TheRoyal Marriages Act 1772[a] (12 Geo. 3. c. 11) was anact of theParliament of Great Britain which prescribed the conditions under which members of theBritish royal family could contract a validmarriage, in order to guard against marriages that could diminish the status of the royal house. The right ofveto vested in the sovereign by this Act provoked severe adverse criticism at the time of its passage.[2][3]
The whole act was repealed as a result of the 2011Perth Agreement, which came into force on 26 March 2015. Under theSuccession to the Crown Act 2013, the first six people in the line of succession need permission to marry if they and their descendants are to remain in the line of succession.
The act said that no descendant of KingGeorge II, male or female, other than the issue of princesses who had married or might thereafter marry "into foreign families", could marry without the consent of the reigningmonarch, "signified under the great seal and declared in council". That consent was to be set out in the licence and in the register of the marriage, and entered in the books of thePrivy Council. Any marriage contracted without the consent of the monarch was to be null and void.
However, any member of the royal family over the age of 25 who had been refused the sovereign's consent could marry one year after giving notice to the Privy Council of an intention to marry, unless both houses of Parliament expressly declared their disapproval. There was, however, no instance in which the sovereign's consent in Council was formally refused, though there was one where it was sought but the request ignored and others where it was not sought because it was likely to be refused.
The act further made it a crime to perform or participate in anillegal marriage of any member of the royal family. This provision was repealed by theCriminal Law Act 1967.[4]
On 15 December 1785, the King's eldest sonGeorge, Prince of Wales, married privately and in contravention of this Act the twice-widowedMaria Anne Fitzherbert, a practising Catholic, at her house in Park Lane, London, according to the rites of the Church of England. This marriage was invalid under the Act. Had the marriage been valid, it would have excluded the Prince from succession to the throne under the terms of theAct of Settlement 1701, and made his brotherPrince Frederick, Duke of York, the heir-apparent.
On 29 September 1791, the King's second son Prince Frederick, Duke of York, marriedPrincess Frederica Charlotte of Prussia, atCharlottenburg,Berlin, but the ceremony had to be repeated in London on 23 November 1791 as, although consent had been given at thePrivy Council on 28 September, it had proved impossible to obtain the Great Seal in time and doubt had thus been thrown on the legality of the marriage.[8]
On 4 April 1793,Prince Augustus, the sixth son of the King, marriedLady Augusta Murray, in contravention of the Act, first privately and without witnesses, according to the rites of the Church of England at the Hotel Sarmiento, Rome, and again, afterbanns, on 5 December 1793, atSt George's, Hanover Square, London. Both marriages were declared null and void by theCourt of Arches on 14 July 1794, and the two resulting children were subsequently considered illegitimate.[9]
After the death of Lady Augusta Murray,Prince Augustus (now Duke of Sussex) apparently (no contemporary evidence survives) marriedLady Cecilia Buggin, about 2 May 1831, at her house in Great Cumberland Place, London, again in contravention of the Act. On that day she had taken the surname Underwood in lieu of Buggin and who, on 10 April 1840, was createdDuchess of Inverness by Queen Victoria (the Duke being Earl of Inverness). The Queen had thereby, as Lord Melbourne wrote, "recognized the moral and religious effect of whatever has taken place whilst she avoided the legal effects of a legal marriage which was what her Majesty was most anxious to do".[10] Acceptance of the marriage would have meant acceptance of the Duke's earlier marriage and the legitimacy of his two children. However, the couple cohabited and were socially accepted as husband and wife.
On 8 January 1847, the Queen's first cousinPrince George of Cambridge married, by licence of theFaculty Office but in contravention of this Act,Sarah Fairbrother, a pregnant actress with four illegitimate children (two by himself and two by other men), atSt James, Clerkenwell. From about 1858, Fairbrother took the name Mrs FitzGeorge. The marriage was invalid, not amorganatic marriage as many have called it.[11] It is also incorrect to say that Queen Victoria refused to consent to this marriage, as no application was made to her under the Act,[12] it being very apparent that no consent would be given.
