Succession to the Crown Bill

Dan Rogerson Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Dan Rogerson (North Cornwall) (LD)]

I did not intervene on my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister on this issue so I will do so now. There are two possible options for the Duchy of Cornwall. One is that it is held by the Crown but does not entirely revert to it, and the revenue is passed on to a female heir. The second is that, as the hon. Gentleman is suggesting, we somehow amend the original charters that established the duchy to allow the heir to hold it in their own right. That would, I think, be a more satisfactory solution given the other constitutional responsibilities of the Duke of Cornwall with regard to the constituency I represent.

[Wayne David]

I suspect that the hon. Gentleman is correct, but if we are to have a package that is watertight and constitutionally thought through, consequences of that type should be addressed as a matter of importance.

A number of Members have referred to the important issue of the relationship between Church and state. According to the Bill, the heir to the throne would now be able to marry a Roman Catholic. It has been suggested that that has implications for the religious upbringing of a royal heir, which might prevent them from being in communion with the Church of England, and then from acceding to the throne. I have been reassured, however, as has the Deputy Prime Minister, that both the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England have expressed confidence in the process that has been outlined.

As the Deputy Prime Minister said, Mr Richard Chapman, the Church of England’s secretary for parliamentary affairs, has written to Members with reference to the removal of the prohibition on the heir from marrying a Catholic, and it is worth quoting him again because it is of enormous significance. He said it is

“a welcome symbolic and practical measure, consistent with respect for the principle of religious liberty. It reflects the sea change in ecumenical relations over recent decades.”

That is extremely important and I hope it will reassure those Members who have expressed concerns.

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[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

It is a great delight to follow the hon. Member for Worcester (Mr Walker). He is a sort of hereditary MP himself, so he knows a little bit about “hereditary”—and we have a few of them around. I was not entirely sure where he was going with the “diamond queen” thing; “diamond geezers” was suggested by my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan).

I wholeheartedly support one of the main principles of the Bill, namely the change in the male preference primogeniture rules that have come to us through common law. We have taken far too long to resolve the issue. Other countries with constitutional monarchies got on with it much earlier: Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands all dealt with it in the 1980s. Indeed, it was much more difficult for Sweden, because at the time the heir to the throne was a boy, Carl Philip, who was ousted from his hereditary status by his older sister Victoria. Sweden took a more courageous decision and we have been rather slow, perhaps because we have felt so confident about our current monarch. So I support the change in the Bill but I do have some worries. A great deal of reference has been made to Pandora’s box, but that is the wrong image to use, because at the bottom of that box was always hope.

The more worrying concern is that when we pull out one of the threads of the constitution, there is a danger of unravelling the whole jumper—if the jumper is indeed made out of threads. I worry because the religion of the monarch in this country depends on a suite of legislation. The Coronation Oath Act 1688 makes it clear in precisely what words the monarch shall accept the throne and what oath they shall make at their coronation. That was reformed in the 20th century and, in fact, Her Majesty the Queen did not use the prescribed oath, as laid down in legislation. We need to address that issue; in the past Parliament has decided what the oath should be, not the monarch.

[Dan Rogerson]

Several hon. Members in the Chamber have examined the issues involved, as have many others, who are busy elsewhere, but does the hon. Gentleman agree that out in the country at large there will be little understanding of them? This is perhaps part of the problem. Our constitutional history is fascinating, but if we had a far more transparent and, dare I say it, written constitution, people might understand more deeply what we are talking about.

[Chris Bryant]

I have always been in favour of a written constitution, but that is not what we are debating. The important job of work that we have to do when we write elements of our constitution into statute is to make sure that they meet any possible eventualities that could come down the road, because we can never imagine precisely what is going to happen. In 1936, we had a crisis because there were no means by which the monarch could abdicate, so we had the odd situation where the monarch announced his abdication and the next day legislation had to be got through the House. As was said earlier, that took only 10 minutes, but none the less we had to make legislation on the hoof.

