22 October 2015
A Real “Who’s Your Father?”
Genetic testing brings unwelcome surprises
by Chin Chin
We all enjoy the drama of the law courts – the Somerset case which was regarded as abolishing slavery in the UK, the Bloody Assizes of Judge Jeffreys, the Lady Chatterley trial, the Oscar Wilde libel case. We like the best lines too. That great reply: “He would, wouldn’t he” when good time girl, Mandy Rice-Davies, was told that a Minister of the Crown denied her version of the facts, the witty impertinences of the great barrister, F E Smith. It is all grist to the mill of public entertainment and sometimes it changes our lives as well. Seldom, however, has there been a case with more potential to cause chaos than that of the Pringle baronetcy which will be decided by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council next month.
Unusually for an important case there is no money or property at stake. There is no divorce and no crime. The litigation is simply to decide whose name should be entered on the Official Roll as the rightful heir to the Baronetcy, Pringle of Stichill.
The trouble started in 1683 when Charles II granted the baronetcy to Robert Pringle “and his male heirs from his body”. Actually he did it in Latin but, as few of us can claim to be as good at classics as Charles II, I have substituted a translation. All went well for 332 years. Pringle followed Pringle in orderly succession until Sir Steuart Pringle, Commandant General of the Royal Marines during the Falklands War, was registered as 10th Baronet. Sir Steuart died in 2013, but before he did so he seems to have lost his head because he allowed his DNA to be taken in a survey of the family history. Oops, it wasn’t Pringle DNA at all. Oh dear, it seemed that his father was illegitimate and thus not from the body of the original Robert Pringle. When his son applied to be entered on the Official Role of Baronets he discovered he had opposition from his legitimately descended cousin. The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, which is to decide the case, is made up of seven Supreme Court judges; one can quite see why it is a popular assignment.
If the Judicial Committee rejects Sir Steuart’s son on the basis of DNA evidence, however, the consequences will be startling.
No loyal Englishman could doubt that the succession to the Crown has been beyond reproach. After all, they probably only have to go back to George I. But what about all those dukes and earls whose claims go back to the Middle Ages? Say you were a twentieth earl – have there really been nineteen loyal wives in succession? Well in some cases yes, but not in all. Are the aristocracy to be stalked around London by pretenders trying to get bits of their DNA for comparison purposes? In the end it will be like Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore where it turns out that, but for a mix up of babies, the captain would be the able seaman and the able seaman would be the captain. Worse still, the process will be a continuing one because you would only just have proved the fifteenth Earl to have been illegitimate, you yourself being descended from his younger brother, when someone else would pop up alleging that the tenth was illegitimate too and that he is descended from the ninth. There would hardly be time to try the coronet on.
The problem would not just be confined to the aristocracy either. What about all those wills where the estate is left to the children or all those estates which passed to the children on intestacy? Are the assets now to be swiped away retrospectively and given to someone else? The mess doesn’t bear thinking about.
When they are in a real fix, judges discover a new law. They don’t invent it, of course (that is the prerogative of Parliament) but under the common law system they simply decide that it has always been there. It is just that up until now nobody has really noticed it. We are going to need something of that sort here – perhaps a long-overlooked rule that where someone is treated as a son in the belief that he is a son, well, then after a set period he should be regarded as being a son after all. There would be something similar for daughters.
It would be nice if Gilbert and Sullivan were here to do the drafting because they could have set it to music. In their absence, however, I think it would be better to have it created by the Judicial Committee than suffering a long series of drafts at the hands of the Law Commission.
Of course, apart from the chaos they can cause, DNA comparisons across the family tree have some obvious collateral advantages. Your number of ancestors doubles with each generation: so, if you go back ten generations, but ignore the fact that there will be some overlaps, you have 1024 of them; if you go back twenty you have to square that number. If we work on the conventional basis that a generation is about 20 years (i.e. that historically people have had children at that age, not that they have died at that age), your forebears living in about 1615 would number over 1 million. A generation or two more and they outnumber the population of England. That means that you should be able to select a pretty interesting group of them which you could have the pleasure of comparing with those of your friends. I don’t think that the trick would be to be connected with royalty. Everyone would achieve that. Rather, maximum points would be given for collecting the rarer specimens. It would be rather like collecting postage stamps.
I am sure that the game will catch on but, pending that, reading their Lordship’s judgement when it comes out should be good entertainment too.