AfterCharles Edward, Duke of Albany was deprived of his British titles under theTitles Deprivation Act 1917 due to his German loyalties during World War I, his descendants married without consent from the British monarch (the earliest in 1932[citation needed]). As Charles Edward was a male-line grandson of Queen Victoria, application of the Royal Marriages Act as written renders null and void for the purposes of British law the marriages of his children, despite having been lawfully contracted in Germany.[c]
The only known case in which permission to marry was withheld by the British sovereign despite a formal request under the Royal Marriages Act is that ofPrince George William of Hanover, a German citizen descended from King George III, whose father and grandfather were deprived of their British titles under theTitles Deprivation Act 1917 due to their German loyalties during World War I. On 23 April 1946, George William marriedPrincess Sophie of Greece and Denmark, who was about to become a kinswoman to the British royal family as her brotherPrince Philip was courting the future QueenElizabeth II. Their request for permission from King George VI received no response due to sensitivity over the fact that a state of war still existed between the United Kingdom and Germany,[d] and it was held by British officials at the time that the marriage and its issue would not be legitimate in the United Kingdom despite being legal in Germany.[13]
The Act rendered void any marriage wherever contracted or solemnised in contravention of it. A member of the royal family who contracted a marriage that violated the Act didnot thereby lose his or her place in the line of succession,[7] but the offspring of such a union were madeillegitimate by the voiding of the marriage and thus lost any right to succeed.
The Act applied toCatholics, even though they are ineligible to succeed to the throne.[7] It did not apply to descendants ofSophia of Hanover who are not also descendants of George II, even though they are still eligible to succeed to the throne.
It had been claimed that the marriage ofPrince Augustus had been legal in Ireland and Hanover, but the Committee of Privileges of the House of Lords ruled (in theSussex Peerage Case, 9 July 1844) that the Act incapacitated the descendants of George II from contracting a legal marriage without the consent of the Crown, either within the British dominions or elsewhere.
All Europeanmonarchies, and many non-Europeanrealms, have laws or traditions requiring prior approval of the monarch for members of the reigningdynasty to marry. But Britain's was unusual because it was never modified between its original enactment and its repeal 243 years later, so that itsambit grew rather wide, affecting not only the British royal family, but more distant relatives of the monarch.
In the 1950s, Charles d'Olivier Farran, Lecturer in Constitutional Law at Liverpool University, theorised that the act could no longer apply to anyone living, because all the members of the immediate royal family were descended from British princesses who had married into foreign families. The loophole is due to the act's wording, whereby if a person is, through one line, a descendant of George II subject to the act's restriction, but isalso, separately through another line, a descendant of a British princess married into a foreign family, the exemption for the latter reads as if it trumps the former.[15]
This so-called "Farran exemption" met with wide publicity, but arguments against it were put forward by Clive Parry, Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge,[16] and Farran's interpretation has since been ignored.[17] Consent to marriages in the royal family (including the distantly relatedHouse of Hanover) continued to be sought and granted as if none of the agnatic descendants of George II were also his cognatic descendants.
Parry argued that the "Farran exemption" theory was complicated by the fact that all theProtestant descendants of theElectress Sophia of Hanover, ancestress of the United Kingdom's monarchs since 1714, had been entitled to British citizenship under theSophia Naturalization Act 1705 (if born prior to 1949, when the act was repealed). Thus, some marriages of British princesses tocontinental monarchs and princes were not, in law, marriages to foreigners. For example, the 1947 marriage of Princess Elizabeth toPrince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, by birth a Greek and Danish prince but descended from the Electress Sophia, was a marriage to aBritish subject even if he had not been previouslynaturalised in Britain. This would also mean theoretically, for example, that the present royal family of Norway was bound by the Act, for the marriage ofPrincess Maud, a daughter of KingEdward VII, to the future KingHaakon VII of Norway, was a marriage to a "British subject", since Haakon descended from the Electress Sophia.
