LONDON — The 16 countries that recognize the British monarch as head of state struck a historic blow for women’s rights Friday, abolishing male precedence in the order of succession to the throne. But the possibility of a Catholic monarch will have to wait, nearly 500 years after Henry VIII broke with Rome.
The decision to overturn the centuries-old tradition known as primogeniture was accompanied by the scrapping of a constitutional prohibition on the monarch’s marrying a Roman Catholic. But the rule that reserves the throne to Protestants will remain.
The changes will have no immediate effect on the existing line of succession. The current heir to the throne, Prince Charles, will retain that position and is in any case the oldest child of his parents, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. The second-in-line to the throne is his firstborn child, Prince William. The new succession rule will come into play with William’s children.
It was the marriage last spring of William and Kate Middleton, now the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, that accelerated the change. Their wedding spurred a widespread sense that the young couple, by bringing a more contemporary influence to the royal court, are likely to have a far-reaching, if not determinant, effect on the monarchy’s future.
With the change in the succession rules, their first child, if a girl, would automatically enter the line of succession as a future queen, instead of being relegated behind a younger brother as would have occurred under the rules that will now be abandoned.
“Put simply, if the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were to have a little girl, that girl would one day be our queen,” Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain said in Perth, the city in western Australia where Commonwealth heads of government are holding a meeting.
While the Cameron government took the lead in pushing the changes, it had to secure unanimous consent from the other countries that recognize the monarch as their head of state, a subset of the 54 countries that are members of the Commonwealth.
These include the nations of the so-called old Commonwealth, such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand, and other countries that have gained their independence from Britain in recent decades. Those include a range of Caribbean nations and Belize, in Central America, as well as three Pacific nations, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Tuvalu.
The change comes at another important juncture in the modern monarchy, the 60th anniversary in Februaryof the succession of Elizabeth to the throne.
The queen, now 85, has presided over a range of changes in the monarchy over the past 30 years, agreeing to a gradual modernization that has swept away some of the stuffiness that critics have identified in an institution with origins going back at least 1,000 years.
After a series of unsuccessful attempts in Britain’s Parliament to change the succession rules in recent years, the Cameron government, in office 18 months, put its weight fully behind the changes, and court officials said Elizabeth was strongly supportive. Nearing the end of a 10-day trip to Australia that has drawn large crowds, she was in Perth in her capacity as head of the Commonwealth when the announcement was made.
The bar on the monarch marrying a Catholic, like the rule on primogeniture, was enshrined in an array of statutes, most significantly in the Bill of Rights of 1689 and the Act of Settlement of 1701, which followed the turmoil of the monarchy of King James II, the last Catholic monarch.
The rules governing the monarchy were set after the violent upheavals that Britain endured in the 16th and 17th centuries after Henry VIII broke with Rome over control of the church in England, an event that led to centuries of marginalization, and often persecution, for Roman Catholicsin Britain.
Over the centuries, legal discrimination against Catholics has been dismantled one brick at a time. Laws that forbade Catholics to serve in the army, own or inherit land, vote, hold public office or join one of the “learned professions” have been scrapped, leaving the provision forbidding the monarch to marry a Catholic exposed, as most Catholics have seen it, as a relic of the past.
The prohibition has seemed all the more incongruous for the fact that there is no similar bar on the monarch marrying somebody from other faiths, including a Hindu, a Jew or a Muslim.
What remains unchanged in the succession rules is the requirement that the monarch be a Protestant, not a “Papist” as the Act of Settlement provided, and “in communion” with the Church of England.
Front Section, Pages 6 on 10/29/2011