We’ve covered before on Lib Dem Voice the campaign by Lynne Featherstone and others to end the built-in sexism in the rules of Royal succession, whereby men automatically come ahead of women in the line of succession (‘Royal primogeniture’), a cause which has overwhelming public support.
One complication is that our monarch is also the monarch of other countries, which makes changes the rules a matter of both international diplomacy and domestic action. So good news today with David Cameron’s decision to write to 16 Commonwealth leaders about getting the rules changed.
As Lynne Featherstone put it previously about Royal primogeniture – the monarchy is about symbolism, so it should be about the right symobolism and not sexism:
This is a good time to do it – as ridding the system of sexism now won’t immediately alter who gets on the throne – so it isn’t about the personal merits of person A versus person B. But William has a 50% chance of having a girl child first – and we don’t want to be discussing it then!
As with gay marriage, it seems to be once again a case of where Lynne Featherstone leads David Cameron follows – which, as one is Prime Minister and leader of the largest party in the Commons, is rather a good combination when it comes to getting liberal policies enacted 🙂
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3 Comments
the built-in sexism in the rules of Royal succession
There is ageism too: favouring the elder child over the younger. And nepotism: the job always goes to a child of the last person to have it. Why not object to those as well?
Why not object to this being about the royal family instead of third world starvation?
Answer: let’s do what we can to make things better, one problem at a time, instead of hand-wringing about all the things we can’t do anything about today and never actually making things better because we spent all our time brooding.
The “rules” of royal succession are actually more like a mass of incoherent customs. Originally the succession was to males in male-line descent. But with the death of the eldest son of Henry I, there were no more male-line descendants of William the Conqueror, so the rules were changes so that, although the king still had to be male, he could inherit by female-line descent. The precise rules of primogeniture hadn’t quite been sorted out, so Stephen (son of William I’s daughter) and Henry II (son of Henry I’s daughter) became rivals for the throne, and Henry became king while his mother was still alive.
From John to Henry VI, the kingship descended only to males in the male line, but Edward IV took power with a claim based both on primogeniture and on not just one but two descents through females, which certainly played a role in cementing that particular custom. Henry VII based his claim on a different female line — and took the throne even though his mother was still living. Henry VIII preferred to found his claim to the throne on his mother, Edward IV’s eldest daughter, but he was convinced that his daughters could not inherit the throne. When Mary I became queen in 1553, it was in exceptional circumstances (there were absolutely no male claimants to the throne available) and based not on established precedent, but on a special law passed to allow Henry VIII to bequeath the throne to particular people. Elizabeth I succeeded under the same provisions.
The Stuarts took the throne through yet another line, operating through two female descents. When James II was overthrown in 1688, Mary II and William III came to the throne by operation of a special Act, as did Anne. Anne’s cousin Sophia would also have come to the throne by virtue of a special Act, had she not predeceased Anne by a few weeks. It was not until the accession of Victoria in 1837 that a woman came to the throne purely by virtue of her hereditary claim; and Elizabeth II is only the second woman to succeed as such. The precedents were, indeed, so thin on the ground that in 1952 some lawyers were not sure whether the fact that Elizabeth had a younger sister would affect her claim to the crown (as it would if she were making a claim to a barony).
The point is that, rather than this being settled law and tradition, the lawyers have just been making it up as they went along, in the process making radical changes to the succession without necessarily rewriting the patchwork of existing laws. Establishing a well-defined law of succession (preferably one not using ambiguous and archaic language like ‘heirs of the body’) would be something quite new in British law.