The Act of Settlement contains two clauses that make different provisions in relation to the monarch. As the hon. Member for 1642 said, section II says that anyone 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”

shall be excluded from the succession. So I raise the genuine point: if someone marries a Roman Catholic in a Catholic church—the Minister said that Her Majesty has been to a Roman Catholic church—it is difficult to see how that person is not then reconciled to the See of Rome. I hope that the Church of England will be reconciled to the See of Rome. The advances we have seen in ecumenism over the years do not just mean that we have rejected the ludicrous prejudice that there was about Catholicism and the belief that somehow or other a Catholic could not be a patriot. We need to go further, and I hope that in the ecumene of all the Churches there will be reconciliation one day. I know that that is the view of the most recent Archbishop of Canterbury and I suspect it is the view of the current one, so it would seem odd if it were not then the view of the monarch. I want to start asking whether we do not need to change all the provisions in relation to the religion of the monarch. As an Anglican, I would have no fear of a Roman Catholic who accepted a series of oaths to protect the Church of England, as established by law—

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[Dan Rogerson (North Cornwall) (LD)]

Like several other Members, I had not planned to speak on Second Reading, but then I thought about some of the issues involving the Duchy of Cornwall. Others have referred to the Duchy of Lancaster and, indeed, to the Duchy of Normandy, which I had not considered but which I believe has a separate status, in that it was not created by a monarch but was held by previous monarchs prior to their accession to the throne of England. I was interested when the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) tempted the usual channels to consider creating a new calendar for the country, as Napoleon did during one of his tenures, but I shall not pursue that issue.

The hon. Members for Caerphilly (Wayne David) and for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil) were proud of the Celtic identity of at least two of the houses that have ruled over England and, in one case, Scotland. We have of course been a multicultural nation: Norman French, Welsh, Scots, and people of German descent have reigned over us successively. Perhaps at some time in the future there will be a dynastic war, following which an Anglo-Saxon will reclaim the throne on which Harold last sat.

I am interested in the religious dimension, which other Members have already explored. On Sunday, after attending mass as a Roman Catholic, I moved to the other side of Bodmin to attend the Anglican christening of my niece. A warm welcome was extended to all of us by the rector of the church of St Petroc, who was keen to inform us that the Norman font had been moved, that it was one of the oldest parts of the church, and that it had escaped the damage done by that great vandal King Henry VIII. I wondered which of the Churches I was delighting in at that point, as the rector seemed so eager to draw attention to something with which I might have been a little more in agreement.

In principle, I am very happy with the proposal in the Bill to update the rules of succession in line with changes in society so that an eldest female child can inherit the throne. The hon. Member for Caerphilly listed countries that had got there before us. If Hanover had got there before us in the 1830s, the history of western Europe might have been different. Had the kingdom of Hanover still been united with the United Kingdom, it might have had all kinds of influences when it came to the unification of Germany.

As one who represents a Cornish constituency, however, I am keen to explore issues relating to the Duchy of Cornwall. The hon. Member for Wyre and Preston North (Mr Wallace), who spoke about the Duchy of Lancaster, said that it was his understanding that the Duchy of Cornwall was recreated whenever there was a male heir, but that is not my understanding. My understanding is that it does not disappear and revert to the Crown in its entirety, but is held by the Crown pending the arrival of a future male heir to the throne. The institution of the Duchy is a continuous organisation, which has been keen to assert its rights on a number of occasions throughout history: its right to the foreshore, for instance, and its right to bona vacantia in Cornwall.

The hon. Member for Wyre and Preston North spoke of the property that is owned. I am not as familiar with the Duchy of Lancaster as he is, but I think that there is a distinction between the rights to property that the Duchy of Cornwall, for example, owns elsewhere in the country as a private estate, and the rights that it has in terms of the territory of Cornwall, which are far deeper. Perhaps at some point I could discuss the issue with the Minister, or, indeed, with my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister.

Those involved in the tin mining industry in Cornwall had their own Parliament, the Stannary Parliament. It was dissolved in 1753, which is not an incredibly long time ago in constitutional terms. The question of who becomes the Duke of Cornwall is not just financial; it is far more important than that, because it also involves a constitutional issue. The Bill makes it more likely that there will be periods without a Duke of Cornwall when the heir to the throne is female. I hope that the Minister or the Deputy Prime Minister will agree to meet me to discuss some of these issues and that prior to such a meeting they might allow me to have access to the translation of the charters that established the Duchy of Cornwall. They might have those to hand and that would allow us to have an interesting exploration into what might be done to deal with these issues as they pertain to the Duchy of Cornwall.