To someone who, as a schoolboy in short pants, was entranced by majesty and pageantry, watching the digitally remastered TV film of our Queen’s coronation last week brought sadness.
The Crown has lost much of its lustre. It’s been reduced in this country almost to a constitutional preamble. Even in Britain, Her Majesty, the sworn pinnacle of tradition, must preside over its further erosion.
One stubborn bit is the royal succession. It hasn’t always been a tidy affair.
The Succession to the Crown Act, which the Queen signed into law in April, says the succession shall be determined by primogeniture: A female child of a monarch may no longer be passed over for a younger brother — the baby Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, is carrying now will be king or queen one day.
Harder to solve is the conundrum caused by tampering with a tradition that goes back to the days when priests were burned at the stake and martyrs made. The Act of Settlement of 1701 declared that no “papist” or someone married to a Roman Catholic could hold the English crown. Now, though Catholics can’t wear the crown, monarchs can be married to Catholics.
Prince Michael of Kent, the Queen’s cousin, gave up his position in line of succession to marry a Roman Catholic German baroness in 1978. When Canadian Autumn Kelly became engaged to Peter Phillips, the Queen’s eldest grandson, in 2008, she renounced her Catholic faith so he could remain 11th in line to the throne.
In April 2011, the week Kate and William were marrying, the British government’s plans to abolish the Act of Settlement seemed stymied because of objections from the Church of England.
A government spokesman called it “a complex and difficult matter that requires careful and thoughtful consideration.”
That’s the kind of answer given Canadians who want the Senate fixed up or swept away.
The Anglican clerics argued that if the heir to the throne married a Roman Catholic, their children would be required to be Roman Catholic by the law of “that church.” The head of the Church of England, the defender of its faith, would be Catholic.
The Church of England, however, eventually endorsed the bill. Prince Charles has not. Poised to take over, one day, from “Mummy,” he’s reported to have “serious concerns” if his grandchild is allowed to marry a Roman Catholic.
He also, apparently, thinks that if Kate’s baby is a girl, a brother born next would have strong constitutional and historical grounds to challenge her claim.
Maybe all this could be settled amicably. Perhaps Kate’s kids could reign together. Perhaps a pope could be persuaded to issue a bull overriding canon law. But the royals are sailing over waters as unchartered as they were in Henry VIII’s day.
Whatever the people think, no matter how up-to-the times they want to be, there’s still a whiff of burning flesh in the air — a fear of “The Errors, Damnable Doctrines and Cruel Massacres of the Bloody Papists,” as a 1713 pamphlet put it.
And what of the confusion sown in other countries of the Commonwealth who still think the Crown stands for something, and whose consent is supposed to be needed to change the succession to a common throne?
The Canadian Parliament assented to the British statute a month before it became law by passing, with little more than a shrug, its own Succession to the Throne Act.
Constitutional experts have argued that the royal succession is a British affair that doesn’t affect the Queen’s powers and rights in this country. They argue that Parliament has undone some of what was achieved by patriation of the Constitution in 1982 by acknowledging that the British and Canadian Crowns are no longer legal entities.
Quebec, predictably, sees its own constitutional opportunities, and the Supreme Court of Canada might have to settle one more thing that politicians have botched.
But surely, we have the constitutional maturity to decide that if we don’t like the monarch the Brits pick for us, we can choose our own, untrammeled by out-of-date fear and anti-popish prejudice.
Many faiths need defending, not just one.
