The bill, as originally introduced in the House of Lords, was undoubtedly liable to serious objections; but it is difficult to discover any valid reason why the Prince, Consort to the Queen, should not be invested for his own life with the highest personal dignity which it is in the power of the Crown to confer.
It has been said, that to place Prince Albert before the princes of the blood royal would be an invasion of the birth right of these illustrious persons. This seems to be the result of a confused notion, that a privilege of precedence is identical with a beneficial interest—it may be a man’s birth right to succeed in some contingency to the throne, or to a title or to an estate, and it would be injurious, and therefore unjust, to thrust any interloper between him and his chance, however remote it might be, of such succession. But the same Act which limits the prerogative of the Crown, confers on the Royal Dukes and Great Officers of State the only right of precedence which they possess, and while they can claim no more than was given to them, the Crown is as surely entitled to all that was left to it by that Act. No individual can insist upon an indefeasible right never to be preceded, under any circumstances, by any other individual not having a status defined by this Act, and as the uncles of the Queen, and the hereditary Earl Marshal of England, occupy their respective steps in the ladder of precedence, by the self-same title, there would be no greater violation of birthright in placing an individual without a status before the Duke of Sussex, than there would in placing him before the Duke of Norfolk; if there be any injustice at all, the difference would not be in the principle, but in its local or personal application.
The question, then, is one of expediency, and of propriety, to be determined with reference to its own special circumstances, and according to the analogies which can be brought to bear upon it; there is not only no case exactly in point to refer to, but there is none sufficiently analogous to be taken as a precedent. When Queen Anne came to the throne, Prince George of Denmark was the only prince in England (all his children being dead), and no new Act was necessary to give him precedence, if the Queen had desired it, inasmuch as there was nobody for him to precede. The condition of a Queen Consort is certainly very different from that of a Prince Consort; but upon the broad principle of moral fitness, there seems no reason why the husband of the Queen regnant should not be invested, by virtue of his consortium, with the highest dignity, over other men, just as the wife of the king is participant by virtue of her marriage of divers prerogatives over other women. For the prerogatives with which the law invests her are allotted to her not upon her own account, but upon that of the king; she is considered as a feme sole, and has certain capacities and rights, ‘in order that the king whose continual care and study is for the public, should not be troubled and disquieted on account of his wife’s domestic affairs.’ And the law, which out of respect to the king makes it high treason to compass or imagine the death of his wife, when she becomes a widow ceases to surround her with this protection. It is the king alone, his dignity and his comfort, which the law regards, and the privileges and pre-eminences of his family are conferred or established in such modes and proportions as may be most conducive thereto.
The principle on which precedence is established is that of propinquity to the sovereign, and no propinquity can be so close as that of the husband to the wife, nor does it seem unreasonable that all other subjects should be required to yield the outward forms of honour and respect to the man who is elevated to a station so far above them, whom she is herself bound to ‘love, honour, serve, and obey,’ and who is superior to her in their natural, while still subordinate in their civil and political relations. Many people who are not unwilling to concede a high degree of precedence to the Prince, are very sensitive about the dignity of the heir apparent, and while they are content that he should precede his other children, would on no account allow him to be superior in rank to a Prince of Wales. The difficulty in these cases is to establish a principle; but that difficulty is rendered much greater if, when the principle is once admitted, it is not taken with all its legitimate and necessary consequences. If the Prince is entitled to claim precedency over any of the blood-royal of England, above all others, he may claim it upon every moral ground over his own children, nor is there any civil or political consideration in reference to the heir apparent, requiring that an exception should be made in his behalf. There seem to exist confused notions of something very extraordinary and transcendant in the status of a Prince of Wales, but the difference between him and his younger brother is not very great; and the only positive privilege with which the law certainly and exclusively invests the heir apparent, is that of making it high treason to attempt his life.[16]
[16] It is also treason to kill certain judicial officers when in actual execution of their offices.—Hale, P. C. 13.
The heir apparent is Prince of Wales, and Duke of Cornwall, but he is not necessarily either the one or the other, and except on a certain condition he cannot be the latter.[17] For as the king creates his elder son, or heir apparent, Prince of Wales, he has the power of withholding such creation, and though the eldest son of the king is Duke of Cornwall by inheritance, the dukedom is limited to the first begotten son of the king.[18]
[17] Two months elapsed between the death of Frederick Prince of Wales, and the creation of his son, George III., Prince of Wales.
[18] If, for example, George IV. had died in his youth, his next brother might have been heir apparent, with no other title than that of Bishop of Osnaburgh. Henry VIII. after the death of Prince Arthur, and Charles I. after that of Prince Henry, were Dukes of Cornwall, but by special new creation.—H., P.C. 13.
The Prince of Wales has no right or privilege beyond those of any other subject; he owes the same faith and allegiance to the sovereign; and since 1789 none have ever ventured to assert that he could claim the regency rather than any other subject. His political condition, therefore, is little if at all different from that of the rest of the Royal Family. His personal propinquity to the sovereign must be less than that of his father, and the question is, whether there is anything so peculiar in his status as to supersede those natural relations of father and son, which, according to all human custom, as well as divine injunction, involve the duty of honour from the latter to the former.
The son’s enfranchisement from parental rule when he arrives at years of discretion does not exempt him from the honour he is bound by the law of God and nature to pay to his parents.[19] The son is under a perpetual obligation to honour his father by all outward expressions, and from this obligation no state can absolve him. ‘The honour due to parents’ (says Locke) ‘a monarch on his throne owes his mother, and yet this lessens not his authority, nor subjects him to her government.’[20] The monarchical theory ascribes to the King of England two bodies or capacities, a natural body, and a politic or mystical body, and ‘from this mystical union of the ideal with the real king, the enquirer after constitutional information is led through childish reasoning and unintelligible jargon, to practical consequences founded on expediency.’[21] These practical consequences are the complete subordination of the natural to the politic capacity of the sovereign, and that moral revolution which supersedes the duty of the son to the father by the superior duty of the subject to the sovereign. Nothing less transcendental seems sufficient to cancel the force of this natural obligation, and while father and son are both in the condition of subjects, the filial and parental relations need not be outwardly reversed.