After the Courtesy of Nations

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It’s fun to imagine how History, with his or her penchant for tricks, must be relishing the announcement at Perth, Australia, where the Commonwealth nations have agreed to cast aside primogeniture and put women on equal status with men in respect of succession to the throne of the British Empire. Not only that. The Commonwealth has agreed that the British monarch, who is the head of the Church of England, be permitted to marry a follower of the Church of Rome. These changes don’t go into effect immediately. They require Parliament to act by changing several laws. Our contributing editor at London, Daniel Johnson, sends us a cable marking the point that this will take time — “as,” he adds, “it should.”

“Though the reforms claim to be about equality,” Mr. Johnson writes us, “they stop short of allowing a Catholic to sit on the throne — because he or she is ‘Supreme Governor’ of the Church of England, which is not in communion with the Catholic Church. So we will still have the anomaly that a monarch can marry a Catholic but not be one him or herself. Not clear what would happen to children in such a mixed marriage, as Catholics are normally allowed to marry non-Catholics only if the children are raised Catholic, but the ban on Catholics being monarchs would presumably also apply to their heirs.”

“Even odder,” cables Mr. Johnson, “is the fact that there has never been a ban on other faiths being monarchs but now, when the rules are spelt out for the benefit of Catholics, there will have to be such a ban: only Anglicans can be king or queen, just as they are becoming a minority. This will inevitably raise the question of having an established church at all. And so the whole unwritten constitution could unravel. We could end up with a much diminished, secularized monarchy or even a republic.”

Then there is the question of what Mr. Johnson calls “might-have beens.” If the law being contemplated were then in effect in recent centuries, the history of the world would have been different. Feature, after all, the fact that England would have been ruled by the German Kaiser without a bullet being fired. For Queen Victoria’s daughter, Princess Victoria, had married the new German empire’s crown prince, known as Frederick, who died after but 100 days as emperor, to be succeeded by her son, William II, known to us as the Kaiser.

When Queen Victoria died in 1901, the Empress Victoria briefly outlived her. So she would under the new rules have inherited the throne of England instead of Edward VII. Hence, on her death, the Kaiser would have inherited the British Empire as well as the German one. This would have made him the most powerful man in the world. There would presumably have been no World War I, and thus also no World War II. Germany would have obtained world domination without the need for a Great War. Unless the British had refused to accept such a dangerous foreigner as their king. Could France or Russia have defied such a Reich? Or would there have been a different war: between America and the Anglo-German Empire?

Finally, Mr. Johnson cables this comment: “If Catholics had not been excluded from the throne and James II or his Stuart descendants had ruled, rather than the Hanoverians, then it is hard to see Britain following the path that led to the triumph of Lockean ideas of religious toleration, constitutional monarchy, parliamentary democracy, and the rule of law, which ultimately made possible the United States constitution. Instead, England might have gone in the direction of France, leading to a second civil war or less than glorious revolution with a French-style terror to follow.”

“None of this means that the present reforms are wrong,” Mr. Johnson says in his telegram, “only that seemingly small changes may have unexpected consequences and that the accumulated baggage of history cannot be cast off lightly.” It’s a point we rather like. Shakespeare once — in “As You Like It” — called primogeniture the “courtesy of nations.” We Americans, who happily decided to choose our head of state by methods other than primogeniture, can ponder all this from the relatively safe distance of our democratic redoubt. So far, America has turned out pretty welll, relatively speaking, which is something else to think about in these trying times.


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