The Unofficial British Royal Family Pages

Sunday 5 August 2007

Summer of Love

It�s been an eventful summer for the royal family, with lots of news about love and marriage and babies. Peter Phillips is going to be the first of the Queen�s grandchildren to marry, which is appropriate as he is the oldest. His bride, Autumn Kelly, is two years older than he at 31. Perhaps the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh will be great-grandparents fairly soon. Autumn Kelly is a Catholic Canadian commoner, which would have ruled her out as a royal bride in the past. Of course, Peter Phillips is not royal himself. Because the Act of Settlement forbids heirs to the throne to marry Catholics, Peter will have to give up his place in the line of succession. Other distant heirs have done so, including Prince Michael of Kent and, only a few months ago, Lord Nicholas Windsor, younger son of the Duke of Kent. Lord and Lady Nicholas are expecting a baby soon; the baby will be in the line of succession until it is baptized into the Catholic Church. Peter Phillips is currently tenth in line to the throne and will soon drop to eleventh, with much farther to fall as his cousins have children.

While Peter Phillips may not care much about signing away his claim on the throne, it is both ridiculous and prejudiced that Catholics may not marry prospective monarchs. It�s particularly silly given that both the Duchess of Kent and Princess Michael of Kent are practicing Catholics who are entitled to be styled royal highness (though the Duchess of Kent rarely uses her HRH). Because the monarch is automatically head of the Church of England, it is not unreasonable to require the monarch to be Anglican, but forbidding heirs to marry Catholics with no other restrictions is unreasonable.

However, changing the rule would not be the minor adjustment some might think. Reworking or repealing the Act of Settlement would weaken the Windsors� claim to the throne, as many Catholic heirs to the throne were passed over when the crown was settled on the Protestant heirs of the Electress Sophia of Hanover in 1701. One of my favorite pieces of royal trivia is that there is actually someone who is last in line to the throne, Electress Sophia�s most distant heir, currently a German girl named Franziska Wassmann who is #1287 in the line of succession according to Wikipedia.

Anyway, back to love and babies. Sophie is pregnant again! After a dangerous ectopic pregnancy in 2001 and nearly bleeding to death when her daughter Lady Louise was born in 2003, it seemed extremely unlikely that the Countess of Wessex would have another child. I said in a column in 2005 that I believed a rumor that she was pregnant at that time, but either it was untrue or she miscarried. So the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh will have an eighth and probably last grandchild in December, sixty years after their marriage.

The Palace has announced that the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh will celebrate their diamond wedding anniversary on November 20th with a private visit to Malta. The duke was stationed in Malta when he was a naval officer and she was Princess Elizabeth, and Princess Anne was conceived there. It is said to have been one of the happiest times in the Queen�s life. This year�s exhibit for the summer opening of Buckingham Palace is on the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh (or Lt. Philip Mountbatten, as he was on the wedding program � he had given up his Greek title and George VI created him Duke of Edinburgh on the morning of the wedding). The centerpiece of the exhibit is the Queen�s wedding dress, still stylish after sixty years. The exhibit has a �microsite� on the royal website that allows close-up views of the dress and other items: http://www.royalcollection.org.uk/microsites/royalwedding1947/.

In other baby news, the Duchess of Cornwall is about to become a grandmother twice over. Her daughter Laura and son Tom got married not long apart and they are now both going to become parents soon. Tom, who married Sarah Buys in 2005, is expecting to become a father next month. Laura married former Calvin Klein underwear model Harry Lopes, a great-grandson of John Jacob Astor, in 2006 and they are expecting a baby in January 2008. Camilla, who just turned sixty, must feel that she is entering her golden years. All in all, it�s looking like a very happy year for the royal family.

- Margaret Weatherford

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