Royal Marriages Act 1772 - Broad Effects

Broad Effects

The Act renders void any marriage wherever contracted or solemnized in contravention of it. A member of the royal family who contracts a marriage that violates the Act does not thereby lose his or her place in the line of succession, but the offspring of such a union are made illegitimate by the voiding of the marriage and thus lose any right to succeed.

The Act applies to Catholics, even though they are ineligible to succeed to the throne. It does not apply to descendants of Sophia of Hanover who are not also descendants of George II, even though they are still eligible to succeed to the throne.

It had been claimed that the marriage of Prince Augustus had been legal in Ireland and Hanover but the Committee of Privileges of the House of Lords ruled (in the Sussex Peerage Case), 9 July 1844, that the Act incapacitated the descendants of George II from contracting a legal marriage without the consent of the Crown, either within the British dominions or elsewhere.

The effects of the law, not always foreseen, remain very much in force. An example is seen in the royal House of Hanover, which descends from Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, a younger son of King George III, who inherited the crown of Hanover according to its semi-Salic order of succession when the British crown went to his niece, Queen Victoria. Although his descendants lost their royal crown in 1866, and their British titles in 1918, as male-line descendants of George II they continue to seek permission for their marriages from the British monarch.

Thus, on 11 January 1999, Elizabeth II issued the following Declaration in Council: "My Lords, I do hereby declare My Consent to a Contract of Matrimony between His Royal Highness Prince Ernst August Albert of Hanover, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg and Her Serene Highness Princess Caroline Louise Marguerite of Monaco...". Without this consent, the marriage would have been void in Britain, where the groom's family continues to own substantial property and retains the right to petition for resumption of the dukedom of Cumberland, suspended since World War I (likewise, the Monégasque court officially notified France of Caroline's contemplated marriage to Prince Ernst August and received assurance that there was no objection, in compliance with the 1918 Franco-Monégasque Treaty). (However, as Ernst August married a Roman Catholic, he lost his place in the succession to the British throne under a different piece of legislation, the Act of Settlement 1701).

All European monarchies, and many non-European realms, have laws or traditions requiring prior approval of the monarch for members of the reigning dynasty to marry. But Britain's is unusual because it has not been modified since originally adopted, so that its ambit has grown rather wide, affecting not only Britain's immediate Royal Family, but more distant relatives of the monarch. Moreover, its purview is growing: Whereas in the past British princesses usually married into foreign dynasties, thereby exempting their descendants from the Act, most now marry fellow Britons so that their children become subject in turn to the Act's restrictions, as do their Protestant descendants who marry Britons, and so on potentially without limit. Nor is the law's application confined to those that bear the official style of "princess". For purposes of the Act, that term is deemed to include any legitimate female descendant of George III, since each inherits a claim on the British crown, unless excluded by the Act itself.