On Evan Harris’ Succession Bill

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As one might have expected, Evan Harris’ Succession Bill has slipped from public attention and perhaps deservedly so. A modern Succession Bill, unless it were explicitly couched in terms of a direct repeal of the Act of Settlement of 1701, would enshrine the right of Parliament to determine royal succession on dubious grounds of political correctness, even if it did have some positive consequences such as permitting those in the royal succession to marry Catholics. Far more important than the absurd question of whether a Catholic can be monarch (as raised, predictably, by the DUP’s Jeffrey Donaldson) is the question of whether Parliament has the right to determine the royal succession. The outcome of the Exclusion Crisis in 1678 proved that it does not, barring an illegal and unconstitutional revolution of government. If a Parliament derives its legitimacy from the monarch that calls it, as Jacobites must surely affirm, then it is absurd for that Parliament to determine the succession to the throne. That Parliament arrogates this prerogative is an evil springing from the Act of Settlement itself, and thus a new Succession Bill would confirm the injustice of 1701.

Evan Harris’ Bill did not propose that a Catholic can succeed to the throne and was, thus, toothless from the beginning. In order for such a change to occur, the Accession Declaration Act 1910 (successor to the stipulation of the 1688 Bill of Rights) would have to be repealed. The present text of the oath is:

I [monarch's name] do solemnly and sincerely in the presence of God profess, testify and declare that I am a faithful Protestant, and that I will, according to the true intent of the enactments which secure the Protestant succession to the Throne of my Realm, uphold and maintain the said enactments to the best of my powers according to law.

This text was adopted for the Coronation of George V in place of the renunciation of the Roman Catholic faith required of monarchs theretofore. In addition to this Act, the Act of Union of 1707 also contains a stipulation that the monarch must renounce Roman Catholicism. However, contrary to popular opinion it would not necessary for the Coronation Oath to be altered if a Catholic were to succeed:

Will you to the utmost of your power maintain the Laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel? Will you to the utmost of your power maintain in the United Kingdom the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law? Will you maintain and preserve inviolably the settlement of the Church of England, and the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government thereof, as by law established in England? And will you preserve unto the Bishops and Clergy of England, and to the Churches there committed to their charge, all such rights and privileges, as by law do or shall appertain to them or any of them?

This oath could, in theory, be sworn by a Catholic who, like James II, regarded his/her religion as a private matter and thus remained Supreme Governor of the Church of England. The oath contains no actual profession of Protestant faith.

It is interesting that one of the bars to a repeal of the Act of Settlement is the Act of Union 1707, and it is surprising that no SNP member in the Westminster Parliament asked why that Parliament should have the right to impose a monarch upon Scotland – that, for Scots, is surely the more pressing issue than issues of religion and gender.

Insofar as this Bill has drawn attention to the injustice of the exclusion of the rightful and senior line of Stuart-Savoy-Habsburg Lothringen-Wittelsbach (as it has in some parts of the media), Evan Harris deserves to be thanked. Yet it is extremely unlikely that anything will come of his efforts.

More immediately, one wonders whether a future King who is reputed by some to be a covert adherent of Greek Orthodoxy would be able to make the Accession Declaration…

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Filed under constitutional matters, jacobitism