliance with his desire, a bill was, in 1772, introduced by Lord Rochfort, as Secretary of State, which proposed to enact that no descendants of the late King, being children or grandchildren, and presumptive heirs of the sovereign, male or female, other than the issue of princesses who might be married into foreign families, should be capable of contracting a valid marriage without the previous consent of the reigning sovereign, signified under his sign-manual, and that any marriage contracted without such consent should be null and void. The King or the ministers apparently doubted whether Parliament could be prevailed on to make such a prohibition life-long, and therefore a clause was added which provided that if any prince or princess above the age of twenty-five years should determine to contract a marriage without such consent of the sovereign, he or she might do so on giving twelve months' notice to the Privy Council; and such marriage should be good and valid, unless, before the expiration of the twelve months, both Houses of Parliament should declare their disapproval of the marriage. The concluding clause of the bill made it felony "to presume to solemnize, or to assist, or to be present, at the celebration of any such marriage without such consent being first obtained."

      The bill was stoutly resisted in both Houses at every stage, both on the ground of usage and of general principle. It was positively denied that the "sovereign's right of approving of all marriages in the royal family," which was asserted in the preamble of the bill, was either founded in law, or established by precedent, or warranted by the opinion of the judges. And it was contended that there never had been a time when the possession of royal rank had been considered necessary to qualify any one to become consort of an English prince or princess. It had not even been regarded as a necessary qualification for a queen. Three of the wives of Henry VIII. had been English subjects wholly unconnected with the royal family; nor had the Parliament nor the people in general complained of any one of those marriages; moreover, two of his children, who had in their turn succeeded to the crown, had been the offspring of two of those wives; and in the last century James II., while Duke of York, had married the daughter of an English gentleman; and, though it had not been without notorious reluctance that his royal brother had sanctioned that connection, it was well known that Charles II. himself had proposed to marry the niece of Cardinal Mazarin. In the House of Peers, Lord Camden especially objected to the clause annulling a marriage between persons of full age; and in the Commons, Mr. Dowdeswell, who had been Chancellor of the Exchequer in Lord Rockingham's administration, dwelt with especial vigor on the unreasonableness of the clause which fixed twenty-five as the age before which no prince or princess could marry without the King's consent. "Law, positive law," he argued, "and not the arbitrary will of an individual, should be the only restraint. Men who are by law allowed at twenty-one[26] to be fit for governing the realm may well be supposed capable of choosing and governing a wife."[27] Lord Folkestone condemned with great earnestness the expression in the preamble that the bill was dictated "by the royal concern for the honor and dignity of the crown," as implying a doctrine that an alliance of a subject with a branch of the royal family is dishonorable to the crown—a doctrine which he denounced as "an oblique insult" to the whole people, and which, as such, "the representatives of the people were bound to oppose." And he also objected to the "vindicatory part," as he termed the clause which declared those who might assist, or even be present, at a marriage contracted without the royal permission guilty of felony.[28]

      The ministry, however, had a decided majority in both Houses, and the bill became and remains the law of the land, though fourteen peers, including one bishop, entered a protest against it on nine different grounds, one of which condemned it as "an extension of the royal prerogative for which the great majority of the judges found no authority;" while another, with something of prophetic sagacity, urged that the bill "was pregnant with civil discord and confusion, and had a natural tendency to produce a disputed title to the crown."

      It may be doubted whether the circumstances which had induced George III. to demand such a power as that with which the bill invested him justified its enactment. He was already the father of a family so numerous as to render it highly improbable that either of his brothers or any of their children would ever come to the throne; while, as a previously existing law barred any prince or princess who might marry a Roman Catholic from the succession, the additional restraint imposed by the new statute practically limited their choice to an inconveniently small number of foreign royal houses, many of which, to say the least, are not superior in importance or purity of blood to many of our own nobles.

      

      Nor can it be said to have been successful in accomplishing his Majesty's object. It is notorious that two of his sons, and very generally believed that one of his daughters, married subjects; the Prince of Wales having chosen a wife who was not only inferior in rank and social position to Lady Waldegrave or Mrs. Horton, but was moreover a Roman Catholic; and that another of his sons petitioned more than once for permission to marry an English heiress of ancient family. And our present sovereign may be thought to have pronounced her opinion that the act goes too far, when she gave one of her younger daughters in marriage to a nobleman who, however high in rank, has no royal blood in his veins. The political inconvenience which might arise from the circumstance of the reigning sovereign being connected by near and intimate relationship with a family of his British subjects will, probably, always be thought to render it desirable that some restriction should be placed on the marriage of the heir-apparent; but where the sovereign is blessed with a numerous offspring, there seems no sufficient reason for sending the younger branches of the royal house to seek wives or husbands in foreign countries. And as the precedent set in the case of the Princess Louise has been generally approved, it is probable that in similar

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