Succession to the Crown Bill

Debate between Baroness Butler-Sloss and Lord Mancroft

Wednesday 13th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Butler-Sloss]

My Lords, I just wanted to ask a rather more general question of the Minister. At the moment civil partnership is not part of this Bill. If the same-sex marriage Bill is passed, will that mean that same-sex couples would also require the consent of the Queen or her successor?

[Lord Mancroft]

My Lords, I am delighted to support my noble friend’s amendment. I start by saying to my noble friend Lord Hamilton that I have not always shared flats with people who are noble and certainly not always with my friends, but that is slightly beside the point. When legislating, we should always adopt the precautionary principle. The amendment before us is not a matter of principle; the principle is in the Bill: that the sovereign should retain consent. The amendment is merely about the practicality of numbers.

My noble friend in moving the amendment talked a bit about the past, about Queen Victoria’s family and George III’s family. I have a faint connection with a 20th-century royal family which, like many of them, no longer has a kingdom. I happen to know that there was some unhappiness in that family and did some research to look at it.

Between 1933 and 1994, which is 61 years and the length of the current sovereign’s reign, there were three generations and three successions in the German royal family, but, during that time, 17 individuals were removed from the line of succession for marital reasons and, in that, seven marriages were removed from the list. They are the only ones whom you can see by doing a little bit of research. Those 17 individuals all had children and grandchildren who would have been affected. So that is an incredibly short period of time and an enormous change, mostly for religious reasons, because that family, too, had difficulties over Catholicism and Protestantism.

It is worth remembering that when this Bill was mooted and was in the newspapers, everybody drew attention to the fact that if it had been passed during Queen Victoria’s reign, her eldest child, Princess Vicky, would have become Queen of England and the Kaiser, whom she married, her consort. The Kaiser would have been King of England and emperor of Germany. The family that I have been talking about would have been our Royal Family in this generation, with their 17 individuals and seven marriages moving on and off the list of six.

There are indeed differences, as my noble friend said, between the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. There has of course been a decrease in mortality, particularly infant mortality—thank God that we have far less of that than they did in those days. However, we have an increase in marriages. A friend of my father once asked him what my sisters did. He said, “They marry, long and hard and often”. Quite a lot of people do that in the 21st century. More and more people have more and more marriages. One of the princes in the German royal family, Crown Prince Wilhelm, an eldest son, was married four times and had goodness knows how many children. That is not very long ago. I hope, and we all pray, that there will not be tragedies in the Royal Family—but there have been. We all know what happened to Lord Mountbatten and his family, not far from the sovereign. We hope that that will not happen, nor that it will be illness or death, but, undoubtedly, there are changes in families. Those 17 individuals were not all direct father-son-grandson in 60 years; many of them were siblings, and those siblings had children and grandchildren.

No one suggests that we go back to the idea of all the descendants of King George II, hundreds of people, having to get their marriages approved, but, under the precautionary principle on which we legislate so often, six seems rather a small number.