Hanoverian Princess barred from the royal succession – shurely shome mishtake?

History is an unpredictable beast: there is no knowing when it may suddenly buck and throw its rider. That is one’s instinctive reaction to the news that a princess has just been removed from the line of succession to the throne, under the terms of the Act of Settlement, for converting to Catholicism. Such sanctions are implemented from time to time – most recently against Lord Nicholas Windsor, previously 27^th in line of succession, in 2001 – but the great historical irony of this exclusion is that the victim is Princess Alexandra of Hanover.

The Act of Settlement, 1701 was designed to divert the royal succession to the House of Hanover, at the expense of senior claimants, and to secure a Hanoverian succession ad infinitum. So, it is somewhat bizarre to see it operating now to exclude a Hanoverian dynast. Princess Alexandra, aged 19, is the daughter of Prince Ernst August of Hanover and Princess Caroline of Monaco whose religion she has now embraced, forfeiting her right to succeed to the British crown. Since she was 444^th in line for the throne in 2001, when a head count was last taken, her life is unlikely to be dramatically affected by this sanction.

The Act of Settlement enlarged upon the anti-Catholic provisions in the Bill of Rights, 1689. That legislation was invalid in constitutional law since it had been passed by the Convention Parliament, an illegal body composed of members of a defunct parliament of Charles II rather than more recently elected MPs loyal to James II, and lacked the authority of the anointed king who alone had the right to summon parliament. The Revolution, however, relied on force to enact bogus laws.

Although the Bill of Rights approved the usurpation of William of Orange and diverted the crown to a Protestant succession, the House of Commons refused to follow the Lords in devising it to the Electress Sophia of Hanover and her heirs. So, the Act of Settlement in 1701 set out to repair that omission. In gracious language it declared excluded from the succession “all and every Person and Persons who… is are or shall be reconciled to or shall hold Communion with the See or Church of Rome or shall profess the Popish Religion or shall marry a Papist”.

Such extreme interference with the legitimacy of the monarchy was anathema to many MPs, despite the pressure put on them. Finally, the Act of Settlement was passed by the wafer-thin majority of one vote (118-117). When it was put into effect on the death of Queen Anne in 1714, it excluded the first 53 legitimate heirs to the throne on grounds of Catholicism and awarded the throne to the 54^th person in line of succession, the Elector George of Hanover, as George I.

So extravagant a distortion of the royal bloodline deprived the monarchy forever of its hereditary mystique and quasi-sacral character; the ‘apostolic succession’ had been broken. In 1903 the Marquis de Ruvigny, an eminent genealogist, calculated that the descendants of the 53 people excluded in 1714 amounted to 6,039 individuals, of whom 858 were then living, so that Edward VII was 859^th in legitimate line of succession to the throne he occupied.

That illustrates the damage inflicted on the monarchy by the Act of Settlement. A convention whereby the legitimate sovereign, by line of descent, is acclaimed or confirmed by parliament may be termed a constitutional monarchy; but a settlement whereby Parliament arbitrarily excludes thousands of legitimate heirs can only be regarded as a crowned republic which, in reality, is what Britain has been since 1688: Disraeli’s ‘Venetian Oligarchy’.

Whenever reform of the anti-Catholic provisions of the Act of Settlement was canvassed it provoked an outcry: the Act of Settlement was the nearest thing Britain had to a written constitution, to tinker with it would unravel the whole skein of constitutional stability, quite unthinkable. The hypocrisy of this self-interested claim was demonstrated in 2011 when David Cameron, in pursuit of a spot of ‘sexual equality’ grandstanding, proposed to alter the royal succession.

With his customary insouciance ‘Dave’, himself a fifth cousin of the Queen (besides being an eighth cousin of Boris Johnson and 13^th cousin of Kim Kardashian whose husband is reportedly close to Donald Trump), despite having made no manifesto commitment and without setting up a preliminary Royal Commission, set out to change the most fundamental aspect of the British constitution, the royal succession, on the back of an envelope.

The pretext for this crude mutilation of tradition was that Britain’s traditional male preference primogeniture law of succession was ‘unfair’ to females. Yet under that supposedly unjust system, since the passing of the Act of Settlement this country has been reigned over by kings for 174 years and by queens for 143 years, which hardly suggests rampant discrimination against women.

Enslaved to gesture politics and ignorant of history and tradition, our MPs failed even to consider the serious practical objection to such a pseudo-reform: that it could precipitate serial changes of dynasty – potentially as many as three in a century – accelerating the deracination of the monarchy from its historical roots and consequently its prestige and contribution to stability and national identity.

The House of Hanover held the crown from 1714 until 1901. In 1837, however, when Victoria inherited the British throne she could not succeed to the crown of Hanover since its inheritance was regulated by Salic Law, so that the Duke of Cumberland became King of Hanover, which separated from the British crown. From 1901 the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, which changed its name to Windsor in 1917, reigned.

If Dave’s Law – the Succession to the Crown Act, 2013 – had been in place in 1901, Queen Victoria would have been succeeded for about six months by her ailing daughter as Victoria II, after which the new King of Great Britain and Emperor of India would have been Kaiser Wilhelm II.

The birth of Prince George has postponed the effects of Cameron’s irresponsible meddling, but in future it may well be that frequent female successions will accelerate changes of dynasty and further distance the monarchy from its roots. The recent fashion for the royal family to intermarry with its subjects – a pitfall mediaeval kings learned to rue – will inevitably reduce its prestige over the long term: there could be no more potent example of Bagehot’s injunction against letting daylight in on magic.

Having rewritten the previously untouchable Act of Settlement to reform an imaginary abuse and given a sop to Catholics by removing the marriage prohibition, Cameron made a mockery of that concession by leaving in place the ban on a Catholic monarch, meaning that children of those marriages, if brought up as Catholics, would be excluded.

The headship of the Church of England is not a credible barrier to a Catholic monarch. The position is not canonical, but purely administrative. The precedent of James II, though not encouraging, proves there is no constitutional objection, other than the Act of Settlement, to a Catholic sovereign. The capricious unpredictability of that legislation is demonstrated by its latest consequence – the exclusion of a Hanoverian princess from the British royal succession.