7 May 2015
Princesses, Peerages and Primogeniture
by Serena Sinclair
The birth of Princess Charlotte Elizabeth Diana has, apart from giving the populace some momentary relief from the election, once again highlighted the issue of primogeniture. This is not one that is of great concern to most of us of course, but for some aristocratic families it is a matter of serious injustice. ‘Primogeniture’, for those who are not into law or heraldry, has been around in this country for nearly 1,000 years, was given to us by the Normans and is the right of the first-born male child to inherit the family estate and titles. Where there are no children the title and estate can pass to more distant collateral relations and the same can happen where there are only female descendants. This can lead to situations such as the one Julian Fellowes highlighted in the Downton Abbey storyline, where the daughters are passed over in favour of a distant cousin.
Since the Succession to the Crown Act 2013, rushed through parliament prior to the birth of the Duke and Duchess’s first born, male members of the Royal family no longer take precedence over females. So, had Prince George been a Georgina, this hypothetical female baby would have become third in line to the throne in exactly the same way as George has done. Likewise, the real Princess Charlotte will now retain her position as fourth in line, irrespective of whether any further siblings are male or female. This can only be regarded as a ‘Good Thing’ (in the words of 1066 and all that), particularly given that three of our most respected and longest reigning monarchs have been female.
However, further down the aristocratic pecking order, things are not looking so up-to-date. As Lady Kinvara Balfour has highlighted in a recent interview in the latest issue of ‘Town and Country’, female members of the aristocracy do not enjoy the equality in law now granted to the female members of the Royal family. Generally, they still cannot inherit the family land and titles. These go to the son – irrespective of where he comes in the family. On the plus side, this has enabled the UK to maintain many of its great estates; that is a contrast to, say, France, where laws based on the Napoleonic Codes have resulted in estates being broken up by distributing them equally amongst all the heirs. Kinvara Balfour and others like her are not suggesting that the U.K move to this equality based system, but simply a change which would allow the titles and property to be inherited by the eldest born of whichever sex.
The proposition sounds so obvious to modern ears that it seems utterly amazing that this was not addressed at the same time as the question of succession to the Crown. It was, or at least an attempt was made. The Equality (Titles) Bill, a private members’ Bill put forward by Lords Lucas and Dingwall and sponsored in the House of Commons by Mary Macleod MP had two readings and got as far as the Committee stage but then, like so many private members’ Bills, ran out of time and could be progressed no further. Lord Trefgarne, one of the 92 hereditary peers remaining in the House of Lords put forward a similar bill in June 2014 entitled the Succession to Peerages Bill, but this has likewise been ‘timed out’.
At the time a number of aristocratic women personally affected by the gender discrimination were very active in trying to effect change. However, amongst other members of the peerage there appears to have been a somewhat mixed reaction to this call for a new order. It seems that only very few were really interested and they were those who had been or were directly affected by the problem. The Countess of Clancarty was one of those voices calling for change. She is married to the Ninth Earl of Clancarty who will apparently be the last to hold that title and various others for 200 years, as there are no males in direct succession. In that case there is no estate to inherit, just, to use her own words, ‘these rather ethereal, intangible names’.
In the case of the Duchess of Rutland, who runs the family estates rather than the reclusive Duke, there is no question of the title dying out, just the rather unfortunate fact for her daughters that, although all three were born before their brother Charles, they have no chance of following in their mother’s footsteps. Liza Campbell was a high profile campaigner for aristocratic equality. She is the second daughter of the Thane of Cawdor, a very ancient Scottish title and was warned that writing and campaigning on the subject would be her ‘social suicide note’. Fortunately, she and her sisters get on well with her brother, who became the 26th Thane and 7th Earl of Cawdor on the death of her father, but that is not always the case and in some families the girls can be effectively exiled from the family lands. Liza and others set up a Facebook page facebook.com/EqualityForWomenInthePeerage. Its members call themselves ‘the hares’, after Lord Trefgarne said that the Royal Succession Bill had ‘set running the hare of what happens to the hereditary peerage.’ Their logo is a gold hare brooch.
Coming as I do from a long line of commoners, I have no personal interest whatsoever in this matter, but as an outsider, albeit female, it does seem to me iniquitous that the situation has been allowed to continue after the matter of the Royal succession has been addressed. Surely what is good for the Royals should be good for those below them in the social hierarchy? Some of the peers who argued against change made the point that in many cases there was nothing to stop peers from passing land to whomsoever they chose, although that would in many cases have meant splitting estates and titles, which most would be very reluctant to do. Others pointed out that the provisions in the bill to allow women to bestow titles on their husbands, in the same way as men currently bestow them on their wives, would be unpopular (!) and yet others that as the political weight of the hereditary class has diminished the debate about succession is possibly largely pointless. All these, in my view, miss the point, which is quite simply that although the whole system may well be an anachronism, it should at least be brought in line with all other legislation which exists in terms of parity between the genders. Whether the whole system should be abolished is an entirely different debate and personally not one I think we need to have, but perhaps the biggest fear is that a Pandora’s Box may be opened and it may just be better to lie low. In 2013 and 2014, this worked and whoever forms a government at the end of this week may well have bigger things to worry about than whether too many girls in the Balfour family leads to castles being inherited by the ‘wrong’ people, but in an age when so many other age-old traditions such as marriage have undergone radical reform, it does look likely that at some point Liza Campbell, Julian Fellowes and Kinvara Balfour will get what they have been campaigning for. I hope so.