In 1936 the statuteHis Majesty's Declaration of Abdication Act 1936 specifically excludedEdward VIII from the provisions of this act upon his abdication, allowing him to marry the divorcée,Wallis Simpson. The wording of the statute also excluded any issue of the marriage both from being subject to the act, and from the succession to the throne; no marriages or succession rights were ultimately affected by this language, as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor had no children.[18]
The legislation in a number of Commonwealth realms repeals the Royal Marriages Act 1772 in its entirety. It was, in the United Kingdom, replaced by theSuccession to the Crown Act 2013, which stipulates a requirement for the first six people in theline of succession to obtain the sovereign's consent before marrying in order to remain eligible. Subsection 3(5) of the new Act also provides that, except for succession purposes, any marriage that would have been void under the original Act "is to be treated as never having been void" if it did not involve any of the first six people in the line of succession at the time of the marriage; royal consent was never sought or denied; "in all the circumstances it was reasonable for the person concerned not to have been aware at the time of the marriage that the Act applied to it"; and no one has acted on the basis that the marriage is void. New Zealand'sRoyal Succession Act 2013 repealed the Royal Marriages Act and provided for royal consent for the first six people in theline of succession to be granted by the monarch in right of the United Kingdom.[21]
TheRegency Act 1830, which provided for a regency in the event thatQueen Victoria inherited the throne before she was eighteen, made it illegal for her to marry without the regent's consent. Her spouse and anyone involved in arranging or conducting the marriage without such consent would be guilty ofhigh treason. This was more serious than the offence created by the Royal Marriages Act 1772, which was equivalent topraemunire. However, the Regency Act 1830 never came into force, as Victoria had already turned 18 a few weeks before becoming queen.
Consents under the act were entered in the Books of the Privy Council but have not been published. In 1857 it became customary to publish them in theLondon Gazette and notices appear of consents given in Council at Courts held on the following dates. Not all consents were there and gaps in the list have been filled by reference to the Warrants for Royal Marriages in the Home Office papers (series HO 124) in The National Archives:[22]
^abThe citation of this act by thisshort title was authorised by section 1 of, and the first schedule to, theShort Titles Act 1896. Due to the repeal of those provisions it is now authorised by section 19(2) of theInterpretation Act 1978.
^According to a Home Office memorandum on the matter, "All the descendants of a British prince require the consent, even if he has become a foreign Sovereign and his family have lived abroad for generations. Thus the Hanoverian Royal Family, who are descended from George III's son, the Duke of Cumberland, who succeeded to the throne of Hanover on the accession of Queen Victoria, have regularly obtained the King's consent to their marriages: in 1937 Princess Frederica of Hanover, great-great granddaughter of George III and 3rd cousin once removed of the King, asked his consent to her wedding with the Crown Prince of Greece. It seems absurd that the King's consent should be obtained for a purely foreign marriage of this kind; one can only suppose that as the marriage would not be valid in the British Dominions without it, the object is to secure the position of the issue as Princes or Princesses of Great Britain (which rank is much valued on the Continent) and possibly to retain their place in the line of succession to the British Throne. Obviously the absence of the Royal Consent required by British law could not affect the validity of a marriage contracted abroad so far as the law of the country of domicile of the parties is concerned. It should be noted here that the Act applies to all marriages in which one of the parties is a descendant of George II, whether contracted in Great Britain or abroad. See as to this the decision of the House of Lords, given after taking the opinion of the Judges, in the Sussex Peerage case (xi Clark and Finelly, 85 ff.)"[13]
^After consultations with theForeign Office,Home Office and King George VI's private secretary,Sir Alan Lascelles, a ciphered telegram dated 18 April 1946 and crafted bySir Albert Napier, permanent secretary to theLord Chancellor, was transmitted from the BritishForeign Office to the Foreign Adviser to the British Commander in Chief at Berlin: "The Duke of Brunswick has formally applied to The King by letter of March 22nd for the consent of His Majesty under the Act 12 Geo. III, cap. 11 to the marriage of his son Prince George William with Princess Sophia Dowager Princess of Hesse. The marriage is understood to be taking place on April 23rd. Please convey to the Duke an informal intimation that in view of the fact that a state of war still exists between Great Britain and Germany, His Majesty is advised that the case is not one in which it is practicable for His consent to be given in the manner contemplated by the Act."[14]
^A. Aspinall, ed.,The later correspondence of George III, vol. 1 (1966) pp. 567–671. The statement in Michel Huberty, Alain Giraud, F. and B. Magdelaine,L'Allemagne Dynastique, vol. 3: Brunswick-Nassau-Schwarzbourg (1981) p. 146, that the first marriage was by procuration (or proxy) is incorrect.
^This marriage, being invalid, was not morganatic as is frequently stated, e.g. by Michael Thornton,Royal Feud (1985) p. 161.
^"Discovery". The National Archives. Retrieved15 June 2016.
^Email from the Privy Council Office dated 11 January 2013: "We do not have any record available as to the omission of the consent in the London Gazette, but I can confirm that consent was given by Her Majesty in Council on 27th March 1981."
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